Tag: Lindsey Roberts

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Memphis Filmmakers Allen Gardner and Brad Ellis Get The Band Back Together For Cold Feet

Memphis filmmakers Allen Gardner and Brad Ellis had such a good experience working on their last feature film, Bad, Bad Men, that they wanted to do it again. “I just wanted to get the old band back together for a new movie,” says Gardner.

Cold Feet

While in post production on Bad, Bad Men, Gardner had an idea for a follow up. It had been years since the long time partners made their last horror movie, and Ellis was thirsty for some onscreen blood. Gardner had been scoring with funny screenplays lately, so why not a horror comedy? Gardner was on a layover on a flight from Los Angeles, where he now lives, to Memphis when the setup came to him: A bachelor party in a haunted house.

Cold Feet takes eight actors who have worked with Old School Pictures before and locks them in a rambling, Modernist East Memphis bachelor pad, complete with hot tub, pool, and disco room. “Allen had the story in mind, but we tailored the scenes to match the layout of the house,” says Ellis.

The actors, who include Bad, Bad Men’s Nathan Ross Murphy and Adam Burns, had their parts chosen by chance. “We had a cold read before the first Memphis screening of Bad, Bad Men,” says Gardner. “It was really exciting to me, because none of the guys had read it before. So instead of putting names into a hat, we put names on the bottom of shot glasses. Whatever shot you got, that was the role you played. I was curious to find out who was going to be who. It was like Christmas.”

Cold Feet

“That was our way of putting a lot of trust in the actors,” says Ellis. “It worked out for the best. Two weeks into the production, and you couldn’t imagine any of these guys being anyone else.”

Joining the core cast is Lindsey Roberts and Kenneth Farmer as cops who crack down when the party gets a little out of hand. “Lindsey is playing the straight man, essentially, which can be a thankless role, but without that balance, you have nothing,” says Ellis.

“Hearing her do the hard-nosed cop with Kenneth, who is just so on the other side of that equation, has been hilarious,” says producer Gabe Arredondo, another Bad, Bad Men veteran.

Cold Feet was shot over the course of three weeks last month. Now the producers have started a crowdfunding campaign to help with post-production. For more information, visit the campaign page on IndieGoGO.

Cold Feet

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Memphis Film Prize Draws Bluff City Talent

Gregory Kallenberg wanted to create a different sort of film festival when he founded the Louisiana Film Prize in 2012. After filming in Shreveport, he fell in love with the town and relocated from Austin, Texas, and brought a more competitive model to the festival world — along with a $50,000 prize.

After three successful years, the prize is branching out to create a feeder system of regional competitions, and Memphis was at the top of the list. They partnered with On Location: Memphis, and this weekend, the top 10 films from more than 50 local entries will screen at Studio on the Square. The winning film will receive $10,000 and a chance at the $50,000 Louisiana prize in September. I spoke with three of the nominated directors.

Ricky D. Smith in director Kevin Brooks’ street drama “Marcus”

“Marcus”

Dir. Kevin Brooks

Last year, the young filmmaker’s short, “Heat Vision,” earned him a slot in the Sundance Ignite program and a trip to Park City, where he was mentored by Nate Parker, director of the Grand Jury and Audience Award-winning Birth of a Nation. “I came back with a huge burst of energy!” he says. “I made ‘Marcus’ especially for the Film Prize.”

The film stars Ricky D. Smith, whom Brooks met while they attended University of Memphis together. “The movie tells the story of a young man who is struggling with the consequences of karma,” Brooks says. “It’s derived from the decisions he made to survive. I wanted to make it really realistic, and I wanted to talk to the issues that people of color face in these urban settings.”

Brooks’ goal, he says, is to return to the big leagues in Park City with a film of his own. “I have to stay focused and keep moving forward, because I want to be there someday.”

“Calls From the Unknown”

Dir. Edward Valibus

Edward Valibus, noted for his gonzo comedies with Corduroy Wednesday, wanted to tackle something a little more serious with “Calls From the Unknown.” “Our main character is a young woman. She’s a film student doing the usual documentary 101: interviewing her dad and hearing stories she’s never heard before,” he says.

His inspiration came from his experiences with his own father’s terminal illness. “I’ve been doing absurdist humor for so long, people who watch it have been calling it a dark comedy. People laugh, then they gasp, then they cry.”

Lead actress Lara Johnson directed the documentary “Geekland,” but Valibus says her comedic student films convinced him she could excel in the role. “A big philosophy behind doing this film was giving people chances to do something new.”

Jordan Danelz, normally a gaffer, was the cinematographer, and musician Michael Jasud, of Dead Soldiers, makes his acting debut. “All my gambles really paid off,” Valibus says.

The one sure thing was Mark Pergolizzi as Johnson’s father. “He’s my favorite actor to work with,” Valibus says. “I went through the entire thing with Mark, what I wanted out of her and what I wanted out of him. Then I sent them off together to work it out. I was trying to create a father-daughter bond. It worked out amazingly well; I just let the camera roll.”

“Teeth”

Dir. Melissa Anderson Sweazy

“Like a lot of my ideas, it came about through casual conversation with my daughter,” director Melissa Anderson Sweazy says. “She heard about the tooth fairy, and she was like, ‘Why? There’s a person coming to my house to get my teeth? Who is this person, and what are they doing with all those teeth?'”

Sweazy, whose previous works include the Indie Memphis-winning “John’s Farm” and “The Department of Signs and Magical Interventions” loves to work in fantastic realms. “I’m definitely drawn to stories about magic, either about the absence of magic in the world or the proof that it is there in reality. I like the world to look normal, except for a magical element at play.”

“Teeth” stars newcomer Gabriella Goble as the young child who wants to investigate the tooth fairy’s motives. Her father, Ryan, was the director of photography. “It was kind of a miraculous find. My day job is at a production company, so my entire crew was made up of co-workers who donated their time.”

Lindsey Roberts portrays the tooth fairy. “It’s going to be a take on the tooth fairy that you have never considered.”

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Fresh Skweezed

On the one hand, short films tend to get short shrift. Aside from a few Pixar animated shorts, they are rarely seen in theaters outside of a film festival setting. But on the other hand, thanks to YouTube, short films have never been more popular — even if most of them are cat videos. Distributors are usually reluctant to take on shorts, which makes it remarkable that one of the best Memphis-made short films of the past few years, Fresh Skweezed, is getting an internet release by Music+Arts on December 16th.

The 22-minute film stars Haley Parker as Maggie, the 11-year-old spelling-challenged proprietor of a trailer park lemonade stand. Writer/director G.B. Shannon created the role specifically for Parker after seeing her act in another short film at the 2010 Nashville Film Festival. “She was fantastic,” he recalls. “She just had a small part, but she stole every scene she was in. She had such great command of the screen, and I think at the time they shot it, she was just 8 years old. So I turned to Ryan Parker and said, I’m going to write something for her.”

Haley Parker stars in Fresh Skweezed.

He came up with the concept for what would become Fresh Skweezed while driving to work at Beale Street Studios one morning. “I thought, ‘A crooked lemonade stand! She’s the flim flam man of the neighborhood.'” He wrote the screenplay over Soul Burgers upstairs at Ernestine & Hazel’s.

“When I first read the script, I cried,” says Parker. He is an amazing writer.”

Parker’s portrayal of Maggie, a tough little firecracker who uses her wits to fight off a bully named Cody (Caleb Johnson), is remarkably poised and expressive. Even with a cast of some of the best screen actors in Memphis, including Lindsey Roberts, Billie Worley, Kim Howard, and Shannon himself, she owns the screen. The audience thinks they know exactly what’s going on in her mind, right up until the script pulls the rug out from under them. “When we started casting the other parts, I got worried,” says Shannon, who co-directed the piece with cinematographer Ryan Parker (who is no relation to Haley). “Did we put too much on this little girl? It’s 20 pages long, and she’s in every scene.”

But Shannon was amazed when she came into auditions with a fully realized character. “I had worked on it quite a bit before the audition process rolled around because I didn’t want to let anyone down,” Parker says. “Maggie was a lot like me. She was easy for me to play, and I really had fun with her.”

The script originally called for a suburban setting, but the crew had trouble finding a suitable place that looked good and would allow filming. Then they stumbled upon a trailer park in Millington that had been evacuated during the floods of 2011. “It was like we had our own sound lot,” Shannon says. “Everything was there.”

Filmmakers love to regale each other with stories of onset disaster, but Shannon says “it was one of those magical shoots where nothing went wrong.”

The film was shot on a few consecutive weekends. “I wished it had lasted longer, because we had a really great time on the set,” Parker says.

Editor Eileen Meyer was brought in for the cut, because, Shannon says, “we wanted a female perspective. She added a couple of elements that we never would have thought of.”

It was during the sound mixing and scoring that Ward Archer’s Music+Arts became involved, supplying music by Amy LaVere, Robby Grant, Rick Steff, and Roy Berry. “Because he has these great artists at his disposal, it’s pretty great how it works out,” Shannon says. “Having that here is pretty amazing.”

The film won both jury and audience awards at its Indie Memphis premiere and went on to play in 18 festivals across the country, winning several more accolades including a Best Actress award for Parker at the Newport Beach Film Festival. After its almost two-year festival run was over, Shannon reconnected with Archer at the premiere of Mike McCarthy’s Cigarette Girl, which was Music+Arts’ first film release, and they worked out a deal to distribute Fresh Skweezed on internet streaming video services such as iTunes, Amazon, and VUDU. Shannon says they are enthusiastic about the possibilities: “If he can keep doing this — having a cinematic sound mixing operation and then releasing as well — it will be fantastic.”

Parker, now 15, has acted in several more films and is currently trying her hand at writing. “I am so proud to be a part of Fresh Skweezed. It’s just been an amazing experience all around — the filming, the production, the film festivals have just been amazing.”