Keep it short and don't try very hard

For several years there was a glut of books on zero-budget filmmaking. I guess it was a bigger deal before digital video took over completely. Now it's perfectly obvious how to make a movie with no money.

Cinema has become a true art form. Almost anyone can do it, but almost nobody can do it very well and even fewer could earn a living at it. We don't need books on how to cope with lack of money. It's lack of talent we need to worry about. How does a person who's not very good make a passable movie? There are styles that seem like they might lend themselves to this. "Slow cinema" for example or minimalism, although they might just make it worse.

There's been a lot written about how to get good performances from non-actors, but what if you have non-actors working with a non-director? How can a non-director succeed without having to learn a bunch of stuff?

I like "wooden acting". You know that scene in Rebel Without a Cause where James Dean screams, "YOU'RE TEARING ME APART!!!"? I would have had him simply say, "You're tearing me apart." Of course, audiences might not appreciate it as much as I would.

You can avoid a lot of that and just do a silent movie. All you need is for the actors to behave naturally. Use intertitles to explain what's going on of it's not obvious. If you have the voice for it you can narrate.

Sit-coms are 21 minutes long when you take out the commercials. They generally consist of a main plot and two subplots. Some shows like Modern Family try to give the three storylines equal time, so each plot gets 7 minutes. Which means each one is very sketchy. You know the expression "Show don't tell"? With sit-comes it's "Imply don't show." If you can write three 7-minute sketches, you can write a 21 minute movie. You just have to cut between subplots to gloss over the huge gaps in the stories.

Some kids on YouTube compressed a Hardy Boys book into a six minute movie.

In the fifties, most shows were half an hour whether they were comedies or not. The Twilight Zone is probably the best know example. We could have twice as many TV dramas if they were all half an hour. There was one season where The Twilight Zone was an hour long and that wasn't an improvement. The same with Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

I like The Rifleman. I hate Wagon Train and Have Gun Will Travel, but at least they were short.

And if you look at B movies from the '30's, '40's and '50's, they were all quite short, usually around an hour. I've seen a couple that were less that 45 minutes. And they were all long enough. Nobody left wishing they had dragged on for another half hour.

Feature-length zero budget movies, 70 to 120 minutes long, are murder to watch. In this age of streaming video, nothing needs to be that long. Nobody's going to see your movie in a theater----there's no need to make it worth their while to go out to a movie.