Chances are that as you are reading this, someone is screening the magnificent movie Luft Gangster: Memoirs of a Second-Class Hero, a documentary about the amazing life of Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson, a Detroit teacher who was a pilot in the Tuskegee airmen in World War II, survived being shot down and a prison camp, and returned to face discrimination at home.
The movie is spellbinding, heartwarming and has been wowing audiences since it was released in 2016. Gary Sinise has plugged it. It was chosen the best documentary feature by the prestigious Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival, won a similar award in Albuquerque, and was nominated for a slew of other honors.
So who made the movie? Which studio produced it? Would you believe a young man named Mike Rott, an entirely self-taught filmmaker who went into business with his dad Sheldon, and created the Dynasty Media Network (www.dynastymedianetwork.com.)
They aren’t in Hollywood. They are headquartered in an old brick building on Nine Mile Road in Ferndale, Michigan. Mike Rott, at 39 one of the older millennials, had a career as a trainer for Apple computers out west before he decided that wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. So he came back home, rented the sprawling old Ferndale building, and started teaching himself everything he could learn about film.
“I never had a day of film school,” he said. Yeah, well, neither did Darryl Zanuck. What Rott did have was a keen mind, a thorough knowledge of technology and something Cecil B. DeMille never imagined.
YouTube.
“I’ve taught myself from studying a million YouTube videos,” he said. Sheldon Rott, a producer and music director, knows something about show business; back in the day, he was part of the team at Capitol Records who brought a young group called the Beatles to Detroit.
“I couldn’t be more proud of him,” he said of his son. Dynasty Media Network is a full-service, multi-media company. On the day I visited, they were producing a financial news broadcast for a Korean TV station, about to beam it to Seoul when the U.S. stock market closed.
They also do everything from training films, to digitizing old media for people like the Automotive Hall of Fame, to providing live streaming services for various events. They’ll even provide some technical and computer training if you are willing to pay for it. “Film making is my first love, but for right now, this is the bread and butter stuff that pays the bills,” Rott said. “Film projects take two years to get off the ground.”
The good news is that recently he got approved for fund-raising for a film that could have really wide appeal.
“Why the (bleep) do they hate me” will be a movie about antisemitism, with Mike Rott playing a supposedly naïve cultural anthropologist, showing up everywhere from campuses to bars to bowling alleys, trying to answer the movie title’s question.
Think of a sort of warmer, younger, and athletic Michael Moore. “The idea, of course, is to start with a lighthearted approach and lay the groundwork for a deeper understanding of anti-Semitic myths and propaganda.” That’s a timely topic – and one that could be the first in series of similar films; you could easily imagine a Muslim, African-American and Hispanic version of “why the bleep do they hate me,” films that Rott hopes might help reduce ethnic misunderstanding.
Of course, self-taught guys in Ferndale aren’t supposed to be able to make successful movies that reach a broad audience.
Except Mike Rott already has. As a supposedly impartial journalist, am I rooting for Dynasty Media Network to succeed?
Damn right.
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Editor’s Note: You can hear both this essay and my interview with Mike and Sheldon Rott on my podcast on the Zing media network. And please subscribe to my YouTube channel!
