Newtown: The New Tinsel Town?

By Nancy K. Crevier

After several rewrites this spring, the script by young Dom D’Andrea needed only final tweaking. Actors, crew members, and director Doug MacHugh of Newtown gathered in the cul-de-sac at Hawthorne Hill Road in Newtown on the afternoon of July 31 to begin two  days of filming the movie written by the 14-year old as an assignment at the Education Center of the Arts (ECA) in New Haven.

Mr MacHugh, a longtime instructor of acting and film acting at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester, N.Y. and screenwriting and playwrighting at the ECA magnet school, has read a lot of scripts in his life. But the assignment handed in by Dom D’Andrea this past year so impressed him with its concept and language that he decided to film the script.

“The language was great,” said Mr MacHugh. “And there’s this little twist to the story, sort of like you see in the movie A Wonderful Life. It’s a little Twilight Zoney,” he said. The script carries undertones of life’s busyness and how parents sometimes get overwhelmed by the number of tasks to do each day, falling behind no matter how hard they try, said Mr Mac Hugh.

Dom’s script, presently untitled, used the concept of “What if a father was late picking up a child?” for the assignment. The story follows the father’s point of view as he sits on the bench where the bus has dropped the now missing child off, and progresses over a ten-year period as the delayed dad imagines how different things could have been had he arrived on time.

“I wanted to do a conversation piece between two people, and I like small casts,” said Dom on Friday morning as he watched the actors get into place and observed the director’s instructions. “I thought when I wrote the script that maybe I’d film it for fun this summer with my friends. I never thought it would be this big,” said Dom.

For as long as he can recall, Dom has loved movies, cinematography, and writing and telling stories.

“Before he could even really write out letters of the alphabet, Dom would scribble on paper and then tell us the stories he had ‘written,’” said his mother, Maryellen D’Andrea, “and he has always loved books. He got his first camcorder when he was only seven years old. The other kids wanted video games. Dom just wanted a video camera,” she recalled.

Being enrolled at ECA has opened up the opportunity to do screenwriting, said the young script writer, who still sports braces across his smile, and working with Mr MacHugh has been a great learning experience.

The biggest change to his script was Mr MacHugh’s idea of a dream character. “Before, that person in my script was really just a random time traveler,” said Dom. “By making him the future son and a time traveler, it gave the piece a whole new meaning and opened up the character. This really is just what I imagined,” added Dom, watching as costumer Joanne Keane added finishing touches to the main character’s makeup.

“The film is very fanciful, and I have wanted to do some filming here in town,” said Mr MacHugh, who lives in Newtown and who was the director last spring for the Mockingbird production sponsored by C.H. Booth Library at Newtown Meeting House.

“We’ve got great locations here in Newtown. I’d like to create something ongoing in Newtown, so far as filmmaking or producing plays,” he added. Dom’s script is compact, but offered Mr MacHugh the chance to involve a few Newtown residents. The character of the young boy is played by nine-year-old Michael Schlesinger of Newtown, a local fire department provided “rain,” and Phyllis Paige drove Newtown school bus No. 1 that provided the vehicle denoting passage of time.

 Once the film is rough edited, Newtown songwriter Tracy James will add her talents, creating the lyrics and music for the short film.

“I’ve got some ideas, and I’ve read the script, but I really like to have the visual to really start getting the lyrics and music together. It helps to hear the dialogue and see the film,” said Ms James.

For Michael Schlesinger, said parents Brenda and Joe Schlesinger, the short film was their son’s first foray into acting.

“He’s an active little kid, plays baseball for the town, is on the youth wrestling team, he’s all over town,” said his dad, “and when they saw him, they thought he would be perfect for the part.”

It was Michael’s fair skin, dark eyes, and longer hair style that made him ideal for the part, said Brenda Schlesinger, who said her son was out with a friend when the director saw him and thought he looked enough like the older lead character to play the younger role.

“Michael loved it,” said Ms Schlesinger. “He found the directing easy to follow and I think he will definitely want to do some more acting. He had a great time.”

Other roles are played by Malcolm Pepin, a student at Sarah Lawrence College, in the lead role, with producer Wayne Stills, an associate of Mr MacHugh’s, playing the part of the delayed dad. Outside of a few other featured extras and Mr MacHugh’s springer spaniel, Finnegan, that is the extent of the cast, said Mr MacHugh.

Mr Stills’ production company, It’s All About Miracles (IAAM), owned jointly with his wife, Lisa Weisglass, is based out of New York City. Mainly a theater actor and a producer of stage plays, Mr Stills has wanted to get more involved in filmmaking. When Mr MacHugh showed him the script Dom had written, he knew that it met his criteria of being a “quick-hitting little drama that makes you feel better,” said Mr Stills. “IAAM tries to tap into that market that is positive, optimistic, and uplifting — not in a sappy way. Uplifting enough that you don’t want to slit your wrists when you walk out of the theater,” he said. And even though the film medium has more positive works than is seen in theater, Mr Stills continues to feel that there could be even more optimistic entertainment.

From his “baptism” into the film when Zak Ouellette and Patrick Keough of Botsford Fire Rescue Company provided “rain” for the movie, to the moment when his character and son literally and figuratively walked off into the sunset, the production was a blast, said Mr Stills. “It was just a lot of fun to be involved,” he said.

Joanne Keane, also of Newtown, shares Mr MacHugh’s vision of Newtown as a destination for small filmmakers. Ms Keane, who does commercial work for magazine advertising and television in the tri-state area, handled the makeup, costumes, and props for the film. She met Mr MacHugh through the Mockingbird event in 2007, and is excited to be working with him again on what she sees as the first of what could be many art events in town.

The costuming for Dom’s film was simple, said Ms Keane, since the story takes place over a span of time covering 1998 to the present day.

“It’s the makeup that will be most significant here,” she said. “We’ll be distressing the actor’s face with makeup to reflect the passage of time, for instance, but the clothing is pretty ordinary, outside of the ‘dreamscape’ sequence,” said Ms Keane. In that sequence, when the main character is visited by his older self, she went all out to create a vision of what a boy would wear if left to his own devices.

The film is being shot on a shoestring budget, said Mr MacHugh, with the crew made up mainly of present and former aspiring filmmakers from Sarah Lawrence College.

“It’s a cool opportunity for them, so they are just working for a stipend,” he said. The point of the film is not to make money, anyway, added Mr MacHugh, but rather to do something positive, purely for the sake of fun.

The film will be edited down to a final eight-minute length and hopefully, said the director, they will enter it in the next Connecticut Film Festival.

“This is just great,” Mr MacHugh said, anticipating the final result. “I mean, here’s a kid that in ten years could be the next Steven Spielberg.”