Story by Chris Graham 

SCENE ONE: Am I in the right place?

We’re on location - University Farm Road, Stuarts Draft.

I was supposed to meet on location with one of the producers of the movie “Disconnected,” a home-for-the-holidays comedy being made by the Charlottesville-based Cavalier Films.

And I thought I had the right place - but then, who can be sure of these kinds of things?

I arrived at what I had thought was to be my destination a little early, in part to account for whatever might have been lost in translation on the phone from the day before - and the first thing I noticed upon getting out of my car was the noise of chickens, apparently aroused from their slumber by what sounded like a call of a member of the crew for everybody to be quiet.

The chickens were not heeding the apparent warning - and indeed seemed to be working in sync with a nearby donkey who started braying as if the director had given him his cue.

The house itself where the filming was ostensibly being done was not at all anything special - just your typical 19th-century farmhouse, a little worse for the wear, from all outward appearances.

As I waited for the producer to guide me through the day on the set, I had this strange, almost eerie sense that I was probably in the wrong place.

Well, except for the cars - I counted 15 cars parked around the farmhouse - and the fleet of Budget rental trucks parked both next to the house and down the hill near a cluster of barns.

A man walking out of one of the barns could give me my answer.

He obviously worked there, I could glean in an instant.

I half-expected him to ask me if I was there for a job on the farm - mucking the barn, perhaps, or baling hay.

“Enjoying the sun?” he inquired of me, and we began to talk about the weather, which on this day had been interesting, to say the least, what with the early-morning thunderstorm and the continuing heavy, stiff winds - the kind of weather that makes one think of the words tropical storm more than autumn in the Shenandoah Valley.

The smalltalk over, he made his way up toward the house, then came back out a few minutes later.

Smiling, he threw a playful question in my direction.

“They just asked me to come out here and see if you could stand in for one of the stars.”

He paused, and opened a smile as wide as the sky above.

“You ready for your closeup?”

Welcome to Virginia, which is quickly becoming one of the more active moviemaking centers on the East Coast.

SCENE TWO: Gotta start somewhere

We’re back at the office.

The Commonwealth’s moviemaking history dates back at least to the shooting of the opening scenes of the 1955 feature film “Giant” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in Charlottesville.

The list of movies made in the Old Dominion since then includes the seminal 1987 Patrick Swayze romance flick “Dirty Dancing,” the quirky 1991 Bill Murray comedy “What About Bob?,” the Civil War period pieces “Sommersby,” “Gods and Generals” and “Cold Mountain,” and the 21st-century action-adventure “Mission: Impossible III.”

During that interregnum between “Giant” and “Dirty Dancing,” the movie industry went through a important bit of evolution - fueled in large part by advances in filmmaking technology - that took producers and directors from their coastal hideaways in Los Angeles and New York to the heart of Middle America in search of the perfect backdrop.

Virginia was among the first states to try to position itself to take advantage of this new trend - establishing the Virginia Film Office in 1980 to serve as a sort of economic-development entity that would actively work to recruit movie projects to the state.

“The state government has always been supportive of the process of attracting and recruiting film production to the state. There’s always been a great government commitment to the idea of this industry being here,” said Mary Nelson, who joined the staff at the Virginia Film Office in 1994 as a locations manager before assuming her current duties as communications manager in 1997.

“The film office itself has been aggressively going after business since it was founded in 1980,” Nelson said. “One thing that helps us is that we have a staff now that is very stable. Most of us have been here 10 or 12 or 15 years or longer - so we’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

Over the past quarter-century, Virginia and the Virginia Film Office have developed a solid reputation among film-industry insiders.

“People know Virginia as being a good place to shoot - with wonderful locations, very talented crews, supportive state and local government, kind of a can-do attitude among the various people. Generally speaking, whatever they need, we try to give it to them,” Nelson said.

SCENE THREE: Getting reconnected

We’re back on location - Stuarts Draft.

The Virginia Film Office worked with Cavalier Films to find locations in the state for the filming of “Disconnected” - though ultimately the decision to stay close to home was not about what the state could do for Cavalier Films as much as what the film company could do for its financial backers

“We’re unique in that we have a company that is made up of a lot of partners who love film - and they get involved with our company because they want to be able to see the film happen and participate,” said Barry Sisson, the president of Cavalier Films and the executive producer of “Disconnected,” the company’s first feature production.

“Many of them participate in a lot of different ways. In fact, some of the scenes in this film were written by some of our partners - not just the writers. People get very involved in bringing our films to life,” Sisson said.

“Disconnected” stars Shawn Hatosy (”Inventing the Abbots,” “The Faculty”) and D.J. Qualls (”Road Trip,” “The New Guy”) in what Sisson calls “a poignant family comedy.”

The storyline follows the Kitner family through a four-day Thanksgiving-holiday weekend fraught with emotion.

“It’s the story of a family that goes through sort of the natural cycle of the kids growing up and pushing away from their parents and starting their own lives - and having some conflicts with their parents, sort of a natural part of evolution, you know? That’s how families separate,” Sisson said.

“This story occurs when the kids are now in their mid-20s. They’ve got their own lives. The parents have moved on - they’ve actually replaced the children with pets. But now their kids come home for the Thanksgiving weekend - and they learn to be adult friends, rather than parents and children,” Sisson said.

SCENE FOUR: The fixer

City Hall, downtown Staunton.

Once Cavalier made the call to shoot in Virginia, the next step was deciding exactly where in Virginia it would land. That they ended up doing the bulk of their work in Staunton and Augusta County came about very much by chance.

“Staunton was not even on their radar screen - until they had looked at another community in Virginia, and someone had suggested that they take a look at Staunton,” said Sergei Troubetzkoy, the director of the tourism department in Staunton city government whose list of job duties includes meeting regularly with film producers and location scouts looking for a place to shoot their movies.

Troubetzkoy came to Staunton in 1989 after working in a similar capacity in Petersburg in Central Virginia. He has long since honed his approach to wooing potential movie clients to the Queen City.

“First of all, I try to find out something about the film,” Troubetzkoy said. “For example, years ago, I got a telephone call from someone with the Virginia Film Office who was driving around different parts of the state with film crews in the car, and they were looking for a certain look, and he explained to me what they were looking for. And he said, It sounds like you might have that in Staunton. And I said, Well, actually, it sounds like the neighborhood that you would be interested in is Sears Hill. Well, the movie was ‘Hearts in Atlantis,’ and they filmed at exactly the site that I had suggested.

“I’ve worked enough with film-production crews over the years that I usually have a pretty good feel for what they are looking for. And it’s not always easy,” Troubetzkoy said. “There were sites with ‘Disconnected’ that one would think would be easy, but ended up being very hard to find. Because it’s not just finding a site that looks really good, but finding a property that belongs to someone who would be easy to work with and who would allow them to film at the site. Because there are movies that have been interested in filming in Staunton that have not come here simply because the property owners would not allow them to film on the site.”

Troubetzkoy does not have to limit his searches to properties inside the Staunton city limits. For “Disconnected,” for example, he helped Cavalier Films line up locations like the Rockingham County Fairgrounds south of Harrisonburg and sites in Broadway in Northern Rockingham County and Stuarts Draft in south of Staunton in neighboring Augusta County.

“Any location that they’re looking for, I’m going to try my best to find that location in Staunton. But there are many times when I simply can’t find that location in Staunton,” Troubetzkoy said. “We actually looked at locations for scenes that they ultimately ended up filming at the Rockingham County Fairgrounds - we looked for a couple of locations for those scenes in Staunton, but they just did not work. We looked for locations that they ended up filming in Broadway. They could not find what they were looking for in Staunton or even in Augusta County.

“Some people would say, Well, how is that benefiting Staunton? The fact remains that the crew spent all their overnights in Staunton. Even when the filming was being done in Broadway, they were spending the night in Staunton, they had meals in Staunton, they bought a lot of their supplies here for their sets and so forth. So Staunton is still benefiting. It’s not benefiting quite as much as if it were filmed right in the city - but you have to keep in mind that a lot of films are not going to find every single site that they’re going to want inside the city limits in Staunton,” Troubetzkoy said.

SCENE FIVE: TCB (Taking Care of Business)

A montage of settings, including …When you think of a movie being made, you think of the director, you think of the actors, you think of the cameraman.

You don’t think of the Tim Esteps of the film world.

“I’m taking care of all the locations and all the logistics of the film,” said Estep, who devoted three years to the making of “Disconnected,” from finding the script on a Web site for unagented screenwriters to developing the storyline with a writer and coproducer to making sure everything went smoothly during the 22 days of shooting in the Shenandoah Valley.

“It’s kind of like being the manager of the office - it’s like creating the business environment for the film. It’s a creative thing as well - as far as when you’re in the development stage - but once you get on set, the producer is more focused on taking care of logistics. That’s what I’m doing right now,” Estep said.

Tyler Davidson, a University of Virginia graduate who teamed up with a former fraternity brother, Derek Sieg, on the 2005 feature film “Swedish Auto,” was in charge of arranging the location logistics in Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

Sieg, a Charlottesville native, wrote the film, which stars Lukas Haas (”Mars Attacks!,” “The Ryan White Story”) and January Jones (”American Wedding”) while living in L.A. - but he intended all along for the film to be set in his hometown.

“From the very beginning, I knew that was where it was going to be shot - or where I wanted it to be shot,” said Sieg, who also directed “Swedish Auto.” “So I was able to write in most of the locations - I was in L.A., but I was kind of fantasizing about home.”

What that meant for Davidson, the producer of “Swedish Auto,” was that he had to do something in the way of mind-reading to make sure that the locations would bring Sieg’s visions to reality.

“Derek likes to create a very authentic, natural world in his films - and certainly in ‘Swedish Auto.’ The job of the art department was not to necessarily make over the sets, but to maintain and highlight the authentic elements of the sets,” Davidson said.

SCENE SIX: A brave new world

Cue up scene from “Giant.”

Location shooting is not at all the extravagance that it was when Taylor and Hudson came to Virginia to shoot scenes for “Giant.”

“We make films for under a million dollars. You just can’t build soundstages and build sets on that kind of a budget,” said Barry Sisson, the Cavalier Films president and “Disconnected” producer.

“I think that it all has to do with the nature of the project - the budget and the story. In some cases, shooting on a sound stage or a set can give you more control of the technical elements and can reduce costs,” Davidson said.

“But when you’re doing a film like we did, which is a relatively low-budget film, you’re able to sort of make things work on location and fabricate sets and find sets that are naturally existing that you couldn’t do for nearly that price if you had to create them yourself. So in our case, it was less expensive to shoot on location,” Davidson said.

SCENE SEVEN: How the other half lives

We’re in downtown Waynesboro for the filming of a scene of “Evan Almighty.”

“We’re rolling!” a member of the production crew shouted to the heavens.

People gathered on the sidewalks of downtown Waynesboro buzzed at the beck and call.

Something was about to go on that was magical.

They didn’t know what exactly - but it was going to be something, and it was going to be good.

Into their view came a police car with lights flashing. Behind it was a flatbed truck that appeared to be towing a Humvee.

The police car turned right from Main Street to Wayne Avenue, and the flatbed towing the Hummer followed behind.

And … that was it.

“Cut!”

Yes, this is how they make movies, ladies and germs.

“I actually got a kick out of seeing Steve Carell driving by,” said Len Poulin, the owner of a downtown business, LBP Enterprises, who pulled himself away from work long enough to take in some of the filming work being done last year on the big-budget film “Evan Almighty,” starring Carell and Academy Award-winner Morgan Freeman.

“I’d never seen anything like this before. Just looking at what they’ve done in front of my building, or even the little coffee shop across the street, it’s really neat to see it in action,” Poulin said.

More than a few people among the several hundred who turned out to see the movie being made firsthand could be heard grumbling about the relative lack of action on the location set. The grumbling did seem to subside when Carell and Freeman rode by in their Humvee - Carell smiling after hearing the “Cut!,” Freeman occasionally waving to the assembled masses.

“What you realize watching it is that when they’re doing the scene like they’re doing today with him just driving up the road, there’s some dialogue in the car. He might not say it with the right expression, he might not say it with the right tone. They may have to do that take five, six, seven, eight, nine times to get it right. They could get it on the first take, it might take nine or 10 takes,” Waynesboro police chief Doug Davis said.

SCENE EIGHT: Hurry up and wait

Still in downtown Waynesboro.

Waynesboro city manager Doug Walker got an up-close and personal view of how things were being done on that end. Walker was cast as an extra in one of the scenes shot in the River City - though he didn’t have to tax his skills as a thespian gained from years of work in community theater all that much.

“I have a certain action that when the car passes me, I come out from one of the buildings, and I turn right and walk down the street,” Walker said.

“The direction that I’ve been given is pretty straightforward. I think what they’re looking for is sort of consistency and uniformity - so that they know that in all of these takes the same thing is going to happen at the same time,” Walker said. “Many of the people around me are professional actors - and are coming here from Richmond, Ashland, Williamsburg. They’re here as paid extras. Obviously, I’m just fitting in - so the best that I could do is to make sure that every small little bit that I do, I do it the same way.”

Like those who were gathered on the streets to see what was going on, Walker was cognizant of the snail’s pace of life on a working movie set.

“What’s interesting is there’s a lot of the hurry up and wait, which I guess is part of what happens when you do this sort of thing,” Walker said.

Walker knows well the hurry-up and wait approach that is a fact of life in the moviemaking business even before the first bit of film is shot.

“The advance work that they do has been very impressive,” Walker said. “They’re very smart people. They know what they’re doing. They know what they need. They know how it’s all going to play out. The communication from them is from a very high level. There’s not a lot of guesswork involved - except for the weather and the schedule.

“They’re focused on what they’re trying to do here - the environment of the scene that they’re trying to create. That was very impressive - how much they knew about the town and the street and what they were looking for before they even got here. From then, the logistics are impressive enough - based on the magnitude of what they’re doing here, and how quickly it all happens. It’s almost like that,” Walker said.

SCENE NINE: Show me the money

Still in downtown Waynesboro.

It was Walker’s goal to have shooting go so well that Waynesboro will be considered for future movie projects.

From all accounts, that was the case.

“If it’s good for the city and good for the movie, we hope that this will then put us in a good light with somebody else who wants to have a downtown street scene with a city that is pro-business, pro-movie,” Walker said.

The plus to Waynesboro and other localities that play host to films is that a film project typically leaves 25 to 35 percent of its budget behind in a local economy. according to the Virginia Film Office’s Mary Nelson.

And in some cases, for example, the “Evan Almighty” project, it can also leave behind new awnings.

“We’re thrilled with our awning. It looks nice and beautiful. It looks nice and cool in front of the store,” said Stacey Strawn Evans, whose downtown Waynesboro-based Blue Moon Galleries has a new look thanks to “Evan Almighty.”

The film’s production staff approached Evans before filming in Waynesboro last year about its desire to put a new awning in front of the store as part of its preparations for shooting on the movie.

“We weren’t consulted about what it looks like or the pattern - and frankly, we didn’t care. We’re so grateful - and it was so nice to have it there,” Evans said.

The new awnings at Blue Moon Galleries and other downtown businesses are the most visible signs that “Evan Almighty” was in town. Less visible - but no less important - was the boost to business receipts.

“We’re assuming it’s going to have an immediate impact on the local economy - just in terms of having this many people in town, particularly in downtown, who are going to be spending money,” Walker said.

“There’s a broader impact as well to the city as a whole in terms of having the cast and crew in the region - because we know that we’re capturing some of that residual business in the local economy,” Walker said.

SCENE TEN: A little help here

Back at the office.

Indeed, according to a 2005 report prepared by the Center for Public Policy at the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Virginia film industry in 2004 had an overall impact on the state economy of $510 million.

Not bad for an industry that gets only a sliver of the attention that the state gives to economic development.

“The state is not very competitive in bringing filmmakers in,” “Disconnected” producer Barry Sisson said. “Way more films are filmed in other locations where the states are more supportive. Don’t get me wrong - the state has supported us tremendously in getting our films off the ground and making it possible for us to film in Virginia. But not written into law in Virginia are the subsidies and incentives that many other states have.”

“We are way behind our competitive states. Virginia and Alabama are the only two states in the Eastern Seaboard - from Massachusetts all the way through Louisiana - that don’t have a significant incentive program,” Mary Nelson said. “Last year, the General Assembly did appropriate a small amount of money - but it is nowhere near what our competitors have. So we’re falling further and further behind in our ability to be competitive.”

Over the past six years, 20 states have put into place incentive programs aimed at attracting movie projects to their environs. The results have been almost overwhelmingly positive - with Illinois seeing its film production grow from $25 million to $75 million from 2003 to 2004 after an incentive measure passed the state legislature there; and New Mexico seeing an increase from $8 million to $200 million from 2004 to 2006 after a series of incentives were adopted by lawmakers in that state.

“What people need to understand about incentives is that they are an investment in Virginia,” Nelson said. “For every dollar that is invested in Virginia film production, there’s a return on that investment of $14 back - that comes back in salaries, in taxes to state and the localities, it comes back to jobs. We know that this is a very substantial industry within the state, and we’re at risk of really losing it. In fact, we really are losing our competitive advantage, because we’re not able to keep up with the rest of the country in incentives.

“It’s a very challenging situation.”

SCENE ELEVEN: We don’t need to be in Hollywood anymore

Another montage, this time featuring …

The Virginia film industry grew when Hollywood realized that it could shoot on location as cheaply or even cheaper than it could on a soundstage.

Its next spurt is coming as independent filmmakers realize that the same cost efficiencies that the studios can bring to bear to a location shoot can help them bypass the studio system entirely.

“It’s increasingly becoming decentralized - and that’s because of the development of digital cameras and affordable desktop editing systems, which make it so that now you don’t have to go to Hollywood or New York or somewhere important to be an exceptional filmmaker. We’re witnessing in the state this growth of these amazing new independent filmmakers who are not connected to Hollywood who are creating some wonderful product,” the Virginia Film Office’s Mary Nelson said.

“I’m going to call it the digital revolution. I don’t know if that’s the actual term for it,” “Disconnected” associate producer Tim Estep said. “What we’re seeing is people nowadays can make movies for a lot less than it used to cost to make movies. This movie is probably budgeted for around a million dollars - but realistically you can probably make an independent movie now for $10,000. Digitally, you can do it - if you want film, you’re going to need more.

“With DVD special features talking about how filmmaking is done, I think it’s just spurred a lot of interest - and people saying, Hey, I think we can do this,” Estep said. “There’s a lot more people trying to do it - and there’s a lot more people trying to do it outside of L.A. There are a lot of areas that are seeing this. I have a friend in Montana, and Montana is exploding, too, with a lot of young filmmakers who live in Montana and are making movies in Montana. St. Louis is another place where stuff is starting to happen. Moviemaker magazine had an article on all the new hotspots for independent filmmaking - and Charlottesville, Va., was on the list.”

Allan Moye isn’t a filmmaker - not yet, anyway. Moye, a screenwriting professor at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, is back at the game of pitching scripts to agents and producers that he had given up on a decade ago to concentrate on the job that pays the bills.

Moye is also toying around with the idea of putting another story to paper that he will then shoot himself.

“I’ve never shot a feature before. I’ve only shot short films and documentary-like things. What I’m working on now is writing a script that I will be able to with a small crew and high-quality digital film shoot myself,” said Moye, who won the 2006 Virginia Governor’s Award for his screenplay “Signs Following,” which tells the story of a celebrated city photographer who revisits his Appalachian hometown to document a community of snake-handling Christians led by his estranged father.

“People say you should go out to L.A. to beat on doors constantly - and I’ve found that it would be advantageous probably to live in L.A. But now with the Internet and things like that, it’s not absolutely necessary,” said Moye, who has two of his scripts optioned - and was thisclose to seeing his post-apocalyptic story “The Blue Man” on the big screen in the mid-1990s.

SCENE 12: Roots

On the Crooked Road.

Paul Wagner hasn’t had any trouble getting his projects to the big screen - not since the Charlottesville-based filmmaker won an Academy Award in 1984 for his documentary “The Stone Carvers.”

Wagner put his roots down in Virginia knowing, like Moye, that it might make his goals for continued success in the business that much more difficult to reach.

“We’re here more for cultural reasons, I would say. We’re here because of the lifestyle of Central Virginia. Because it’s beautiful. These are sort of obvious things, but they’re important reasons why we have located here to do our work here,” Wagner said.

“One of the things that has happened in filmmaking, as in other areas, is that for some types of occupations, you can be anywhere,” Wagner said. “We tend to go to various locations to shoot our films - that could be Tibet, it could be inner-city Washington, to cite a couple of different examples of films that we’ve shot in the last few years.

“But then most of the work of developing the project, raising the money, doing the editing and postproduction, all the administrative work and the research and planning, all that could be done sort of anywhere. And so we’ve chosen to live in a place that is culturally rich, that is a great place for a family, and a place that stimulates our imagination and our thinking as filmmakers. So we like it not because there’s a lot of film business or a big client base here, but because it’s enriching for us intellectually and emotionally and even spiritually, you could say.

“We view ourselves as trying to be original in our filmmaking approach - and one of the ways that you make sure that you’re original is, not by isolating yourself, but by pulling yourself out of the commercial mainstream, by putting yourself in a position where you’re not just doing the next obvious hot subject to come down the pike, but instead trying to take a more thoughtful approach, to be more broadly curious about life in America,” Wagner said.

Wagner’s current project has him working on a documentary about the Crooked Road, an area in Southwest Virginia that is regarded as the birthplace of country music.

“I can guarantee you, there aren’t a lot of people in New York or Hollywood thinking about that as a subject for a film. But it’s a subject that I know is important and has value - and I also know that it has beauty, and that it addresses ideas and issues and celebrates people who deserve to be celebrated, and it will enhance the understanding of those issues by the people who see it, whether they’re in Hollywood or in Appalachia,” Wagner said.

“I feel it’s important, even though it’s not about Paris Hilton,” Wagner said.

CLOSING CREDITS

Fade to black.

Written, Produced and Directed by … Chris Graham

Special Thanks To …

Mary Nelson at the Virginia Film Office

Barry Sisson and Tim Estep at Cavalier Films

Sergei Troubetzkoy

Tyler Davidson and Derek Sieg

Len Poulin, Stacey Strawn Evans and Doug Walker

Allan Moye

Paul Wagner

Staunton, Augusta County, Harrisonburg, Rockingham County, Charlottesville, Albemarle County.

You guessed it - we’re scouting film locations.

Filed under: 8-January 2007 Issue