Numerous minds and hearts and hands, to say nothing of time, equipment, and business savvy, all merge to mold and shape a screenplay for the screen. And if the relationships of the creators are simpatico, who knows to what heights the muses will soar? Just ask writer-director John Stimpson who recently wrapped his first feature for Moody Street Pictures in Waltham, Mass., which increasingly is positioning itself to become an eager contender in the film marketplace. “I brought my project here,” Stimpson says of Moody Street. “This is my home. They’ve given me office space, room to work, and equipment to use, and support in the filmmaking process. Moody Street is a group of seasoned filmmakers who know what they’re doing.”

           Moody Street Pictures’ website boasts “end-to-end production services from concept development to final release print.” Founder John MacNeil, who also started Boston Film Factory and is co-owner of Boston Camera, used the latter’s all-under-one-roof operation as a model, according to Moody Street producer Mark Donadio “to create an atmosphere for people with different skills to foster creativity.” Collaboration is a byword at Moody Street Pictures, and synergy is what makes its creative sparks fly.

When Stimpson’s project, THE LEGEND OF LUCY KEYES, finally was greenlighted,  the company coalesced its production branches to launch it. Within two years, the project became a wrapped film ready for editing, which Stimpson is now deeply immersed.

           Over lunch recently at Watch City Brewing Company in Waltham, a block west from Moody Street Pictures on, well, Moody Street, John Stimpson between bites and a risible laugh talked about LUCY KEYES. He admits that even though the film’s primary shooting was completed at the end of November, he’s still making script changes and will insert off-camera dialogue plus add special effects.

            Stimpson arrived at this table speaking not as a novice, rather as a seasoned professional in the film business though not always behind the camera. Fact is, he was smitten with show biz while a student at Harvard University in the early eighties. He joined the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and got elected president of the historic theatrical troupe. His eyes seeming to laugh, Stimpson says, “I majored in Hasty Pudding Theatricals at Harvard, and it was a full-time job. It involved running a quarter-million dollar production which ran for 32 nights in Cambridge and then toured New York and Bermuda.”

            In 1983, Hasty Pudding granted its Man of the Year Award to Hollywood director Stephen Spielberg, and Stimpson spent some face-time with him. It was a dream come true. Ever since Stimpson had seen Spielberg’s JAWS (“I was the first one in the theater on opening day.”), the budding thespian had been enamored by the director’s style. “It blew me away at the time,” he says looking back. He studied Spielberg’s technique, analyzing film sequences to see how the director built suspense before the menacing jaws lifted out of the water. “When I was formulating my career goals, he was the guy I looked up to.”

 But the romance of the greasepaint and the rush of the limelight lured the young, photogenic Harvard grad to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. For the next five years he acted in commercials, pilots, and in guest spots. Once he came close to a break-out role. When the actor who played Coach on the TV series CHEERS died, Stimpson auditioned for the part. He got five call-backs but lost out to Woody Harrelson. The turndown became Stimpson’s epiphany. “I could have been out there fifteen years,” he says, “and I could be in the exact same spot and never move forward. I thought: my education doesn’t matter, how hard I work doesn’t matter, and my attitude doesn’t matter. It’s all about ‘the look,’ an intangible called talent.”

            Humbly, Stimpson returned to his roots back in Massachusetts and joined the local media world, directing and producing for film and episodic television and expanding his Rolodex of contacts in the business. He fell in love, got married, settled down, and started raising a family, which now numbers three sons. “I’m much happier and much better off for it.”

            Eventually, locus on the planet seeped into his destiny. Princeton, Mass., where he calls home, in the foothills of Mount Wachusett, harbored for generations a centuries-old mystery involving a child disappearance, suspicions of abduction or murder, and rumored beyond-the-grave contact, enough grist for myth and legend—and  ripe for a filmmaker’s sensibilities to connect the dots. Enter John Stimpson. Perhaps the creative theory about subject choice applied: the artist doesn’t choose the subject; the subject chooses the artist. However it was, he “kicked the idea around for four or five years” in his mind.

            Meantime, Stimpson concentrated on resume-building—writing, producing, directing, and editing projects in film, video, and television. In 2000, he co-wrote and co-directed with former Massachusetts Secretary of State Michael Conolly, his first feature, THE GENTLEMAN FROM BOSTON (later re-cut and re-titled BEACON HILL – see IMAGINE June 2001), a tale about power and corruption on Beacon Hill. Still, the 18^th century missing-child story kept nagging him.

            Stimpson input story details into the screenwriting software program Dramatica which helped him structure a three-act plot. In six months he had a first draft of THE LEGEND OF LUCY KEYES. “That’s when you can bring other people in and start working and thinking as a team. And that’s why Moody Street has been so great. It was good to have a team behind you from the development stage forward.”

Stimpson handed the script to long-time associate Mark Donadio. “He was instrumental in giving me the encouragement to say this is an interesting idea. Let’s work on this.” Laughing, he adds, “Seventy-five drafts later, we shot the thing.

            “I can’t speak more highly of the collaborative process. Writers come to me and show me a script and say this is my fourth draft, and it’s ready to shoot. I laugh and say, ‘No it’s not. It’s not even close.’

            “You’ve got to have people read to it. You’ve got to hone it and re-write, re-write, re-write. You have to get it to a point where every piece of the script is just magic. It has to be perfect. It must be tailored so that everything is wound perfectly into the story. If it’s not there for the story and for the characters in such a way that it drives the plot forward, it’s not worth keeping in.”

            When Stimpson reached that point, he approached West Coast producer J. Todd Harris who headed Davis Filmworks, a branch of Davis Entertainment. Harris, now head of production at Intellectual Properties Worldwide, liked the script, and he paired with Mark Donadio to produce the project. As the wheels of financing started to spin in  development, Stimpson launched a short film he had written with two purposes in mind, and Donadio produced it. First, the film, THE WINTER PEOPLE, a creepy, seductive 14-minute short, premises “Are spirits living in your summer home?” It would be a foretaste of Stimpson’s trying out the horror genre to attract investors for LUCY KEYES. “We were stacking the odds in our favor to get investors. Horror films are traditionally successful. Someone once said, ‘There are no bad horror movies. There are great ones and there are good ones.’ We can sell a scary movie.”

            Secondly, Stimpson wanted to test the digital waters with Panasonic’s Varicam

High Definition digital video camera to see if it could really render a big-screen, filmic look. An off-season, desolate Cape Cod was the testing ground, and after one long weekend of shooting, Stimpson and Moody Street had their answer.

            “The Panasonic Varicam is an outstanding alternative to shooting on film,” Stimpson waxes. “It is cost effective, gorgeous-looking, and interfaces with Apple’s editing system Final Cut Pro HD. And it transfers to 35 mm for projection beautifully.

“What’s more, I can work with full resolution HD images stored on a DVD on my laptop. You don’t have to think about off-line edit any more. When we’re done here, we’ll take the data file and send it to Technicolor for transfer to 35mm film. It’s an amazing process. It blows me away.”

Still, they had to face-off with the grinch of all filmmakers: raising money. Legend Films, the LLC behind LUCY KEYES, stepped up to the puck for the hard-sell campaign. Says Stimpson, “It’s the hardest part of all convincing people to put cold hard cash behind a movie project when it’s traditionally such a difficult way to recoup your money.”

Eventually, a small group of investors lined up with their checkbooks, and down to the wire filmmaking elements came into place including talent. J.Todd Harris’s credibility with Hollywood agents gave Legend Films a leg up. The script landed in Julie Delpy’s (BEFORE SUNSET, BEFORE SUNRISE, THREE COLORS: WHITE) hands, and she requested a meeting in Los Angeles. Delpy was attracted to the script because she thought it was a “well-told, suspenseful, creepy story,” according to Stimpson, “and she liked the fact it was based on a true story based on a legend, and that we would be shooting in the place where the ghost actually haunts and that the ghost’s actual headstone is in the film.” Justin Theroux (MULHOLLAND DRIVE, SIX FEET UNDER, CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE) added further star power to the casting. Mark Boon, Jr. ( LONESOME JIM, GET CARTER, MEMENTO) and Brooke Adams (DAYS OF HEAVEN, MADE-UP, AT LAST) were inked in as supporting players.

Back in his office, Stimpson elaborates when asked about creative vision and budget, a foundation block touted at Moody Street Pictures. “I’m just like a producer on this just as much as I’m a director. I’m the first one to say an idea is too expensive so we can’t do that. It drove our creative thinking from the beginning, knowing that we wanted to film an 85-page script in less than 20 days, and that we could make it under a million dollars. You might as well start with a concept and a script that’s accomplishable with parameters that you’ve got from the beginning. Sometimes I wish I could back off from that a little bit and go at things without feeling that dollar signs are attached to it.”

Still, Stimpson knows that a film must draw an audience in one way or another to be considered successful. And to earn an audience, filmmakers must create films that interest and engage them. “How can something move an audience romantically, horrifically, emotionally—touch those parts of people when viewing it? That’s what we’re doing as filmmakers.

“ More than anything, it’s about moving an audience, touching emotion, striking a cord, and taking people for an hour-and-a-half into a different world and engaging them completely, a world where they look up to the characters and admire them. They leave their lives for a couple of hours.

“We’re about entertaining. It’s not about what I want. It’s about what the audience wants. Ultimately, the audience is the judge. If you make a boring movie that has all your great ideas in it and it’s not engaging, who’s going to see it?”

John Stimpson and Moody Street Pictures together appear to be on a cusp with THE LEGEND OF LUCY KEYES. Says Donadio, “He’s at the initial stages of defining Moody Street as an independent film company. With him, we are creating an entrée into the marketplace. When this picture is successful, we will not only be launching his career, but we will also be launching Moody Street as a premier company in New England, and hopefully on some level, on the national stage to get recognition as a company that is successful in making quality films.”

 

 

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Writer-photographer Robert Pushkar is a regular contributor to IMAGINE. Currently, he is marketing his romantic comedy screenplay. He can be reached at rgp@robertpushkar.com