By Matt Mueller Culture Editor Published Sep 29, 2014 at 9:16 AM

For much of director Manny Marquez’s life, he dreamed of going to Los Angeles and becoming a filmmaker. As with many stories in the city of dreams, however, Marquez’s mission took an odd detour.

"I went out to L.A. to go to film school, and I was the optimistic film student, thinking you’re gonna get out and be Francis Ford Coppola and be famous," Marquez said. "Well, you end up working in coffee shops and picking up garbage on commercial sets. About four years down after graduation, I found myself working on reality television shows."

After working in cheap reality TV for years – including an MTV show called "That ’70s House," essentially "Big Brother" or "The Real World" clad in hippie garb – Marquez decided he needed a break from reality TV and wanted to dip his toes into something completely different: actual reality.

A decade later, the result is "Psychopath," one of the Cream City Cinema selections currently featured at the Milwaukee Film Festival. The charming, crowd-pleasing documentary follows Victor, a small town Oklahoma garbage man – as well as Manny’s uncle – with a crazy dream: to put his Hollywood makeup skills to work and build an incredible haunted ride attraction cleverly called Psycho Path. Along the way, Victor’s dream turns into a nightmare, as the build is slow and the neighbors aren’t particularly keen to the idea.

When Marquez first came out to Oklahoma about a decade ago, however, a haunted trail was nowhere close to his itinerary. The film he originally set out to make was less about Psycho Path and more about an actual psychopath.

"I had written a script – a dark comedy – in college about a man, a family friend, who tried to murder me when I was eight years old, and nobody believed me," Marquez recalled. "Two years later, he got caught for murdering another kid and then everyone believed me. So I took some time off from reality TV and said we’re going to Oklahoma to location scout this movie."

While he was there, he met with Victor, who was beginning work on his extravagant haunted path.

"We go to this flood zone that my uncle had bought, and we have to ride in this amphibious tractor," Marquez recalled. "This woods is total devastation; it’s flooded everywhere. But he’s like, ‘This is where the Sleepy Hollow bridge will go, and this is where the Lord of the Rings thing will go, and we’ll have a vampire here!’ I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t know how you’re going to do this.’ But we filmed them and hung out and thought that’d be the end of it."

Marquez returned to L.A. and soon found himself toiling yet again with mind-drubbing reality TV work, far from the world of cinema. He soon remembered that crazy haunted path in the middle of the Oklahoma woods, however, and after making a few calls, he decided to make Victor’s wild struggle into an "American Movie"-style documentary.

"I wasn’t connected to cinema," Marquez said. "I wasn’t touching anybody. I wasn’t moving anyone emotionally. I wasn’t telling stories. So I said I’m going to make a movie about my uncle building that haunted house."

Focusing in on its first year of existence in 2005, Marquez recorded the evolution of Psycho Path, watching the path slowly grow – along with local resistance – relationships evolve and characters come and go. It would eventually take a total of 10 years – of shooting, editing, shaping and just simply germinating – for the story of "Psychopath" to come together with the help and support of "American Movie" editor and About Face Media CEO Barry Poltermann.

Adding to the tension of the project was the family connection between Manny and his struggling subjects. After all, Victor was one of the reasons why Manny originally got interested in film as a kid, doing impressively elaborate makeup work for Manny’s Halloween costumes and "Star Trek" outfits for conventions, and eventually training young Manny in his image.

"I knew he always wanted to do it, and he was trying to pass it onto me because he didn’t go to Hollywood and live his dreams because of family commitments and stuff," Marques said. "I was studying makeup too, but I don’t have the finesse that he does. I would make these little ‘Star Trek’ fan films with a lot of makeup in them, but then I’d make one where the captain just has a personal dilemma, and there’s no makeup. And I liked that better: the writing and the filming. So I got away from the makeup aspect, which broke his heart because he really thought he had somebody to carry on what he didn’t get to do."

As a result, to come back and record Victor, his family and his friends struggle – emotionally and financially – to get his flailing dream get off the ground was no easy task.

"I said I would never, ever do that again," Marquez said. "It was really hard, especially when you hear or see things that you don’t want in the movie because they’re your family, but at the same time being objective. You don’t want to sway one way or the other, but you obviously are going to unless you hate your family."

With the help and careful editing scissors of Poltermann, however, Marquez was able to craft "Psychopath" into a fascinating story starring real-life characters both charming and possibly crazed in their motivation.

Real-life characters that still haven’t seen the movie either. Unfortunately, due to the fire in Chicago last week, the stars of the documentary weren’t able to see the final filmed product. According to Marquez, however, they are trying to get them up to Milwaukee for the film’s final festival showing on Saturday, Oct. 4 at the Times Cinema. It’s only fitting the Marquez family gets to see "Psychopath" together, a tribute to their wild ambitions – whether it be a Halloween attraction or a feature film. 

"It came out of Victor wanting to fulfill his dream and me trying to realize my own," Marquez said. 

Matt Mueller Culture Editor

As much as it is a gigantic cliché to say that one has always had a passion for film, Matt Mueller has always had a passion for film. Whether it was bringing in the latest movie reviews for his first grade show-and-tell or writing film reviews for the St. Norbert College Times as a high school student, Matt is way too obsessed with movies for his own good.

When he's not writing about the latest blockbuster or talking much too glowingly about "Piranha 3D," Matt can probably be found watching literally any sport (minus cricket) or working at - get this - a local movie theater. Or watching a movie. Yeah, he's probably watching a movie.