Job loss

Like many creative impulses in this economy, this one started with a layoff. Austin, 26, lost his job at an Internet startup in December. He was in a Newport Beach coffeehouse, fueled up, when he turned to a friend and blurted out “I want to drive through 50 states. I don’t know why.” He thought about it and then he did know why.

“People were losing jobs, retailers were filing for bankruptcy. I was like, ‘Man, something is happening and I need to go out and film it.’ “

Because he knew nothing about filmmaking, his brother Brian, 23, tried to talk him out of it, but that backfired. Instead, Brian, who majored in television and radio at San Francisco State University, quit his job to join his brother and they hit the road in late January.

“We tried to come up with a thesis before we left,” says Austin. “But that was very difficult because I had no idea what I wanted to cover.”

By the time they left Las Vegas, he knew. Just beyond the glittering lights they saw something they’d never seen, not even in overbuilt Orange County.

“As soon as you go beyond the Strip, you see brand new neighborhoods, less than 2 years old, that are abandoned,” says Austin. “You look down a street of 10 homes and eight of them have bank foreclosure signs. We were on Route 66 for a long time. We were also on 80, 40, 15.”

They drove along, filming whole developments of foreclosed homes.

Bigger picture

If this were a movie about the housing implosion, they wouldn’t have had to go any farther than Nevada. But they had a bigger picture in mind. They also had a Web site, which advanced their arrival to each state with a three-minute video, constantly updated.

“We’d roll up to a coffee shop,” says Austin. “Coffee shop kids vibe the same way. They’d hear about our project and get pumped up and say ‘Where are you guys going to stay?’ ” That led to a bed and shower for all but 15 nights in five months on the road.

Determined to hit all 50 states, they were up in Maine when they realized they’d forgotten Tennessee and had to go all the way back down. They were in Seattle when they figured out they couldn’t ferry the Minivan to Alaska. They flew, and once there, they didn’t just touch ground and come back. They rented a similar Minivan and put 2,000 miles on it.

“We didn’t have any goals,” Austin says. “Whenever someone had a suggestion about where we should go, we went.”

This got them to Youngstown, Ohio, where the recession is now in its 30th year, according to a guy who drove them around while the camera rolled. This was the same way they toured the bombed-out public schools in Detroit, while being told that the vacant land in that city is the size of San Francisco.

Back home

Driving back home to Orange County, they stopped to deliver Brian to San Francisco and Austin decided he’d stay if he could find housing in one day, which he did, in a shared Victorian in the lower Haight.

He took a job marketing for Zipcar while Brian edited their film. Finding a place for their premiere was much tougher than finding places to stay on their road trip.

“I couldn’t sleep for the month of August,” says Austin, who checked out every theater in San Francisco before booking the Victoria, a 100-year-old vaudeville house with 500 seats for $1,200.

“We only have money for one screening,” he says.

E-mail Sam Whiting at swhiting@sfchronicle.com.