As Ed Radtke’s The Dream Catcher begins, teen-age Freddy has just abandoned a pregnant girlfriend to hit the road and search for a distant uncle. He meets fourteen-year-old runaway Albert at a highway rest stop and the two begin an epic journey across a landscape of American roads and byways rarely represented in independent cinema.

Radtke says he lifted The Dream Catcher’s sensibility if not its specifics from his own troubled adolescence as the only Japanese-American kid in Bellbrook, Ohio. At 19 Radtke left home for NYU’s film program from which he graduated in 1985. He returned to Ohio to make his first feature, Bottom Land, and in 1995 scored one of the last sizeable NEA production grants to shoot The Dream Catcher. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed the next year. By that point Radtke recognized a need for experienced producers and teamed with Ohio documentary filmmakers Julia Reichert, a two-time Academy Award nominee for Union Maids and Seeing Red, and Steven Bognar (Personal Belongings). Reichert helped raise the film’s high six-figure budget from private investors. The filmmakers auditioned over one thousand young men before casting Colorado unknown Paddy Connor as Albert and the more seasoned Maurice Compte (illtown) as Freddy.

The Dream Catcher’s arduous eight-week shoot last winter took a six-van crew convoy to eight states from a production base in Yellow Springs. Cinematographer Terry Stacey (Love God, Spring Forward) shot Super-16mm on a borrowed Aaton XO-Plus. Twice trapped by sudden snowstorms, the filmmakers shot in Ohio’s Appalachian foothills, the Colorado Rockies and Utah’s salt flats as well as St. Louis, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas and Nevada. Editor Jim Klein cut the film throughout August and the filmmakers brought an eight-minute work-in-progress teaser to the IFFM, where Village Voice critic Amy Taubin labeled it one of the market’s exceptional finds. All rights are available and The Dream Catcher should be completed early in ’99.

Cast: Maurice Compte, Paddy Connor, Jeanne Heaton, Larry John Meyers, Joseph Arthur. Crew: Producers, Julia Reichert, Steven Bognar, Ed Radtke; Co-Producer, Peter Wentworth; Screenwriters, Ed Radtke and M.S. Nieson; Director, Radtke; Cinematographer, Terry Stacey; Production Designer, Sally Petersen; Editor, Jim Klein; Line Producer, Annetta Marion; Composer, Georgiana Gomez. Contact: Steven Bognar/Julia Reichert, Transparent Films, 726 Xenia Avenue, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387. Tel/Fax: (937) 767-1924.

Cement - Adrian Pasdar
Daughter of Suicide - Dempsey Rice
The Dream Catcher - Ed Radtke
The Five Senses - Jeremy Podeswa
Harlem Aria - William Jennings
Jump - Justin McCarthy
The Opportunists - Tim Perell
Smut - David Wendell
Why Love Doesn’t Work - Julie Davis