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Between script rewrites and storyboarding for the next day’s Tooth and Nail shoot last fall, Charlotte-based filmmaker Mark Young was averaging two hours of sleep a night. Sadly, for local film enthusiasts, Young was working in Philadelphia, not Charlotte.
But with improved incentives – Governor Easley signed legislation last August providing a full 15% tax credit on productions over $250,000 – the prospects for filmmaking in the state appear to be on the upswing. Does this mean we’ll see more of George Clooney and Will Ferrell jetting in from Hollywood to shoot in the Piedmont? Is there more happening? Young is emblematic of a growing core of locals with a burning passion for the craft, and he has something that gives him an edge on his Hollywood counterparts – the uncanny ability to squeeze a dime from a nickel.
YOU’VE GOT THREE WEEKS
After working as a painter in the Big Apple, native New Yorker Young ventured south in the mid eighties, hustling a living around Charlotte doing any freelance ad work he could pick up. Meanwhile, the former architecture student and tattoo artist started making short films. By 1992 his short Dead Bodies, a film about internet addiction – what Young calls “social commentary wrapped in the guise of a horror film” – got noticed, playing in over 100 film festivals.
There were often long breaks between films during which Young made corporate videos for Lowe’s and I.B.M. to pay off filmmaking debts. But lately Young is on a roll. He shot Southern Gothic--a tale of redemption in a town full of vampires--locally in early 2006. Soon after, Michael Madsen (of Reservoir Dogs fame) and soccer star Vinnie Jones came aboard for Tooth and Nail, a project that was Young’s, if he was willing to write a script and prep the film in just three weeks. Young and his North Carolina director of photography, Gregg Easterbrook, pulled it off.
“It looks like a five-to-ten million dollar movie,” Young says proudly. They did it for around a million.
HOLLYWOOD REFUGEES
While many local filmmakers are born and bred here, award-winning duo Christine and Michael Swanson handpicked Charlotte when they’d had enough of Los Angeles two years ago. They had visited while promoting their first film, All About You, and fell in love with the place.
After eleven years in New York and L.A., the couple, originally from the Midwest, was looking for a mid-sized city with Christian values where they could raise their kids. Changes in technology meant they could live anywhere, shoot on location and edit from home. The great restaurants and quality of life added up to a sell for the Swansons. “Charlotte had a lot to offer,” Michael says.
He produces, handling the business end of the process, while Christine writes and directs. Like so many of the other filmmakers gaining traction in the area, they are savvy about their audience. The Swansons focus on romantic comedies that are geared toward black women, a segment of the market they feel is underserved.
When it came time to cast All About Us, a semi-autobiographical flick they shot on a shoestring in L.A. and Mississippi last summer, they aimed for the heart of their female-audience sweet spot, casting up-and-coming heartthrob model-actor Boris Kodjoe in the lead.
Their films are “character-driven movies with primarily black cast members,” Michael Swanson says, “but the stories are universal, with crossover appeal.” All About You’s strong DVD sales show they’ve found their niche as filmmakers and entrepreneurs, he says.
Though the Swansons haven’t shot in their adopted hometown yet, they did most of the editing for All About Us in their South Charlotte home and hope to mount a larger production for their next film, Preacher Man, in the area this fall.
HOMETOWN HEROES
Bert Hesse, C.E.O. of Plaza Midwood-based production company Synthetic Fur, didn’t enter the movie business with his Oscar speech already written. The Florida transplant had built and run several businesses before landing in Charlotte in the late eighties. In 1996, he met local boy Tony Elwood, who’d written and directed two cult films, Killer and Road Kill. Together they started regional ad agency Indievision, and while Indievision got off the ground, Elwood kept bugging his partner about filmmaking as a legitimate money-making venture.
Before they started Synthetic Fur, Hesse says he didn’t know much about the film business. “I bought an eight-dollar ticket like anyone else,” he says. But Elwood eventually convinced him there was great potential in independent film, and in 2003 they opened Synthetic Fur exclusively to produce feature films. So far they’ve completed two pictures, Elwood’s own suspense-thriller, Cold Storage, and Night Feeders, a low-budget romp about ravenous extraterrestrials picking off a group of hunters.
Hesse is a relative neophyte in the film business, but in a market like Charlotte his business and finance background merges well with Elwood’s creative aspirations. “Tony can take a small budget and make a product that looks like we had five times that,” Hesse says.
That type of return catches investors’ eyes. “Synthetic Fur has raised more cash locally than anyone else,” he continues. And with a track record of making films, “on time, and at the highest quality that the budget allows,” (two things Hollywood often fails to do) investors can put their money in with confidence, Hesse says, “not just because they want to support the arts.” With relatively modest budgets, area investors can get in “without having to write ten- and twenty-million dollar checks.”
JET ELLER – HILLBILLY FILMMAKER
Jet Eller may be the most unassuming filmmaker around. Sporting a ball cap, suspenders, and a scraggly beard and sucking fifteen cups of coffee a day, he could be one of the hillbillies that populate his films. This self-taught, Pineville-bred artist has a knack for low-budget “horror-comedy,” as he calls it. Last year’s Night Feeders was his return to the scene after a fourteen-year hiatus from the business. He hadn’t made a film since the debilitating experience making Marley’s Revenge in 1989 sent him into a self-imposed exile. All along, he kept his day job managing a local optical lab, mass-producing eyeglasses.
Eller says it took old friend Tony Elwood’s encouragement to convince him he could make Night Feeders. While Eller wrote and directed the tale of extraterrestrials with a taste for humans, Elwood produced, ran the second camera, and created all the prosthetic makeup and special effects. While keeping up their day jobs, the two edited the movie on weekends for four months following the shoot. Hesse served as executive producer on the film, and with a successful direct-to-video deal, it’s now earning Synthetic Fur, and Eller, a little stream of income.
It’s not quite enough to keep Eller in coffee and DVDs without having to take crew jobs on other film work in the area (he finally quit the eyeglasses biz two years ago). He works a few days a week as a production assistant, a location scout, or a grip--whatever it takes to pay the bills. Then he spends the rest of his time cranking out more scripts and chewing up movies like they’re candy. Eller watches over 300 titles a year – continuing to learn, always trying to figure out how the filmmakers got a shot, or why they made a certain cut.
Eller is also making frequent trips to Atlanta to shoot interviews for a documentary on Piano Red, an African-American albino pianist. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones recorded Red’s tunes, but he died in obscurity. Eller hopes to launch another low-budget alien invasion flick in the area later this year. With another success in the can, the amiable filmmaker hopes he won’t suffer a fate similar to Piano Red’s.
BIG FISH
Among area cineastes, Rick Eldridge is hailed as the biggest fish in the pond. He opened The Film Foundry as a high-end post-production house for commercials and television in 2004 and has grown the company into a full-blown independent film studio. They have completed and distributed two features, Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, and the recently-released, The Ultimate Gift, which was shot and posted in Charlotte. Like the Swansons, Eldridge says The Film Foundry’s product leans toward “family, values-driven entertainment.” With distribution deals in place with Fox Faith, a division of 20th Century Fox Studios, the strategy appears to be working.
Though Eldridge insists that he’s doing everything he can to promote indigenous filmmaking, The Film Foundry’s larger budgets and ties to Hollywood studios often mandate that bigger-name talent fly in to direct and star in their films.
Eldridge, who serves as executive producer on all of The Foundry’s pictures, spends a fair amount of time brokering deals in L.A. Running the Sahara, one of their pictures currently being shot, is a co-production with LivePlanet, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s production company. It would have been impossible to re-create the Sahara desert in the Carolinas, Eldridge admits. Nonetheless, Sahara and The Perfect Game, a baseball film that was originally slated to shoot in Charlotte last year but ended up going to Mexico and California instead, will be posted entirely at The Film Foundry’s facilities in South End. “Our goal is to get as much as possible in the Carolinas,” he says.
GRANDMA MOSES
Will someone emerge who can find a compelling middle ground between vampires and family values? Eldridge plans to nurture local talent such as Joanne Hock, co-owner of Emulsion Arts, a NoDa-based production company whose bread and butter are commercials and corporate video. Hock has penned two scripts that have deep regional connections: Hope Stout is based on the life of a local girl whose bravery in the face of cancer inspired thousands, and Interwoven chronicles life in a southern mill town in the midst of massive layoffs.
Hock, who began as a creative ad director with Belk, maintains creative control and keeps budgets lean by producing, directing and running the camera. Eldridge appreciates that Hock’s heart is in the area. “I’m from here and I really love the area,” she says. “The crews are great, and more recently, the money’s coming here,” she continues, “Why go elsewhere when you can do it where you love?”
When compared to her comrades making grittier fare, Hock says the films she writes are more nostalgic. “Let’s look at where we are and where we can go,” she says. Hock aims to stay behind the camera as long as possible, shirking the notion that filmmaking is a young person’s game. “I’m going to be the Grandma Moses of film,” she predicts. With hordes of baby boomers looking for engaging entertainment in their sunset years, Hock may be onto something.
INCUBATORS
Bert Hesse and Tony Elwood plan to seed local talent with their upcoming Synthetic Fur Film Fund. The Fund springs from Hesse’s success finding deep-pocketed locals who are looking for a new investment. He describes the fund as a bank, “strictly an investor’s tool,” that will contract with Synthetic Fur ¬– the production company – to acquire, produce, and supply all services needed to make feature films. They’ll make more of Elwood’s films, but also plan to take on regional up-and-comers as protégés. With Fur’s Film Fund, Hesse says, “we have the opportunity to make an impact with the local film community. We want local filmmakers to come to us.” They plan to have the fund up and running by the end of the year.
Eldridge, too, keeps a guiding hand on young talent from the region. The Film Foundry shepherded North Carolina School of the Arts grad Mark Freiburger’s Dog Days of Summer through the process last year, and it screened at Cannes last month. With several films by NCSA grads screening at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, the Winston-Salem arts school seems to be the likeliest spawning ground for Charlotte’s version of Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino – a renegade who can really put the place on the map. Or better yet, an M. Night Shyamalan, who commands blockbusters while insisting that his films be shot and edited in his home state.
STICK AROUND KID
The trick will be for the kids to stick around after they graduate. Or maybe come home after cutting their teeth in the bigger markets. The Swansons spent a month in L.A. finishing All About Us in February, and by the end they were ready to get back to Charlotte.
Mark Young concurs. “I’m happiest when I can stay here,” he says. “I prefer not to travel – I’d rather sit in Caribou and write.” He says he’s penned thirty screenplays during his morning regimen at the local coffee shop.
Though his next project will take him back to Philly, Young believes North Carolina can attract even more film work with beefier and more streamlined incentives to compete with other states, like South Carolina, where filmmakers see less red tape and a bigger tax break.
Young, who edits in his South End loft, plans to bring several future projects back home for production. “I’ve got three projects I’ve written specifically for North Carolina. They have to be shot here,” he says. That is, unless Louisiana or New Mexico makes him a better offer.
~ Nate Fitzgerald
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