Part 22, Our DIY release leads to a distributor

As described in my last post, our theatrical world premiere opening night at The Colonial Theatre in Keene, NH was a big success.

We sold out the nearly 1000-seat house and turned hundreds away. We were fortunate to have our congressman Paul Hodes join us along with the state’s first lady Susan Lynch, Keene’s mayor and many other dignitaries. The local daily paper carried the event as their lead front page story. Our spotlights beamed through the sky and our red carpet was rolled out in style for actors David Strathairn, Read the rest of this entry »

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Part 21, Our DIY release begins

buzz_mclaughlin_producerFrom the beginning of this project we were fairly certain that one way or another we going to have a special premiere for the film here in New Hampshire.

After all, the film was entirely shot in Peterborough—the same town Thornton Wilder used as his model for his wonderful play “Our Town”—and we raised roughly 90% of our financing in the state. In a very real sense, the production was a grand partnership with many NH people and organizations and we knew we wanted somehow to celebrate that fact when the film was finished.

With no indie distributors knocking on our door offering us a decent deal, we finally decided to take matters into our own hands Read the rest of this entry »

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Part 19, Taking our film to Eastern Europe

buzz_mclaughlin_producerAfter our American premiere at the Starz Denver Film Festival we continued to tour the festival circuit for well over another year. The entire list of seventeen festivals can be found on this website’s film festival page.

It was quite an adventuresome time for us as we always had at least two more festivals looming as another one was wrapping up.

Probably the most fun experience for us was a trip that Aaron and I made with Ian Somerhalder and his father Robert to the Vilnius International Film Festival in Lithuania. And it serves as an excellent example of how being selected at one festival Read the rest of this entry »

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Part 17, Hanging out at the San Sebastian Film Fest

buzz_mclaughlin_producerOnce our opening night was over all of us breathed a sigh of relief and set about having a good time at the festival in one of most beautiful cities in Europe. The festival itself helped out in numerous ways by supplying us with great hotel rooms with ocean views, passes to everything, and numerous dinners and parties in various tucked-away places in the oldest section of town. We enjoyed seeing films from around the world and caught glimpses of film actors and directors there such as Jeanne Moreau, Max von Sydow, Matt Dillon, Tom DiCillo and Steve Buscemi.  One night we wandered back from a screening of “The Children of Men,” amazed at Read the rest of this entry »

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Part 16, How we almost missed our world premiere

buzz_mclaughlin_producerAaron and his wife Keri and me and my wife Kris flew from Boston to Paris, then took a connecting flight to Berlitz in the far southwest corner of France. Picking up a rental car, we drove into Spain from there, arriving in San Sebastian about an hour later.

Ian Somerhalder and fellow “Lost” star Maggie Grace arrived separately, as did Ron Wyman our documentarian and Mark Constance, one of our producers. Ron suffered quite a trauma getting there as his cameras were lost in transit (and never recovered except for insurance replacement months later) and Mark’s plane connections delivered him to the hotel in the middle of the night, long after Read the rest of this entry »

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Part 6, Entering pre-production

buzz-headshot-2-300x290Once we’d raised enough of the capitalization so that we could commit to actually shooting the movie, the decision was made to green light it. We set a three-week shooting schedule of eighteen days and then counted back four weeks from the start of the shoot and staked out this four-week period as our formal pre-production timeframe.

With these dates set, we flew to Los Angeles for several days of auditions. Our script had already been sent to a number of talent agencies in the preceding weeks and it received a very favorable response from key agents. When we started auditions we realized that Read the rest of this entry »

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