Go backBack to selection

Watch: Jim Cummings’s Springsteen-Fueled Sundance Grand Prize-Winning Short, Thunder Road

Following a heartfelt public campaign to convince Bruce Springsteen — or, perhaps, his battery of lawyers, publishers and master owners — to let him affordably release his short film, Thunder Road, director Jim Cummings prevailed. The result is that this excellent short, fully deserving of Sundance’s Best Short prize, is now screening online, for free. Cummings himself stars as a young man who decides to evoke The Boss while eulogizing his mom at her funeral, and the short is an example of a game-changing work that can make a career. (Cummings is on every agent’s radar now as an actor and director, and he was recently commissioned by Full Screen to direct six more one-shot shorts for a total budget of $150,000.)

Cummings is one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces, inducted in as part of the Ornana collective back in 2012. This year at Sundance, Cummings created and starred in a four-part series of shorts documenting (and dramatizing) the heady experience of winning a grand prize at Park City. Check them out here.

© 2024 Filmmaker Magazine. All Rights Reserved. A Publication of The Gotham