PRODUCTION UPDATE
Production Update is compiled and edited by FILMMAKER Contributing Editor, Mary Glucksman.
(pi) - Darren Aronofsky
Floating - Meredith Cole
Liar - Josh Pate & Jonas Pate
Little City - Roberto Benabib
Louis and Frank - Alexandre Rockwell
Push - Jason Jennings
Remembering Mario - Val Franco
The Second Wife - Michael Steinberg
Shopping For Fangs - Quentin Lee & Justin Lin
The Sticky Fingers of Time - Hilary Brougher
Whatever - Susan Skoog
Most people leave (pi) behind in tenth grade calculus. Mathematician Max Cohen, the protagonist of Darren Aronofsky's Pi, thinks the transcendental symbol holds the key to cracking the stock market.
Max's years of scavenging have turned his dingy Chinatown, New York apartment into a crazy walk-in supercomputer he calls Euclid. Now Euclid's getting temperamental, and Max is plagued by nightmare migraines; meanwhile, a Wall Streeter set on financial domination and a cabalistic sect who want him to unlock the secrets of an ancient religious text, are closing in. "It's really a character study of a gifted guy who can't live in the real world told as a psychological conspiracy thriller," says Aronofsky.
Aronofsky, 27, studied film at Harvard and used Pi-star Sean Gullette as lead in his thesis short, Supermarket Sweep. He met producer Eric Watson and cinematographer Matthew Libatique at the AFI, where all three were MFA fellows, and the trio brainstormed Pi's story with Gullette last year. "I was inspired by Mike Leigh and Tom Noonan to workshop the script with different actors, letting them create their own scenes until the story gelled," says Aronofsky.
The filmmakers went to equity investors for Pi's "under a million dollars" production financing. Pi's four-week shoot this fall included Chinatown exteriors and stage work at a Brooklyn lighting warehouse where the filmmakers built sets for Max's apartment. Production designer Matthew Maraffi, whose last challenge was creating sets for the original production of Broadway's Rent, had to fashion Euclid as a kind of hacker's surreal wet dream with equal parts high-tech majesty and menace. Watson got the raw materials by soliciting universities and computer companies across the country to donate obsolete hardware headed for the trash heap. Aronofsky shot in 16mm black-and-white reversal, usually used for music videos, to create the stylized look he wanted. All rights are available.
Cast: Sean Gullette, Samia Shoaib, Ben Shenkman, Pamela Hart, Ajay Naidu, Mark Margolis, Stephen Pearlman. Crew: Producer, Eric Watson; Coproducer, Scott Vogel; Associate Producer, Scott Franklin; Writer/Director, Darren Aronofsky; Cinematographer, Matthew Libatique; Production Designer, Matthew Maraffi; Editor, Oren Sarch. Contact: Eric Watson, Protozoa Pictures, c/o Truth & Soul, Suite 3E, 181 Hudson Street, NY, NY 10013. Tel: (212) 941-6323, Fax: (212) 941-1045.
Meredith Cole's Floating takes on the internal dynamics of a half-dozen over-educated and under-fulfilled Washington D.C. twentysomethings as the writer among them, Paul, resists the group's pressure to relinquish his literary ambitions for a more conventional career path.
Paul's convinced he can write the book that will define his generation, but his anti-slacker friends - a lobbyist, law student, programmer and p.r. maven - say he's avoiding reality. When his actress girlfriend dumps him, conflict erupts.
Cole, currently a promo producer for The Learning Channel in D.C., grew up on a commune in Scottsville, Virginia where television was banned but classic films were a weekly staple. At Smith College she spent her junior year as an exchange student in N.Y.U.'s film program and interned at Good Machine, earning a P.A. spot on Pushing Hands, Ang Lee's first film. As a Smith scholar, she got to design her own senior year and returned to the commune to make a feature documentary about its 20th anniversary. She met David Vergano, Floating's co-producer, editor and co-screenwriter, while writing a short film - The Salon - with his brother in 1995.
Floating was shot over 30 days of nights and weekends between March and May last spring so all involved could keep their day jobs; most actors were experienced members of the local theater scene eager for a shot at film. "We'd been working in film and video in the city long enough to have a list of pros we could call on to donate days," Vergano points out. Actual cash went for a Betacam transfer so the filmmakers could cut on-line at a Beta suite where Vergano works. All rights are available.
Cast: Todd Alexander Kovner, Jeffrey Bankert, April Cantor, Anne Simons, Carleton Robinson, Rhea Seehorn, Shari Lindsay Lewis. Crew: Producers/Screenwriters, Meredith Cole, David Vergano; Director, Cole; Cinematographer, Parrish Smith; Steadicam, Dennis P. Boni; Casting, Kimberly Skyrme/Capital Casting; Art Director, Shari Lindsay Lewis; Editor, Vergano. Contact: Meredith Cole, Mass. Ave Productions, P.O. Box 33045, Washington, D.C. 20033. Tel: (202) 319-7302, Fax: (703) 750-0566.
Tim Roth stars as an Ivy League grad under investigation for murder in Josh and Jonas Pate's Liar, the 25-year-old twins' subversive follow-up to last year's Sundance midnight hit The Grave.
Roth plays Wayland, a pathological liar and charismatic son of the local gentry who may have killed a prostitute (Jerry Maguire's Renee Zellweger) and is definitely enjoying the opportunity to manipulate the two cops (Chris Penn and Michael Rooker) charged with his interrogation.
Little is as it seems as Liar unfolds through flashbacks, and Wayland may have less on his conscience than the cops. "We break the fourth wall early here," admits Jonas Pate, who says Liar's script got started when a producer friend testing new game show ideas hooked him up to a polygraph. The Pates grew up all over the Carolinas and say they set Liar in Charleston to take advantage of the city's stunning antebellum settings.
Liar find the Pates reteamed with Grave producer Peter Glatzer, who financed this film through Mark Damon's MDP Worldwide. An industry leader in international sales, MDP has of late been producing a mix of specialized and genre films and currently has six in various stages of production including Abel Ferarra's latest, Blackout, made in association with Ed Pressman.
The 35mm color Liar rolled October 7 in Charleston with venerable cinematographer Bill Butler (Jaws, The Conversation, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) behind the camera. "He's an unbelievable collaborator with the spirit of an 11-year-old with a train set," says Josh Pate. "We'd have one shot left before we wrapped at 6:00 A.M. on a night shoot and he'd come up and say ċI can do this lighting gag where all the light in the room drops out and there's just a band left across Tim's eyes.' He's 75, but he pushed us." All rights are available.
Cast: Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Michael Rooker, Renee Zellweger, Rose-anna Arquette, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Parks. Crew: Producer, Peter Glatzer; Executive Producer, Mark Damon; Line Producer, John Saviano; Screenwriters/Directors, Josh Pate and Jonas Pate; Cinematographer, Bill Butler; Production Designer, John Kretchmer; Casting, Laurel Smith; Editor, Dan Lebental. Contact: Peter Glatzer, Polygraph, Inc., 6626 Franklin Avenue, #402, Los Angeles, CA 90028. Tel: (310) 248-2786, Fax (310) 248-3927.
Best friends succumb to unchecked lust, jilted boyfriends beg for mercy and straight women check out sapphic dalliances in Roberto Benabib's San Francisco-based Little City.
Jon Bon Jovi follows his starring role in John Duigan's Leading Man (not yet picked up for U.S. release) as catalyst Kevin, whose indiscretions in love set the plot in motion. Josh Charles, Joanna Going, Penelope Ann Miller, Annabella Sciorra and Jo Beth Williams round out the cast. "It's about smart, educated and entirely unambitious people content to work as bartenders and taxi drivers and waitresses, with a lot of free time to dwell on their emotional lives," says Benabib.
A longtime TV writer/producer who's had development deals at Warner Brothers and Castle Rock, Benabib originally set up Little City at Fine Line as a $6 million feature. When the project stalled, reportedly due to cast approval and scheduling issues inherent in moving forward with an ensemble piece at that budget level, Benabib's agent, Vision Arts' Scott Schwartz, called indie producer Beau Flynn in L.A. Flynn's two-year-old Bandiera Entertainment has so far produced Johns and House of Yes. Flynn says Bandiera ultimately got City made for a cool $2 million secured from L.A.-based foreign sales giant I.E.G. in exchange for worldwide rights. Little City's intensive four-week shoot kicked off September 16 in San Francisco. I.E.G. is selling rights.
Cast: Jon Bon Jovi, Josh Charles, Joanna Going, Penelope Ann Miller, Annabella Sciorra, Jo Beth Williams. Crew: Producers, Beau Flynn, Stefan Simchowitz, Jeffrey L. Davidson, Ron Wechsler; Executive Producers: Matt Salinger, Michael Sayles, Cindy Cowan; Associate Producer, Jane Gurtiza; Screenwriter/Director, Roberto Benabib; Director of Photography, Randy Love; Production Designer, Don De Fina; Casting, Mary Vernieu; Editor, Sloane Klevin. Contact: Beau Flynn, Bandeira Entertain-ment, 176 North Swall Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90211. Tel: (310) 657-1444, Fax: (310) 657-0345.
It's back to basics for Alexandre Rockwell, whose Louis and Frank takes the manic, singing Italian landlords who plagued Steve Buscemi in In the Soup and recasts them as cousins with a penchant for doo-wop. Rockwell actually tailored Louis for the actors Steven Randazzo (Louis) and Francesco Messina (Frank), who'd had a doo-wop group back in the '60s.
The fun starts when Frank, now a hairdresser in Sicily, arrives in New York to visit Louis, a moving man with a family in Queens, and pushes him to revive their singing career. When Frank connects with two-bit talent agent Tony Curtis (Lenny), the Bitchin DiBuffonis are on their way, scoring gigs everywhere from bowling alleys to drag clubs. Rockwell finds an excuse to get Curtis back in drag while he's moonlighting as a private detective, and usual suspects Steve Buscemi, Rosie Perez, Sam Rockwell and Rockets Redglare show up in supporting roles.
Rockwell had made three films (Lenz, Hero and Sons) before In the Soup put him on the map at Sundance '92, winning the fest's grand prize. Next came Somebody to Love and Four Rooms. Louis finds Rockwell reteamed with In the Soup production partner Why Not, the five-year-old Paris production company. With Why Not committing Louis' high six-figure budget, Rockwell tapped New York producer Tim Perell (Breathing Room, The Myth of Fingerprints) to run the show. His next trick was getting Messina, who really had relocated to Sicily to work in hair dressing, back to Manhattan.
The 35mm color Louis and Frank rolled out a 27-day shoot November 11 in New York with cinematographer Jim Denault (Clockwatchers, Illtown) behind the camera. Rockwell says Louis represents a return to In the Soup's aesthetic. All rights are available through Why Not with Perell as point man in New York.
Cast: Steven Randazzo, Francesco Messina, Tony Curtis, Elizabeth Bracco, Jason Fuchs, Giancarla Nashlenas, Rockets Redglare, Sam Rockwell, Meta Golding. Crew: Producers, Pascal Caucheteux, Tim Perell, Howard Bernstein; Screenwriter/Director, Alexandre Rockwell; Cinematographer, Jim Denault; Production Designer, Susan Block; Costume Designer, Catherine Thomas; Casting, Walken and Jaffe; Locations, Andy Clark; Sound, William Kozy. Contact: Beatrice Mauduit, Why Not Productions, 102, Rue du Fauborg Poissoniere, 75010 Paris, France. Tel: (33 1) 53 20 04 56, Fax: (33 1) 53 20 02 06 or Tim Perell, Eureka Pictures, 170 Varick Street, 11th floor, New York, NY 10013. Tel: (212) 929-4902, Fax: (212) 929-8407.
Jason Jennings' Push takes on West Coast post-adolescent skate and snowboard culture to the tune of Smashing Pumpkins, Curtis Mayfield and the Beastie Boys. Twenty-three-year-old Jennings also plays protagonist Jaybird, a budding artist who hits the road to seek his future on Lake Tahoe's slopes.
With characters called Wizard, Brains, Jazz, Echo, X and Farmer, Push's cast is filled with the dedicated boarders - skate and snow - Jennings says inspired him to make the film. "I was raised with Hollywood movies about skateboarding and they never depicted it realistically," says Jennings. "You could always tell that somebody a lot older than these kids actually made the movie."
Jason and his brother Troy, Push's producer, had planned to shoot the film no-budget on Hi-8 but say a preliminary investors' offering netted so much enthusiasm they were able to convince two local businessmen to come up with the entire low six-figure budget for a Super-16mm shoot and 35mm transfer. "We tried to get 50 people to invest $2,000 each, and because of the snowboarding edge the response was overwhelming," says Troy. "I called a snowboarding company cold and they committed to $10,000 without seeing anything."
Working with professional extreme-sports cinematographer Bill Gallen, the filmmakers shot 56 days between January and June to capture Lake Tahoe in snow and spring and Las Vegas in between. The arduous shoot often called for lugging equipment through long mountain hikes so Gallen could get snowboard sequences skiing after the cast with a handheld camera. "Down below we got really creative rigging skateboards for dollies," says the director. The Jennings also had to build a simulated snow rig for a flashback to the real freak storm that blanketed Vegas in '79. "Although Push features snowboarding," Troy Jennings cautions, "the drama carries the film. It's not just an MTV-style extreme sports montage."
All rights are available and Push should be completed by the time you read this; look to the film's website at http://www.pushfilms.com/ for breaking updates.
Cast: Jason Jennings, Justin Giarla, Brad Holmes, Shawn Farmer, Justin Taylor, Cessie Pulleyn, Cameron Desart, Iwa Wojcik, Drew Johnson. Crew: Producer, Troy Jennings; Screenwriter/Director, Jason Jennings; Executive Producers, Robert Bigelow, Bob Panaro; Cinematographer, Bill Gallen; Editor, David Finkelstein. Contact: Troy Jennings, Push Films, 6188 S. Sandhill Road, Las Vegas, Nevada 89120. Tel: (702) 433-3373, Fax: (702) 433-5522.
Intrepid first-time filmmaker Val Franco sets out to do for suburban working-class Italians what Ed Burns did for their Irish counterparts in her no-budget debut, Remembering Mario, a romantic comedy about four thirtyish Yonkers-based (New York) friends looking for love in all the wrong places.
Franco plays Anna, who's shed her ethnic heritage for whitebread ways as a college educator. Mario, her Italian father, is dying from Alzheimer's disease and can no longer recount the family stories that Anna once tuned out and now misses. Though Mario remains an unseen presence, his offscreen voice drives Franco's film and at press time she was negotiating to land a high-profile Italian-American actor for the role. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani makes his film debut as Anna's uncle in a brief scene outside City Hall. "One thing I'm trying to do here is break away from the familiar stereotypes of Italian Americans on film for a more realistic cross-section," says Franco. "Frank Vincent plays a wise man instead of a wiseguy."
Franco, 30, grew up in Yonkers and graduated Fordham University before embarking on a varied show business career that has included production work and stints as radio d.j., off- Broadway actress, stand-up comic and voice-over artist dubbing foreign films. She studied acting at New York's Circle in the Square Theater School and workshopped her one-woman show, Start with A Bang, on both coasts. Her cartoon volume, How to Stop that Table from Wobbling and 63 Other Uses for An Actor's Headshot, is in its third printing. Franco financed the color 16mm Mario herself from savings and says the production's seed money fell into her lap unexpectedly when Richard Dreyfuss pulled her from a crowd of extras for a small bit on his latest film, Mad Dog Time.
Mario's guerrilla 12-day shoot last August kept the small company on the move between Manhattan (Grand Central Station and Fordham University at Lincoln Center), Queens (J.F.K.'s Alitalia terminal) and bucolic suburbs to the east and north. Product placement deals resulted in a shiny red Porsche for one scene's visual gag. Luck ran out, however, when Franco's lab (Guffanti) lost a roll of film - a whole day's work - that her cut-rate production insurance didn't cover. The film's first public screenings are set for January and all rights are available.
Cast: Frank Vincent, Val Franco, Bernadette Penotti, Geraldine Sivero, Kenneth Favre, Antonia Sisti Crew: Producer/Screenwriter/Director, Val Franco; Associate Producer, Jen D'Angelo; Cinema-tographer, Richard Siegel; Line Producer, Max Reichman; Costumes, Maria Marzilli; Editor, Franco; Composer, Shane Visbal. Contact: Val Franco, Willy Nilly Productions, 15 Falmouth Road, Yonkers, NY 10710 Tel/Fax: (914) 337-4877.
There's a monstrous secret at the cold heart of the blackly comic drama The Second Wife, director Michael Steinberg's stylized foray into the macabre.
Jennifer Beals plays a suburban California mom oblivious to the horror that awaits her in this insidious mystery about an apparently all-American family, the Christiansons, that could be the natural offspring of Spielberg and Polanski.
Producer Frank Beddor comments, "[The film] starts off cheery and inviting and then it sucks you in. It's twisted but it's also very funny thanks to the incongruities of certain situations." Newcomer Julia Stiles, a 15-year-old who is co-starring with Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford in The Devil's Own, Alan Pakula's latest, has the lead as Ellie, an eighth grader whose angelic demeanor mocks a dangerous maladjustment. "It's Greek tragedy set in a gated community, a heightened melodrama grounded in fundamental psychological reality," says Steinberg.
Steinberg took a break from directing to produce Sleep with Me in 1994. He was trying to set up Hot Lava, a noirish screwball comedy, with producer Joel Castleberg, when his agent, David Cantor, slipped him an early draft of Wife, a spec script by newcomer Eric Weiss. Steinberg, an avid skiier, then met Beddor, a former U.S. Ski Team star who'd parlayed stuntwork on several films into an acting career and had just signed to co-produce a World War II ski feature (Whiteout) at Paramount. The two joined forces and Beddor went to equity investors for financing he describes as in the low-seven figures.
The Second Wife's 33-day shoot rolled November 11 at a San Fernando Valley sound stage with seasoned indie cinematographer Bernd Heinl shooting 35mm Fuji. The filmmakers expect a finished film by May; all rights are available.
Cast: Julia Stiles, Vanessa Zima, Chelsea Fields, William R. Moses, Linda Hart, Louise Myrback, Michael Parks, Patrick Muldoon. Crew: Producer, Frank Beddor; Associate Producer, Greg Steinberg; Screenwriter, Eric Weiss; Director, Michael Steinberg; Line Producer, Jamie Beardsley; Cinematographer, Bernd Heinl; Production Designer, Dominic Watkins; Costumes, Sara Jane Slotnick; Storyboards, Kasia Adamik. Contact: Frank Beddor, Flipped Out Productions, 535 North Poinsettia Place, Los Angeles,CA 90036. Tel: (213) 634-0600, Fax: (213) 634-0633.
Co-directors Quentin Lee and Justin Lin deliberately transcend genres with Shopping for Fangs, their style-conscious "generasian x" first feature about a pair of sexually repressed loners convinced their personal quirks have supernatural origins.
Phil's a young accountant with a little too much hair for comfort and a sister with a boyfriend writing a book on werewolves; when a girl he's slept with turns up missing - maybe dead - his imagination goes into overdrive. Enter Katherine, prone to mysterious blackouts and unhappy within the confines of her marriage - until a quirky young waitress finds her wallet and starts tracking her with love notes she finds surprisingly intriguing. When Phil meets Katherine over their mutual shrink's dead body, Phil is sure he's killed again. "Both of [their] stories are about identity - sexual and cultural," says Lee. "Alienation and repression fuse the creation of their personal myths."
Lee and Lin met in the UCLA grad film program where they're still students, although they stress Fangs got made entirely outside the school's auspices. Lee got tagged the "queer video bad boy" for an award-winning early video, To Ride A Cow, banned in Japan on its way to the '91 Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Born and raised in Hong Kong, 26-year-old Lee immigrated to Montreal at 16 in time to spend his college years at U.C. Berkeley and got an M.A. from Yale in post-structuralist theory and feminist criticism before landing at UCLA; 25-year-old Lin left Taipei at ten for Orange County and entered the UCLA film program as an undergrad. When the two decided to collaborate Lee took the project to IFFCON, where he sufficiently impressed Exotica producer Camelia Frieberg to recommend Fangs for a Canada Council grant that ultimately came through to the tune of $35,000. The biggest chunk of Fangs' lean six-figure budget came from loans Lee got in Hong Kong.
The 35mm color Fangs shot 21 days this July throughout L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley, the heavily Asian-American suburb Lee calls "a culturally molten postmodern landscape consuming rather than fusing the western with the eastern."
Because the filmmakers wanted the visuals to serve as surreal metaphors for the subjectivity of L.A. Generasian Xers, cinematographer Lisa Wiegand, also a UCLA student, lit for a collage effect mixing cold fluorescent lights with dashes of bright color. All rights to Fangs are still available and the filmmakers expect to have a finished print in December.
Cast: Radmar Jao, Jeanne Chin, Clint Jung, Lela Lee, John Cho, Peggy Ahn, Scott Eberlein. Crew: Producer, Quentin Lee; Directors, Quentin Lee, Justin Lin; Screenwriters, Lee, Lin, Dan Alvarado; Cinematographer, Lisa Wiegand; Art Director, Deeya Loram; Line Producer, Stanley Yung. Contact: Quentin Lee, de/center communications, inc., 840 S. Serrano Ave., Suite 608, Los Angeles, CA 90005. Tel/Fax: (213) 382-8022.
Hilary Brougher puts a slyly literate spin on time travel in her potent debut, The Sticky Fingers of Time, a meditation on destiny and sexual politics.
The Sticky Fingers of Time is what journalist Tucker Harding calls the novel she begins in 1953 when she returns to Brooklyn from covering the H-bomb tests to find Isaac, her lover and editor, inexplicably missing. Ofelia, the mysterious beauty who's meantime materialized and won Tucker's heart, takes her mind off Isaac, but when she spots him on the street and tries to follow, she finds herself in 1996. Tailing Isaac leads Tucker to Drew, an East Village writer, and towards Sticky's notion of non-linear time as a pie: You can eat the slices in any order but you can't eat the same slice twice.
"The challenge was to make a movie that's not about special effects but the suspension of disbelief," says Brougher. "It's really an allegory about creative awakening."
Brougher, 28, started making Super-8 shorts at fourteen in hometown Woodstock, New York and graduated from New York's School of Visual Arts. She was wrestling with a complicated thriller, 10:30 Rosebud, she envisioned as her feature debut, and working as a script supervisor to pay the rent when she found her way to Good Machine two years ago. Brougher says Ted Hope was sympathetic to 10:30 but advised her to start smaller. "He suggested I write something I could reasonably get done by any means necessary," she says. The result was Sticky Fingers.
With Hope on hold Brougher spent a year revising Sticky with input from Good Machine head story editor Jean Castelli, an early champion and eventual executive producer. Together they and producer Isen Robbins raised sufficient cash to make it through production shooting Super-16mm. They also brought on seasoned producer Susan Stover. At what Brougher describes as the eleventh hour, Good Machine came on board as executive producers with post financing from an external source. Sticky should be done by March and all rights are available.
Cast: Terumi Matthews, Nicole Zaray, James Urbaniak, Thomas Pasley, Julie Anderson, Belinda Becker, Amanda Cole. Crew: Producers, Isen Robbins, Susan Stover; Executive Producers, Jean Castelli, Ted Hope, James Schamus; Screenwriter/Director, Hilary Brougher; Cinema-tographer, Ethan Mass; Production Designer, Teresa Mastropierro; Editor, Sabine Hoffman. Contact: Isen Robbins/Susan Stover, Sticky Films, c/o Good Machine, 526 W. 25th Street, New York, NY 10001. Tel: (212) 229-1046, Fax: (212) 255-4308.
Susan Skoog's Whatever is a New Jersey beach girl's coming-of-age story as grittily melodramatic as it is matter-of-fact. It's 1981 and if Anna can make it through the last month of high school unscathed she's got her heart set on Cooper Union, the prestigious free art school in Manhattan. In search of adventure and life beyond high school, Anna throws herself into the fray with best friend Brenda. What comes next includes a road trip to New York and an inadvertent crime punishable by much more than detention.
"[Whatever depicts a] generation lost between the '70s and the '80s," says Skoog. "Reagan had just been shot and the country was poised on the brink of '80s conservatism and commercialism, before AIDS, before campaigns like 'Just Say No.' Anna makes lousy choices and she suffers the consequences."
Skoog, 32, has spent the last ten years producing and sometimes directing arts programming for cable networks like VH1 and TNT. She made her first short, A Dry Heat, last year. When she showed the screenplay for Whatever to former VH-1 colleague Ellin Baumel, a longtime PBS producer who'd just left an executive stint at Paramount TV, Baumel decided to join forces, and Skoog put up a hefty payday from a Turner job as seed money. She was bemoaning the expense of shooting in New Jersey in the summer to another friend, Cinewomen Screening Series director Michelle Yahn, when Yahn suggested Wheeling, West Virginia, her home town.
Yahn also hooked the fledgling filmmakers up with an in-law from the New York indie film world, Kevin Segalla, who'd spent the last five years producing and directing short films and television projects (The 28 Instances of 1914, A Counter Fancy, Notes). A veteran of IFFCON, Sundance and like events, Segalla structured production financing from private sources as two S-corps in a co-production. "It's a little different but it was a safe way to make sure we retained control of the film," he says.
Whatever's five-week shoot rolled right after Labor Day in Wheeling with cinematographers Michael Barrow (Heavy) and Michael Mayers (Spanking the Monkey) shooting Super-16mm color. At press time the producers were closing a deal on completion financing in the mid-six figure range; all rights remained available.
Cast: Liza Weil, Chad Morgan, Fredric Forrest, Mark Riffon, Catherine Rosseter, Gary Wolf, Dan Montano. Crew: Producers, Susan Skoog, Kevin Segalla, Ellin Baumel, Michelle Yahn; Screen-writer/Director, Skoog; Cinematographers, Michael Barrow, Michael Mayers; Production Designer, Dina Goldman; Casting, Adrienne Stern. Contact: Kevin Segalla, Anyway Productions, 214 West 17th St., 5th floor, New York, NY 10011. Tel/Fax: (212) 633-2000.
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