Thomas Smugula brings futuristic fantasy—and St. Louis investors—to a rural Missouri film set
By Neal Fandek
Photographs by Melissa Richardson, Cincity Films LLC
If the late, great, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson had directed a post-apocalyptic science fiction flick in eastern Missouri, the set might look like this: cumbling old wreck of a hospital surrounded by wardrobe trailers, beautiful people and BMWs, spot-a-potties, milling extras and straw for the stable scenes. (Horses survived the apocalypse?)
Up the crumbling stairs and down peeling-paint corridors, a dozen or so people are filming in a room painted the color of a blood orange. There’s an enormous four-poster swathed in red silk. A stuffed boar’s head with jewelry coming out of its mouth. A ram’s head with a black boa around its neck.
“Midget off set!” Crew shorthand for silence on the set. “Marker!” The digital marker blinks before a gowned, barefoot woman curled odalisque-like on the floor. The marker says Apocalypse and the Beauty Queen, the flick’s name.
“You don’t spout off to your queen!” The blonde storm trooper touches the slave’s cheek. This will become a sharp slap in post-production.
“And—cut!”
The crew does it again. And again. Until the director crouched behind the camera—St. Louis fashion photographer, commercial maker and independent film director Thomas Smugala—is satisfied. Outside, the writer/producer chomps an unlit cigar. The co-leads playing the Evil Queen’s procurer and the slave girl he falls in love with are snuggling and cooing, and—is that Shepherd Mountain? Pilot Knob with Fort Davidson at its base?
What’s a post-apocalyptic St. Louis science fiction flick doing down here in Missouri’s bucolic Arcadia Valley?
“We’re shooting some of the palace scenes down here,” explains co-writer/producer James Schulte. “Some across the river in an Illinois junkyard, too. This area is just tremendously undershot. The nucleus of talent to make great films is here—if we can get those local craftspeople work, the talentpool won’t migrate but stay and deepen.”
Executive producers are William Kamper, who left Zipatoni to become a partner at Shaw-Marconi Marketing, and St. Louis restaurateur Patrick “Pepe” Kehm. Smugala has directed other indie movies (check them out at www.smugala.com), as well as a Jeff Foxworthy video, a bevy of commercials and a Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad that would leave old Hunter cackling.
