Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
St. Louis’ independent filmmakers love documentaries. They love serious narrative features; they love experimental shorts and bloody, gritty genre flicks. It’s not that people don’t make comedies here—A. (Anonymous) and Hooch & Daddy-O come to mind—they just don’t make them very often. When they do, it seems to show off some of St. Louis’ best acting and directing talent.
This year, that funny movie is Love Stalker. A sex comedy co-written and co-directed by St. Louisan Bowls MacLean and Brooklyn filmmaker Matt Glasson (who also stars), it showed in the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase in August and screens again this month as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival (along with Bill Streeter’s super-buzzed-about documentary, Brick by Chance and Fortune, which MacLean also worked on).
Love Stalker began as a short in the 2009 48 Hour Film Project festival. Glasson—who met MacLean, and Bill Streeter as well, at the Columbia College Chicago film department in the early ’90s—flew in from New York to work on it. After it made the fest’s finals and won the award for best actor, the pair decided to turn it into a full-length feature and wrote a nearly 125-page script.
“Before we started shooting, we had a huge discussion, page by page: what’s staying in, what’s not, what’s important,” MacLean says. “I was also trying to quit smoking during that time, so there was a lot of yelling, a lot of very heated conversation for three days. We knocked out quite a bit; we got it down to 100 pages.” Glasson says it was “like a marathon. We had to get as prepared as we possibly could, so that when production was rolling, there wouldn’t be too many concerns for me to deal with on the production side… I had to be on-set, either behind the camera or in front of the camera, at all times.”
In the film, Glasson plays Pete, a randy womanizer who falls for Stephanie (Rachel Chapman), a relationship blogger. After she figures him for a Lothario and dumps him, Pete sets out to win her heart back in vehement fashion, which looks not unlike stalking. (Chapman, who’s originally from Alton, Ill., now lives a few blocks away from Glasson in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood: “Who’s stalking who, I ask you?” he laughs. “I was here first!”)
The film is filled with one-liners, plot twists, and old-fashioned physical comedy, and MacLean says the only continuity hiccups might be a stray extra (giving new meaning to the word) in the background here and there. The production quality is high, thanks to an HD camera, though by industry standards, there was essentially no budget—about $5,500, raised $10 and $15 at a time through fundraising site IndieGoGo (indiegogo.com). Local support was also crucial, Glasson says: “I can’t say this enough—it was incredible how generous and welcoming all the businesses were to us in making the film. Having the support of the bars and the City Museum and people like Bill Streeter was absolutely instrumental in getting this film finished and having it look and feel as professional as it does. Without that wellspring of support, it wouldn’t have been possible. I’d still be sweating in the editing room now, trying to piece it all together.”
MacLean and Glasson continued to fine-tune the editing up till the film’s screening at the Filmmakers Showcase in August. (“It’s taken this long because we can take this long,” MacLean says of the editing process. “We have no deadline.”) They’d already taken it to the Festival de Cannes’ Marché du Film in April, on the advice of producer Billy Baxter (Dawn of the Dead), who saw an early cut of the film and liked it. Since then, MacLean says, they’ve had a weird trickle of distribution offers from overseas companies, including one in Barcelona (which sent a contract written in Spanish!).
Though it is very much a St. Louis movie (the filmmakers purposely threw in local landmarks, including the Arch, City Museum, The Bevo Mill, and a string of South City bars including Colorado Bob’s, The Silver Ballroom, Sandrina’s, Pop’s Blue Moon, and The Upstairs Lounge), MacLean and Glasser definitely envision it playing outside of the region, and at press time, they were busy entering it in festivals, including Slamdance. “I just think it has everything to offer that a Hollywood film has to offer,” MacLean says. “The only difference is, no one is recognizable, and there’s a goddamn Arch in the background—not a Statue of Liberty or a Hollywood sign up on a rolling hill.”
Love Stalker screens Tuesday, November 15, 9 p.m. at the Winifred Moore Auditiorium on the Webster University Campus.For more information, call 314-289-4150 or go to cinemastlouis.org; for more information on Love Stalker, visit lovestalker.com.The 20th annual St. Louis International Film Festival runs November 10 through 20 at the Hi-Pointe Theatre, Tivoli Theatre, Plaza Frontenac Cinema, Webster University’s Winifred Moore Auditorium, and other locations.
