The Internet, Only the Latest Credit for Long-Time Shorts Maker
By Denise Harrison 		`
"I'd like to see our films air inside a pair of $3.99 sunglasses that you buy at Kmart," jokes Frank Chindamo. "Or how about on an LCD screen at the end of a roll of toilet paper? And absolutely, positively in every box of Coco Puffs."
The Internet is only just now finding Frank Chindamo, who has been making comedy shorts since 1987. Chindamo has got to hold the record for writing and directing the most shorts, with more than 60 in the can.

By 1988, his shorts were appearing on cable TV’s Showtime.

"Then I was commissioned by A&E, MTV, PBS, CBS, Bravo, Comedy Central and Playboy," he remembers. "I was lucky in that, every year, there seemed to be a different network asking for these things."

He said it wasn’t much money at the time but in the long term, are paying off, mostly due to some strategic thinking back then.

"There was very little money to be made then, but I was smart enough to get the rights to them back after a period of, say, five years," He explains. "Then I took the advice of John Cleese. When they made the Monty Python series, they made things completely timeless. Everything in my films in 1987 are applicable now. There are no pop references, and I kept with comedic themes that were universal and timeless."

Most recently, Chindamo's shorts have aired in a compilation on PBS, a retro screening at Montreal's Just For Laughs Festival, a compilation at an AFI Film Festival, a screening at the Director's Guild, and at Digidance Festival at Sundance.

"Probably the highest profile at Digidance was that my film aired on the bus people took from Park City to the hotel," he said.

Chindamo recently signed deals for his shorts to be aired on National Lampoon's Website and another huge, not-yet-announced deal with a large entertainment company.

When it comes to shorts on the Internet, he says he's thrilled to see the new market but, because for many years his business is and has been making shorts, he has a different take on how it should work.

"Right now, short filmmakers are giving their work away to Internet companies," he says. "We need to stand together and not do that anymore. We need to be paid for our work the same way the lawyer who hands us the deal memo was paid, and the exececutive who asked us to use our shorts was paid. Just as the programmers who put your film on the site were paid as well. Why should we, the artists, be the only ones in that chain who don’t get paid? Just because it’s art it doesn’t mean it’s free."