Gary Schmad

He majored in religious studies, but it was his minor in film that set his life's course. Starting out with an old 16mm Bolex, he set out to shoot his first documentary in India only to have the authorities confiscate all his film and get malaria to boot. Coming up the ranks through cable access, so he could edit for free, he shot a variety of shows like the "Democratic Convention" in Frisco, "USA Volleyball" and a show for men called the "The Bull Moose Club" way before the "Man Show" was ever a glint in Jimmy Kimmel's eye. Add to this a plethora of other shows like "Chasing the Light" and "The Road to Cabo" that were more artistically rewarding than commercial successes, you can understand why he needed to hide out in academia for a few years to regroup. Those were dark times, but he came out of there with a renewed spirit and enough investor money to shoot a movie based on his politically incorrect TV show ("Bull Moose Club") called "Sirens of Seduction". Even though it had a successful run on cable (Cinemax, Time Warner and PPV-TVN) and sold enough foreign territories to make a profit, he never saw much of it after the Hollywood accountants tallied up the score. So what to do? A fun little project called "Dream Girls on the California Riviera" caught the attention of Playboy and late night cable (Time Warner and PPV-TVN) and the rest was history... or at least for the next 5 years of his life anyway. They bought everything he could shoot, edit and put in the can until, like all things, he lost interest in the genre and it just ended one fine day. A free man, he hit the road to see what else life had in store for him and landed up somewhere in Asia. With shooting in his blood, he had no choice, he had to shoot. And shoot he did wherever his odyssey took him, resulting in several more documentaries like, "The Last Temptation in Thailand" and "The Last Road to Cambodia". In the end he ran into some trouble with some local thugs who had the local authorities in their back pocket and had to high tail it out through Laos, just one step ahead of some very bad hombres and the law (a movie he has sworn to shoot one day). Back in the USA he had to cobble together some money to make another stab at the bright lights of Hollywood. Wrapping a music video one day, the real reason he was shooting just hit him out of the blue, as in all things, it was the journey, the odyssey. He thought about all the misfits, dinosaurs, has-beens, bad guys, cool guys and the women he'd mixed it up with to shoot over the last twenty years or so and, voila, a project was born, "Shooters" - the journey behind the story which he is (as of 2018) writing and directing.