When Clay Liford was a young nerd growing up in Dallas, his dad would take him to sci-fi and fantasy conventions, give him 20 bucks and tell him to have a good time. Amid the wandering Klingons and Wookies his eye would always wander to the room off to the side, the one marked "18 and up."
His imagination ran wild as he asked himself the question: "What could possibly be going on behind those doors?"
That sense of curiosity would one day make him a filmmaker. The experience itself inspired his latest, Slash, which plays the Dallas International Film Festival April 20 and 21.
Liford's surrogate in Slash is Neil (Michael Johnston), an awkward teen who finds himself exploring the strange world of erotic online fan fiction. Sexually confused and humiliated by classmates who discover his hobby, Neil is befriended by a fellow aficionado, Julia (Hannah Marks), and invited to be a featured erotica reader at one of those conventions. He also attracts the online attention of an older man, played by Michael Ian Black.
What follows is a Liford specialty: discomforting humor that manages to find a sweet spot of sympathy through all the squirming.
As Liford tells it, slash fan fiction gets its name from the slash symbol (/) used by writers to denote the hookup between two characters popular in one fantasy world or another. For instance, K/S, or Kirk/Spock, was an early and popular slash combination. (Hey, it's only logical).
"Eventually, it kind of branched out to other shows, like B.J. and the Bear, or anything else people were interested in," says Liford, who now lives in Austin.
The Harry Potter characters make for fruitful slash subjects, and they originally provided the inspiration for Slash. "I had a funny idea," Liford recalls. "What if your kids or your brother and sister were trying to Google Harry Potter stuff because they're really into Harry Potter, and they accidentally fell into one of these sites?"
OK, maybe it's not so funny if you're a parent. Liford made a short based on the Harry Potter idea, then switched gears to make his feature, largely because the keepers of the Harry Potter fortune would never allow beloved Harry and Co. to feature in a movie about erotic fan fiction. (According to Liford, "The Gone With the Wind of erotic Harry Potter fan fiction" is called Tiny Hermione. Look it up. Or not).
So Liford decided to create his own fictional universe from scratch. He called it Vanguard. It doesn't exist, but Neil and Julia should be familiar to fans of Liford's other films, including Wuss and the short "My Mom Smokes Weed." They're young, fumbling outsiders in a world indifferent at best to their plights. And they remain sympathetic as they endure seemingly unendurable circumstances. It's no surprise that Liford, 42, is a fan of Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness).
Dallas' Adam Donaghey has produced several Liford films. "Clay has a very intriguing mind," Donaghey says. "He has a dark sense of humor about what it's like to be an adolescent. Most of his movies have a nerd-to-hero kind of storyline, and that's the kind of thing I'm attracted to."
Liford has endured some online scorn from members of the slash community who claim he got this or that wrong. But he considers himself a slash fan, and he's given the genre a lot of thought.
He notes, for instance, that the slash world is mostly female-driven. "The reason why non-straight or even straight women write this stuff is because it's a way to talk about sex that cannot be viewed through a straight male gaze," he says. "If you have two men having sex in fiction, then no straight male is going to be like, 'Oh yeah!' It's not going to flip that switch for them."
Slash wasn't made to invoke a peaceful, easy feeling. Liford adheres to Steve Martin's adage that comedy is not pretty. But it can tell you plenty about human nature, fear and desire. This is the very real world that Liford navigates so well.
"For me, the comedy/tragedy line is very narrow," he says. "That's the stuff I connect to. I think it's just the way I'm wired."
The Dallas International Film Festival runs April 14-24 at the Angelika Dallas, the Alamo Drafthouse DFW and other venues. For tickets and more information, visit dallasfilm.org.
