Ex-Islander produces winning film
Published 6:43 pm Monday, November 24, 2008
By Diane de la Paz
In Chelsea Gilmore’s love story, a Mercer Island beginning moves toward a Hollywood ending.
The best part is that it’s a true tale. Stranger than fiction, really.
Gilmore, who grew up on the Island, is bringing her husband, Andrew Wagner, home this weekend. Together they will show their feature film, “The Talent Given Us,” at the Varsity Theater in Seattle’s University District, and answer audience questions after each evening screening Friday through Sunday.
The picture’s Pacific Northwest premiere is a stop on a trip Gilmore could hardly have invented, even though she’s a television and film script writer.
After graduating from Mercer Island High in 1990, Gilmore attended the University of California at Davis for a bachelor’s in art history and film, to New York University to earn a master’s in media studies, and finally to Los Angeles to break into screenwriting.
Soon after that, she met Andrew Wagner at a barbecue.
“He’s a deep thinker, smart, very funny. We literally hit it off right away,” Gilmore remembered.
She didn’t know, of course, that one night in 2003 he’d wake her from a sound sleep to suggest spending $30,000 — the sum they’d earmarked for a down payment on a house — on a movie about his parents. Starring his parents.
Both knew it was a crazy idea. But then, the couple had been immersed in the just-as-nuts Los Angeles housing market. Their $30,000 wasn’t going to get them into anything livable.
At the same time, Wagner was suffering from career derailment. At age 40, he was teaching high school instead of using his advanced education and talent in filmmaking.
“Maybe,” he told Gilmore, he could use a digital video camera to produce a picture that “would at least lead to jobs and get my career on track.”
She gave him the green light.
“I completely believed in him as an artist,” said Gilmore, now 33. “Making a film with $30,000 is a leap of faith. But if anyone could pull it off, Andrew could.”
So, later in 2003, Wagner and the only other crewmember, sound man Tommy Hines, made “Talent” and submitted it to film festivals around the country. At CineVegas 2004 in Las Vegas, the picture won the Grand Jury Prize, and since the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, it drew glowing reviews from the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and others.
The movie, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, is “one of the most original, daring, intriguing, and honest films of the year.”
That’s no wonder. “Talent” is the product of a 37-day road trip across the country with Wagner’s y Diane de la Paz
Special to the Reporter
In Chelsea Gilmore’s love story, a Mercer Island beginning moves toward a Hollywood ending.
The best part is that it’s a true tale. Stranger than fiction, really.
Gilmore, who grew up on the Island, is bringing her husband, Andrew Wagner, home this weekend. Together they will show their feature film, “The Talent Given Us,” at the Varsity Theater in Seattle’s University District, and answer audience questions after each evening screening Friday through Sunday.
The picture’s Pacific Northwest premiere is a stop on a trip Gilmore could hardly have invented, even though she’s a television and film script writer.
After graduating from Mercer Island High in 1990, Gilmore attended the University of California at Davis for a bachelor’s in art history and film, to New York University to earn a master’s in media studies, and finally to Los Angeles to break into screenwriting.
Soon after that, she met Andrew Wagner at a barbecue.
“He’s a deep thinker, smart, very funny. We literally hit it off right away,” Gilmore remembered.
She didn’t know, of course, that one night in 2003 he’d wake her from a sound sleep to suggest spending $30,000 — the sum they’d earmarked for a down payment on a house — on a movie about his parents. Starring his parents.
Both knew it was a crazy idea. But then, the couple had been immersed in the just-as-nuts Los Angeles housing market. Their $30,000 wasn’t going to get them into anything livable.
At the same time, Wagner was suffering from career derailment. At age 40, he was teaching high school instead of using his advanced education and talent in filmmaking.
“Maybe,” he told Gilmore, he could use a digital video camera to produce a picture that “would at least lead to jobs and get my career on track.”
She gave him the green light.
“I completely believed in him as an artist,” said Gilmore, now 33. “Making a film with $30,000 is a leap of faith. But if anyone could pull it off, Andrew could.”
So, later in 2003, Wagner and the only other crewmember, sound man Tommy Hines, made “Talent” and submitted it to film festivals around the country. At CineVegas 2004 in Las Vegas, the picture won the Grand Jury Prize, and since the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, it drew glowing reviews from the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and others.
The movie, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, is “one of the most original, daring, intriguing, and honest films of the year.”
That’s no wonder. “Talent” is the product of a 37-day road trip across the country with Wagner’s parents, Judy and Allen, and his sisters Emily and Maggie. In a Honda Odyssey, they drive from their Manhattan home to their son’s California place, on a quest for better family relations. It’s “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” but more gritty than giddy.
The movie industry, of course, doesn’t recommend putting your parents in your first feature film.
“But his mom and dad are impossible to replicate. They are characters,” Gilmore said. “And Emily, she’s a riot.”
The movie is an extravaganza of Wagnerian quirks. Judy and Emily are on perennial, parallel searches for perfection. Allen and Judy’s sex life is nonexistent due to Allen’s health problems, so the couple is grappling with that and other baggage from their four-decade marriage. Meanwhile, Emily is obsessed with her body and whether she should get liposuction.
The family stumbles upon Bumby (Judy Dixon), Emily’s friend just fired from a job in Iowa. She hops in the Honda with them and, at a motel somewhere in Middle America, makes a weird scene with Allen.
But this isn’t a documentary. “There are some emotional and historical truths,” Gilmore said, but the film was completely scripted by Andrew Wagner.
Gilmore is mentioned in “Talent,” and is credited as producer, but she doesn’t appear on-screen. She admits that she doesn’t think she has the stamina for a six-week movie-shoot road trip with her in-laws. Besides, she has a day job as an administrative assistant back in Los Angeles.
But when the shooting was done and Wagner was back home, Judy, Allen and the gang took up residence, figuratively, in Gilmore’s Los Angeles home.
“He was editing the film in our family room for nine months,” she said.
Next, Gilmore and Wagner held home screenings for friends of early versions of “Talent.” With that feedback, they streamlined the movie further and added music.
Despite its rave reviews, the film still doesn’t have a distributor.
That means the copious work of advertising, promoting and distributing the feature falls to Gilmore.
“The film was shot on digital (video). So we needed to raise money for prints. We got some investors, quickly,” she said. Then, after word got out about the unusual feature, art house theaters started calling. New York City’s Angelika Film Center, the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, and now the Varsity in Seattle are among 40 theaters screening “Talent” this summer.
Advertising eats up whatever income those screenings generate. But, Gilmore said, the idea is to reach an audience, not necessarily make a fortune.
It would be nice, of course, if “Talent” accelerated Wagner’s directing and screenwriting career, so that eventually he and Gilmore could buy a house, Gilmore said.
That’s looking more likely every day. With “Talent,” Wagner captured the attention of InDigEnt, the production company that made “Pieces of April” and other art-house hits. InDigEnt is funding Wagner’s second movie, an adaptation of Brian Morton’s novel, “Starting Out in the Evening.” Shooting should start this fall.
For her part, Gilmore continues to work on her own screenwriting projects, including the script for a forthcoming movie she calls a “holiday comedy.” Even 15 years after leaving Mercer Island High, she credits Mike McArthur, her now-retired English teacher there, for turning her loose on the writing path.
“He was so open to me exploring my creative side. He let me write dialogues between philosophers,” even accepting a conversation between Henry David Thoreau and Samuel Beckett for an essay assignment. “That was probably my first scene.”
Gilmore’s parents, Doug and Joy, have watched “Talent’s” trajectory with amazement. “It’s fabulous,” said Doug, “to see the kids follow their dreams.”
He and his wife, along with Wagner’s parents, first saw the film at Chelsea and Andrew’s place in Los Angeles.
“I think all of us were shocked,” Joy Gilmore said. “It’s sort of raw in some parts,” with its talk about sex and other spousal dynamics. “For a parent, it has some things that make you kind of squirmy.”
But after she’d seen it several times at various festivals, she “was able to sit back and just love it. I laughed and laughed.”
What, then, is “The Talent Given Us”?
“Andrew thinks of the `talent’ in the title, as being a different word for the emotional baggage that’s passed on,” from one generation to the next, Gilmore explained. “That family story is the `talent’ we’re all given.”
