On Sept. 26, Jennifer Locke will bring a Western to Eastern.
With cowboy heroes on 10-speed bikes, a video game shootout
in Debt Valley and lots of stuff painted gold, you may
never look at the classic American genre the same way again.
Locke's feature-length satire, "Edenwood", premieres at
8 p.m. in the Eastern Michigan Student Center Auditorium.
The film pokes a playful finger in the eye of American
consumer culture.
 |
DRAW: Dallas Fortune (played by Tom Szymanski)
gets ready to draw his gun against Platinum Valance
(played by Kristin Beckett) for "Debt Valley
2
Extreme" a video game the two play as opposed
to
shooting real guns. The scene is from "Edenwood,"
a
movie directed by Jennifer Locke, an EMU assistant
professor of art. The movie's world premiere
is
scheduled Saturday, Sept. 26, 8 p.m., in the
Student
Center Auditorium.
|
"On the surface, it's really a light, goofy movie. But,
hopefully, underneath people will see some of the undercurrents," said
Locke, an EMU assistant professor of art, and co-founder
of Lion Belly Media, the collaborative Ann Arbor sound
and movie production company that produced the film. Lion
Belly's pilot TV horror/comedy, "Darkives", and its award-winning
short, "The Most Difficult Thing", also will premiere Sept.
26. "The Most Difficult Thing" won five awards, including
Best Comedy, at the Detroit 48-Hour Film Project in July.
The Student Center event is free.
Locke, an installation/video artist, teaches drawing in
EMU's Art Department. Visual art has long offered her a
way to create discussions about contemporary subjects,
among them consumption and excess. But, it wasn't until
a 2006 trip to Paris that she started exploring those themes
in film.
"If you think of the way narrative painting teaches us
about religion or government, film has the ability to create
an illusion in time, and in a much more complex space than
just a painting," she said.
As part of a new faculty research grant, Locke filmed
examples of consumption and decadence in Paris, then worked
with that footage in a film production class at Washtenaw
Community College. Never one to spend hours in front of
the computer, she was surprised at how much she enjoyed
editing video.
She started writing the "Edenwood" screenplay
while visiting family in Seattle, pulling in childhood
neighborhoods, childhood friends, popular culture millionaires,
and credit card industry lingo as jumping-off points for
developing characters, location names and plot points.
The story became a Western because the genre is so steeped
in the idea of westward expansion, attaining more, getting
the gold. Her film is based loosely on the 1936 public
domain B movie, "The Three Mesquiteers: Ghost Town Gold."
 |
MAKING PLANS: (from left) In a scene
from
"Edenwood," Sally Mae Rio (played
by
Lisa Semerad) enjoys a drink while
Janey Gates
(played by Ashley Dyess-Blu)
works the laptop at
Ghost Town
headquarters during a scene from
"Edenwood." |
Locke sent the script off to Lion Belly colleagues Brian
Lillie and Sara Jackson. Lillie made it more cinematic;
Jackson helped flesh out the characters. And, as the script
bounced back and forth, it picked up nuances added by various
friends and family.
"We had a ball working on the script," Locke said. "(Comic
satire) seemed like a fun way to look at the world and
be a lens of sorts on our current surroundings and situations
without being too cynical. It turned out to be more fun
to make observations or reflections about our American
space in a funny manner, than to be critical and didactic."
It also offered the chance for a hopeful ending — the
good guys always win in a Western.
The 56-minute film represents almost three years' worth
of work by Locke and a crew of about 70 friends and collaborators
from the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti music communities, and
the theater departments at EMU, WCC and the University
of Michigan. A faculty research fellowship helped make
it happen, and money from the Josephine Nevins Keal professional
development fund covered film festival entry fees.
None of the many people who worked on the film was paid
— except with pizza — which meant lots of 11th-hour rewrites
when scheduling conflicts came up.
"Someone in the film industry said something like this:
'There is the movie you write, the movie you shoot, and
the movie you edit; none being what you would have expected.'" Locke
said. "That sure turned out to be true in our case."
As an artist, Locke has had solo exhibitions in Paris;
Montecastello, Italy; and around the United States. But,
the upcoming film premiere, she said, is its own kind of
thrill.
"We had a screening at the Royal Oak Theater and it's
such a weird charge (to see it on the big screen)" she
said. "A bunch of my friends who are in the music business
said, 'This is so much cooler than a rock show.' We're
definitely excited."
To look at more of Locke's work, go to www.jenlocke.com or www.lionbelly.com
