Local filmmakers earn award at Florida film fest

Long Beach resident Robert Snyder was near a local railway several years ago when he witnessed a garbage man emptying a pail. As the man waited to be picked up by a sanitation truck — stuck on the other side of the tracks — a plastic bag, which had fallen from the container, kept sticking to his leg. The worker pushed it away repeatedly.

“He wouldn’t put it in the garbage pail,” Snyder recalled. “It was like a matter of pride or something, and [the bag] kept attacking him.”

Right then, Snyder had an idea for a movie, and shared it with his brother, Philip, who has lived in Island Park since 2005. The brothers, who began making films in the 1960s while growing up in Lawrence, have continued their craft. A couple weeks ago, their 2016 film, “The Bag,” which combines horror and comedy to address the issue of plastic bag pollution, won the Best Science Fiction category at the 15 Minutes of Fame Film Festival in Palm Bay, Florida.

“I was quite surprised…very pleased obviously,” Philip said, adding that the small festival featured other good-quality films. “Rob always says, ‘Don’t expect anything and then you’ll be surprised,’ and he’s right.”

The 25-minute movie — condensed for the festival’s 15-minute limit — chronicles Robert’s loved ones, who are ingested one by one by evil plastic bags. “That’s my son getting devoured, and my daughter and grandchildren get eaten up in the beginning of the movie,” Robert said. “[It was] a family affair.”

Hiding out in his basement, Robert’s character finally decides to surrender to the bags, which merge to form one giant bag and ultimately destroy the world. The final scene, filmed in Atlantic Beach, shows Robert sitting in a beach chair with a drink in one hand, falling victim to the apocalyptic fate.

“We filmed the last scene first,” Snyder explained. “I thought wow, we’ve really got it here because it looks like the end of the world. There’s nothing — not even a mark in the sand. It was so barren. There weren’t any seagulls or anything.”

Robert, 65, who works for the Town of Hempstead, is “the idea guy” of the two, and wrote and directed “The Bag.” Philip, 67, who worked for years at a post-production company editing television commercials and now makes videos for various organizations, filmed and edited the flick.

The brothers began filming in the fall of 2013, a process that took more than a year. After it was complete, Philip said he entered the film in about a dozen festivals, and it was shown in a theater at both the Long Island International Film Expo in 2015 and the Winter Film Awards in Manhattan last year.

But making movies is nothing new to the brothers. As kids, Robert recalled, he and Philip used their 8-millimeter camera to create amateur films, including a war film, and their own version of James Bond. “We’re shooting each other, falling down and putting ketchup on our faces and people are just walking by,” Robert recalled about one of their adolescent filmings in Queens.

The brothers earned a Kodak Teenage Movie Award, and went on to work with Roger Corman, an independent film maker who has been called “the Pope of pop cinema.” In 2006, Robert and Philip won the best short film and video award at the LIIFE for their picture “Fitzgerald’s Flask,” in which author F. Scott Fitzgerald, desperate for a source of income, contacts science fiction writer H.G. Wells and travels in time to the 21st century to auction off his memorabilia.

But their most recent film has more serious undertones, and brings up a timely issue, as local communities address plastic bag pollution. An ordinance requiring Long Beach businesses to charge five cents for each plastic bag — unanimously approved by the Long Beach City Council last year — took effect last month on Earth Day, and aims at curbing the pollution of these bags, which end up in local streets, Reynolds Channel, and the ocean.

Rather than just charging five cents per bag, Robert suggested creating technology that would make bags dissolve in water. “[The bags] get into the water supply, they get into fish; plastic is even in toothpaste,” he said. “…If someone sees the movie and then is aware of the danger, [we’ll] have accomplished something I think.”

Much like “Dr. Strangelove,” a 1964 black comedy, satirizes Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Snyder brothers said, “The Bag” brought a political issue to light in a unique way.

“From my point of view, it was just a cautionary tale, but done in a comedic way,” Philip said, adding that his focus was simply making the film entertaining. “…You’re sending a message — that’s a serious message — with comedy, and I think that [leaves] an impression.”