One day while having lunch at a McDonald’s in Phoenix, Arizona, Nancy Criss told her father Darrell, “I want to make a film.” But Nancy didn’t want to make just any kind of film—she wanted to make a period piece. Though they had no money and minimal resources, Darrell believed in his daughter and “literally sitting there at lunch at McDonald’s, we decided: we’re gonna go make a Western.”
And they did. Nandar Entertainment (a combination of Nancy and Darrell’s first names) was formed in 2001, and the company’s debut feature was a western called True Legends of the West that the company produced for just $75,000. Though the movie wasn’t a commercial blockbuster, it served as an instrumental learning experience for Nancy. Off of that film, Nandar received an email from NBC Universal asking Nancy to come in and have a meeting with them to look into spinning True Legends off into a TV series. Like so many Hollywood stories, that deal fell apart, but the important lesson from this experience to Nancy was that the only barrier to breaking into the film production industry is making something and putting it out into the world. “The point was we got [the film] done, we got it out there, and it got distributed.”
