Athens resident Dane McCarthy is, in many ways, like any fledgling filmmaker. When he’s not directing actors during a shoot, he’s desperately working out their schedules for the next one or bugging his editor to see a cut of his latest project.
Unlike the rest, he’s 57 years old, an age for some that’s closer to the lure of retirement and settling down.
But McCarthy is just getting started, and he’s been catching his breath in the past few months for the first time in the past few years.
Tomorrow marks the premiere of his second full-length film, (War is) Suicide: Nixon Invades Cambodia, at Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville.
Set in Athens in 1970, Suicide tells the story of 24 hours in the life of an Ohio University student who’s faced with the decision to be drafted into the Vietnam War or resist. The film’s opening credits are intercut with photos of the spring 1970 anti-war riots in Athens.
“I lived through that era and know a lot of stories like that — things that happened to me personally during that time period — and it’s been kind of sitting in the back of my mind,” said McCarthy, who would have been about 20 at the time the film takes place. “I’ve been looking for a way to tell that story.”
McCarthy wouldn’t confirm or deny that the central character of Suicide is actually him, and said, “It’s closer to the truth than I’m actually letting on. It’s fictionalized but the actual story is true.”
Reaching into his past has become standard for McCarthy’s work. His last full-length film, In the Blood, premiered at Stuart’s Opera House in fall 2005 and tells the story of a former radical — played by McCarthy — who reconnects with his old partners in crime and decides it’s time to turn himself in.
“I guess I am reaching back into my own past somewhat,” he said last winter while shooting Halloweenies, the film his producing partner Arnie Chambers is editing now. “We’re all created by our past. I was interested in exploring that.”
A quick trip through McCarthy’s past begins when he moved with his family to the town in 1959 at age 10, graduating from OU with a bachelor’s degree in general studies in 1978 and then a master’s degree in theater in 1981 — but not without a few trips to Europe in between. McCarthy has since made a living renting 11 rental properties around the county and — as always — working on scripts.
He began filmmaking in 2003 with a defunct project called Tom Kelly, finally getting a movie onscreen locally two years later with In the Blood, which cost about $10,000 to make. Suicide’s budget came in at $20,000, mainly because of the movie’s two-hour length, which had Chambers fishing through 25 hours of film, another six hours of audio and even more music that makes up the film’s lively period soundtrack.
The result is a movie that features several Athens locales — including a posthumous appearance by the Former Baker University Center — and makes strides forward in the quality of work McCarthy and Chambers are doing, even if it might not land them any recognition outside Athens, Chambers said.
“I think until we get more on the front end as far as budget … we’re not going to get that big prize that every filmmaker wants,” he said. “Something (eventually) will break, and people will want to look back (at these movies).”
But right now, it’s not the future or the past McCarthy and Chambers are worried about. While Chambers edits Halloweenies, slated for release fall 2007, this is the first time in a long time McCarthy isn’t juggling the schedules of dozens of volunteer actors for a shoot. He’s working on another feature-length script and sitting on footage for a documentary about a Virginia “ghost hunter” called Maverick’s Ghosts.
But this break from shooting is hardly what McCarthy wants, and it didn’t even seem so last year during the troubled Halloweenies shoot, one full of schizophrenic Ohio weather and busy, unpaid actors.
“Dane will not stop,” Chambers said. “Sometimes I think his brain is spinning around a reel of film.”
Reader Comments
Submit a comment to The Post