His movie was a disaster. His movie about making it is a delight

If Anthony Frith had realised just how easy it was to break into the movie business, he might have started sooner.

He’d been aware of The Asylum, the LA-based churn factory best known for Sharknado , since picking up a three-pack of DVDs from The Reject Shop in Adelaide and bingeing the cheap blockbuster knockoffs with a bunch of mates in a single sitting.

“I was like, ‘holy crap, this is amazing’,” he says of the triple bill — Triassic World , 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea and I Am Omega . “I just fell in love.”

Flash forward a decade to 2023, and Frith decided to take a punt and email David Latt, one of the founders of The Asylum. Ostensibly, saying he had an idea he wanted to discuss; in truth, he wanted to ask if he could direct one of these cheap-and-nasty knockoffs himself.

As it happens, such chutzpah was exactly what The Asylum trades on. “It took about three minutes on a Zoom for me to land my deal with them,” says Frith, laughing at the memory.

The tyro Australian director wasn’t an obvious choice to helm a feature film, no matter how shameless a rip-off it was. Sure, he had a couple of filmmaking courses under his belt, but other than some mucking-about-with-mates efforts, his screen credits extended to a bunch of corporate promos (including one for his parents’ industrial cleaning business). If he was the next Martin Scorsese, there was little evidence to show it.

Frith, who is now 36, didn’t come to the table entirely empty-handed, though. He was proposing to make a documentary about the making of an Asylum movie too.

“It was part of the same conversation, but they weren’t linked,” Frith explains. “I asked for the film first, and they were going to let me do it regardless, and then the documentary came. As far as I know, I’m the first person to get a deal just by asking for it.”

Given The Asylum has turned out something like 350 movies , it’s a little surprising no one had pitched a making-of project before. So, how did Latt respond to the idea?

“He thought it was hilarious. He’s like, ‘yeah, sure; we’re going to make the film anyway, so you might as well have your documentary’.”

Frith was a quietly spoken fellow, with a wife and a one-year-old at home in a brick-veneer house in Adelaide, when he embarked on the madcap adventure that has given him not one but two directing credits, the feature film The Land That Time Forgot (based on the 1918 novel by Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs, which is in the public domain and royalty-free, and hence exactly the sort of material The Asylum laps up) and Mockbuster , his documentary about the making of that film.

But there’s obviously a tenacious streak beneath the mild-mannered facade; to actually make the doc he pitched in that two-for-the-price-of-one Zoom would take another couple of years, as he went through the far more traditional process (in this country) of applying for and securing the finance (Screen Australia was the principal investor) that would enable him to develop and shoot it.

Without the doc to complicate matters, he says, his Hollywood paymasters “would have sent the script, and I would have been on my way immediately.