Send Unstable, Paranoid And Imbalanced “Aspiring Filmmakers” Back To LA Where They Belong

Choose your bias: anti-military (“An Ex-Marine Was Shooter of Two Officers”) or anti-filmmaker (“Gunman Was Aspiring Filmmaker With Pent-Up Hostility and a Résumé of Failures”). Let’s go with . . . filmmaker! Because it’s clear that the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting is at least partly to blame:

David R. Garvin’s first brush with New York City came at a time when his life was already drenched in personal and professional failure. It ended in May 2005 with a collapsed career in the production department of The Wall Street Journal.

But he came back, months later, this time to make movies.

Traveling in the dim light of obscurity that New York bestows on most of its citizens, he had a sensibility that was unremittingly dark. He gravitated toward the paranormal, to projects where the bizarre and abstruse — in one of his scripts, a metallic object inhabits a philosophy professor — converged into the far-fetched.

. . .

Brent Jaimes, an independent filmmaker in St. Louis, said Mr. Garvin had approached him about helping with the project. He said Mr. Garvin had begun auditioning actors and had permission from the owner of an old barn in nearby Nashville, Ill., to burn it down for the movie.

“What he was doing in this project that I thought was unique was that he was going to take two cameras and set them parallel to each other,” Mr. Jaimes said. “Each image would be parallel and overlapping.”

In the fall of 2005, before the project was fully under way, Mr. Jaimes said, Mr. Garvin abruptly notified everyone involved that he was scrapping the film because he had to move to New York immediately. “We were about two weeks out from shooting and he said that he had an offer from a buddy with HBO,” Mr. Jaimes said. “He e-mailed me on a Thursday or Friday and said he had to be in New York City on Monday.”

Those massive tax credits have reached diminishing returns.