South Florida theatergoers probably know Carbonell Award-winning stage director Michael Leeds (The Timekeepers), but may not realize that he is also an accomplished screenwriter. But his most recent movie project, The Last Film Festival, came to a grinding halt five years ago when its star, Dennis Hopper, died of lung cancer.
The film, which also features Jacqueline Bisset, JoBeth Williams, Leelee Sobieski and Chris Kattan, was nearing completion, with all of Hopper’s crucial scenes already shot. But key backers of the $6.5 million movie pulled their pledged funds, leaving Leeds and his co-writer/director Linda Yellen some $90,000 short for post-production costs.
So they have appealed to general movie fans and especially fans of Hopper’s in a Kickstarter campaign that ends this Thursday. To date, they have raised more than their goal — $106,435 — from 474 backers, an estimated half of which are in South Florida. And the fund-raising drive continues, for improved sound, color correction and music and film clip clearances.
“To really get the movie where we want it, we need more than the $90,000,” says Leeds. “It would improve the soundtrack, it would let us get it into 10 theaters and out to foreign distributors.”
As he explains the movie’s genesis, “What happened was we were at Cannes, just along for the ride there. We met Dennis there and then we saw him again at Sundance. There we were talking about how Sundance was one of the best film festivals in the world and Linda said, ‘Gee, I wonder what it would be like if we were at the worst one.’ And Dennis liked the idea and he said. ‘If you write it, I’ll do it.’ And we wrote it and he did it.”
Hopper plays a Hollywood producer peddling a movie so bad that it has been turned down by 3,999 film festivals. The 4,000th is the O’Hi Film Festival, a festival so small that it is held entirely in a high school. The Last Film Festival is a send-up of the movie business, and what happens when Hollywood comes up against small-town America.
Most of the shoot took place at Forest Hills High School in Queens, N.Y., which Yellen had attended. “As a matter of fact, one of the funny things about it, because it was so low budget, instead of having their own trailers, all of the actors had their own classrooms,” says Leeds. “It was very funny. With their own bulletin board. What a plus.”
Hopper was so amiable and lively during production, that none of the cast and crew realized how sick he was. “No, that’s the thing. Nobody on the set knew. And when you see the footage, he looks younger than springtime. It was such a surprise and a shock to find that out, just at the very end of filming,” says Leeds. “Luckily, Dennis had shot 90 percent or more of his scenes and he’d also seen a rough cut and liked the film very much. Then all of a sudden, he just got worse and was in the hospital.
“Once he was sick, some of the investors — there was a clause where if they wanted to they could drop out. It was really kind of awful, they used that to make additional demands, for additional compensation or some of them even wanted to take away Dennis’s voice, to have him dubbed. So the movie was put on the shelf for a while.”
When Yellen and Leeds were ready to return to the project, they were approached by a company called Dynamo, which had initiated several successful Kickstarter campaigns. “The conundrum was that most Dennis Hopper fans are not familiar with Kickstarter. So it was a challenge to figure out how to get to the Dennis Hopper fans and get them to figure out how to use Kickstarter. Luckily, we got a lot of press, which was terrific. Some of it even giving directions for how to get to Kickstarter.”
On the Kickstarter website is a heartfelt plea from Yellen and the cast that has taken the project beyond its initial goal. “$90,000 was the bare bones of how we could get the movie out there,” explains Leeds. “But it’s interesting: When you reach your goal, that’s when a lot of people start to invest. Because then they know it’s a done deal. So we’re very encouraged and if we could reach $120,000, that would be terrific.
“It’s a wonderful performance by this iconic film star,” he adds. “The two things that I find most fun about the film is one, Dennis, and two, the poking fun at Hollywood. It’s a fun ride.”