Rex Sikes' Movie Beat

Filmmaker Magazing Heralds director Frankie Latina as one of the new faces of independent film. “Frankie Latina's Modus Operandi is a trip. A fuzzed out ode to B-gangster films, '60s political paranoia thrillers, '80s late-night Skinemax, and raunchy underground cinema (think a Quinn Martin production directed by John Waters from a script by Jean-Pierre Melville), the picture is the 30-year-old Milwaukee writer-director's debut, an act of will shot on Super 8 (with bits of video) over the course of four years. Listen in and learn how he did it. Film includes Danny Trejo currently starring in Robert Rodriguez upcoming film "Machete". Latina, who has worked as everything from a clerk at Blockbuster to, currently, a teacher of film production to twelfth graders in the Milwaukee public school system, would buy film whenever he had the cash, purchase and paint his own sets and props and assemble whatever crew he could round up on the weekends. Things got better as he assembled a team of producers, starting with a