Take Heart

(I took the above photo at the dog track in Galway, Ireland, in 2002. Read on to find out what the hell it has to do with anything.)

I woke up to some exciting news today. "Smalltimore" has been accepted at its first festival, "The Heart of England Film Festival"! Currently it is scheduled to screen on June 8th, the first day of the festival, in Tamworth, UK.

This festival just launched last year, but it is already attracting actors such as Marcia Gay Harden and Keifer Sutherland, who are involved in projects that will be screening there this year. And no matter how big or small it is, hey, we can say we screened internationally!

Acceptance at this festival also guarantees us screening, if we choose, at several other international festivals in places such as Ireland, Thailand, and South Africa. I'll be researching these a little more extensively to see if they are suitable to us. I know that the one in Ireland is a new one that if you pay the submission fee, you are guaranteed to screen there, which can mean the process is rather watered down. But then again, if you have a good product, it can easily stand out in a festival like this. The other reason I might do that festival is because it is in Galway.

I took an extensive 2-week tour of Ireland in 2002 that included Galway and it was one of my favorite towns. It is small and pretty, a working town, on the water, and they have a dog track. Our tour guide, Terry, told us that if we wanted to do something non-touristy to go there, it was locals (who are all pretty much regulars) only. Terry told us that if we wanted to really know the ins and outs, to ask the youngest person we could find there, as a lot of boys in the town more or less grow up at the track. I went, by myself, and sure enough there were lots of young boys scampering around, walking with a confident bounce in their step, head tilted back with an air of authority, and interacting with the well-weathered gray-haired regulars with such familiarity I wouldn't be surprised if they all went out together for a pint afterwards. The odds boards, unlike the electronic and computerized boards at Pimlico or Laurel, were actual boards - CHALK boards - each held up by an older man who would change the odds by hand as the bets came in.

The track was well lived-in, the age showing on the facility as well as (some of) the patrons. I made a bet, something I had never done before (this was well before I got hooked on the ponies here in Baltimore). For dog races, if you don't know, there is an electric rabbit on the rail that the dogs are trained to chase. SLAM!!! The gates open, the greyhounds take off like slim bullets with fur, maniacally chasing something they can never hope to catch. This was very exciting to me, a very new and different experience. The dogs are unbelievably fast. The track is not as big as a horse track, of course, and there were no TV screens so you could see the dogs up close as they ran. But the track was small enough that you could still see them yourself when they were running on the opposite side. As they approached the final bend, even from where I stood I could see that the dogs were slowing down. When they came into full view as they rounded the corner, they seemed confused and started running into each other, crossing each other's paths. I had never seen a dog race before, but surely this can't be how they all go? The dogs further slowed down and now were just bumping into each other, looking around, when the race caller announced: "Sorry, the electric rabbit has broken. All bets are off, please turn in your tickets for a refund at the window!" I looked and sure enough, there was the rabbit, still sitting on the rail at his starting position.

So, things like that, that may be why I enter some festivals that may or may not do me that much good. You never know who you are going to meet or what kind of experiences you are going to have when you travel. Even bad experiences later make for good stories. Throw the movie at a film festival into the mix, and who knows what might happen? In Ireland, I'M the one with the sexy accent ;)

Darik Bernard, as Darik

To answer your first question, no, the character was not originally named Darik. In the screenplay he was first called Brad, named after someone I had a crush on at the time that I wrote it. By the time we were filming, that crush had long since dissipated, and my dear but sometimes annoying friend/big brother/Executive Producer Tom Kyte thought (mistakenly) that I had named the character after my college boyfriend, who was Tom's roommate way back in that day. So, in order not to have Tom give me grief for the rest of my life (at least about that; he finds plenty of ammunition without me handing it to him), I decided to change the name of the character. Plus, Darik just doesn't look like a "Brad" to me. I started thinking about it, and then I started over-thinking about it, and then I was like, screw it, he looks like a Darik, just call him Darik! And Darik was very happy about that, so problem solved.

Darik came to the first round of auditions at Baltimore Theater Project. The actors received a brief description of the characters and I let them choose which they would try out for. Darik tried out for (bi-sexual) Bentley and (gay) David. Something that happened over and over in these auditions - straight men who could not convince me that they were gay - and Darik was one of them. However, in one of the sides he was given he had to act as if he were drunk, and that he did very convincingly! So when I contacted him later to tell him he didn't get a scripted part, I told him I wanted to write him in as a drunk guy, and he was pleased as punch to do that.

(Side note: In the future, if I am directing a scene where a character is supposed to be drunk, most likely I will actually get them drunk, because few sober people are as convincing as Darik was.)

A few weeks later I attended the Stonehenge auditions at the Creative Alliance. Darik was there, and did a very dramatic but subtle monologue. I was surprised and impressed, and started to see him in a new light. I emailed him soon after and asked him to come to the callbacks, to audition for the role of Brad. I was having a hard time filling this role, which was weird because it is one of the less quirky, more straightforward characters.

Darik did a very good job and landed the role. I asked him why hadn't he auditioned as Brad or Tony in the first place? He told me, "I just really wanted to be gay!" He had never played a gay role and thought it would be challenging as an actor. I liked that attitude, because I can't TELL you how many actors dropped out of the auditions because they didn't want to play a gay or bi-sexual man. Isn't that why they call it acting??? It's not like this was porn or anything. Raise your hand if you are secure in your manhood!

Darik is a real sweetheart and easy to work with. During our days of rehearsals, Cheryl Scungio turned everyone on to a little trick called, "hugging it out". If she was in a scene with a person she had never acted with before, she would hug them for a minute so they would quickly establish a connection. Darik really liked this concept and it seemed to help him. He kept campaigning for me to alter the script so they could kiss it out, but I stood my ground.

Anyway, Phil Calvert was not at rehearsals on the first day, so he didn't know about "hugging it out". Thom (Phil) and Darik (Darik) had a scene together and are supposed to be good friends. So Day Two of rehearsals we are going through this scene, and admittedly it was a little flat. Darik stopped in the middle of it, looked at me and asked, "Can we hug it out?", walked up to Phil before I could answer and gave the rather confused Phil a big bear hug. I found the whole thing to be hysterical and I wish to god I had been taping so I would have caught Phil's expression on film! I had to explain "hugging it out" to Phil, we had a laugh about it, and I tell you what, the scene worked a lot better afterwards.

Darik has a big, beautiful smile and can be a warm teddy bear or a jealous, brooding, wanna-be boyfriend. His size and stature made him the perfect adversary for Tony (and remember what I said about trying to find tall, muscular guys? Darik is another one of the very few you'll find in this area). But the thing I love most about Darik is his almost childlike enthusiasm. He just LOVES acting and he gets SO excited about it. I am confident that some day he will realize his dream, and play an amazingly gay gay man.