Major great news – I have been offered my first on-camera speaking role in a feature film. Why the caveats? Well, I had a role many years ago in this forgotten little movie made during my days as a development executive. During some reshoots I was pressed into service to play an employee at a bus depot, silently loading bags into a bus cargo hold. “This is great,” I thought, “this is guaranteed to end up in the movie, because if they don’t see how this bag got from point A to point B, the movie will make no sense!”
My scene got cut. But that’s just one of many, many stories about that movie.
Last year I had a role in an independent feature I’ve mentioned here before – Bread and Butter, but it was a voice-only role, and for all I know still might end up cut or replaced. So when it comes to features, I’m not technically totally new to this, but it sure feels like a major first, in that I’ll have a real role with long dialogue scenes and a character name and stuff.
The movie is called “The Story of Ben”, and it’s a romantic comedy to be written/directed by a gentleman named Kevin Resnick. I call him a gentleman because he specifically warned me that my big shooting day might be Mother’s Day and he wanted to make sure I was okay with that. I told him my guess was that my mother would be supportive.
My role is Greenley, the main character’s best friend/co-worker who is perpetually stoned and has terrible advice about women. It won’t be a massive studio-level production, it is an MFA thesis film produced through the New York Film Academy, so very low-budget and distribution isn’t likely – although you have to imagine they will be motivated to get it out there on the festival circuit. Kevin and his producer Rebecca Norris took a short to Cannes last year.
Honestly, I wont even be paid beyond gas money and the meals on-set. And unpaid work is a longtime hobbyhorse of mine, but one of the things most likely to make me okay with it is to have the opportunity be a real professional stepping stone, the chance to do something I haven’t done before. This very easily qualifies.
The film shoots in May and my guess is that they’ll spend most of the rest of 2014 finishing and tweaking. So who knows when it will emerge, or how it will look when it does. But this is major – updating my resume across all the different platforms I use can be tedious, but I’ll be glad to do it this time.