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Five years out of Dartmouth College, she still owns the school record of 9:55.89 seconds for the women’s steeplechase.
Today, Pappas, 27, steps to the starting line as a filmmaker with the nationwide release of Tracktown, the one-hour, 28-minute feature that Pappas co-directed and co-wrote and in which she stars as a young distance runner confronting her limitations.
“We feel really lucky to have gotten a distribution partner in Samuel Goldwyn Films,” Pappas said during a recent telephone interview from Eugene, Ore., where she lives and continues to train as a runner. “It’s special for an indie film, as opposed to releasing it on our own right away.”
Tracktown, on which Pappas collaborated with her boyfriend, Jeremy Teicher, a fellow Dartmouth graduate, comes at the end of a long road that began in Hanover, with Pappas helping Dartmouth film professor Jeffery Ruoff put together his 2012 documentary Still Moving: Pilobolus at Forty.
“I learned a lot of things, like the process of getting the rights to music used in the movie, that I hadn’t realized,” Pappas recalled. “There are a lot of different pieces to it that I understood better coming into this project.”
Pappas also credits Dartmouth film professor and veteran screenwriter Bill Phillips and creative-writing professor Cynthia Huntington with sharpening her writing skills, and encouraging her to explore and share her athletic experiences. Huntington, she said, “was a huge role model for me. She was flexible about helping me fit my school work around my training and racing schedule, and she helped me realize that there’s a unique window of opportunity to pursue these athletic things.”
Phillips recalls first crossing paths with Pappas as her freshman adviser, chosen randomly by computer, and learning quickly about her determination both to learn and to compete.
“Most advisees are ‘required’ to meet with their advisor three times freshman year but end up meeting just once, until they learn they don’t have to,” Phillips said recently. “Alexi met with me every month for four years, because she was interested in writing, acting, directing. It’s amazing what happens when you have something in common.”
While pursuing her athletic career and at the same time putting together and promoting Tracktown was and is challenging — Pappas is on a cycle of running 90 to 100 miles a week in preparation for possibly racing in Europe this summer — Pappas said it’s not all that different from balancing schoolwork and competition.
“You learn to schedule yourself,” Pappas said. “You do your very best, but sometimes, you can’t spend 10 hours on a paper. You have to allocate time and make the most of it. I became a much more efficient person. I saw it as an opportunity instead of a sacrifice.”
The opportunity to perform in front of the camera, meanwhile, revealed other similarities to Pappas.
“We found this wonderful acting coach to work with on learning some of the tools of the trade,” Pappas said. “There are warmup exercises, just like an athlete, that get you into your comfort zone. … The two worlds are very synergistic. There’s only so many hours you can run in a day. Only so much thought you can put into editing a scene or writing a movie. One sort of helped the other.”
Teicher started to appreciate the synergies while attending the Dartmouth track meets of the young woman he’d met in a film class.
“I was looking at this world with very fresh eyes,” Teicher recalled. “It was cool to see the similarities between an aspiring Olympic athlete and aspiring independent filmmakers. There’s a lot of overlap as far as drive and emotion in building toward the big moment. You put your heart into making a movie from scratch, then you have to wait for things to fall into place.”
For Pappas’ onscreen character, Plumb Marigold, things seem to be falling apart more than into place at first, after she twists an ankle right before the Olympic Trials and wrestles with whether to rest or keep training and risking greater damage. The cast includes Dartmouth graduate and Saturday Night Live alumna Rachel Dratch as Plumb’s mother and, as a journalist, Norwich resident Andrew Wheating, a Kimball Union Academy graduate who ran for the United States at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics.
In addition to general release in theaters — the nearest opening to the Upper Valley this weekend is the Apple Cinemas complex in Cambridge, Mass. — Tracktown will be available on video on demand and iTunes.
Dartmouth track coach Barry Harwick said recently that he has been talking with Pappas and with the Hopkins Center about showing the movie on campus in mid-September, during a gathering of Dartmouth track alumni who competed in the Olympics and at world championships.
In the meantime, Pappas is fighting back the starting-line butterflies.
“The educations we got at Dartmouth allowed us to be optimistic, and really go after things that take bravery,” Pappas said. “Whether it’s a race or making a movie, they’re all scary in their own way.”
At the Moovies
The age-old question, “Who will buy the cow when they can get the milk for free?” is often a rhetorical one.
Forgotten Farms, a documentary that looks at family-run dairy farms in New England, seeks to explore a similarly tricky question: Who will buy the milk if it actually covers the cost of production?
The film will screen at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction on Wednesday night. Organized by the Upper Valley Land Trust and Hanover Co-op Food Stores, the screening also will include a panel discussion with local farmers, led by Meriden dairy farmer and former N.H. Agriculture Commissioner Steve Taylor.
Though the farmers portrayed in the Forgotten Farms are based mainly in western Massachusetts, the film’s focus on the local food movement is salient to the Upper Valley, said UVLT President Jeanie McIntyre.
Because dairy farmers must often send their milk to out-of-state plants to be pasteurized and bottled, an expensive process that also removes the product from its intended consumer, “it can be very difficult for farmers to establish direct relationships with the people who want to buy their milk and support local farms,” McIntyre said, calling it “a conundrum under the best of circumstances.”
The film will start at 7. Doors open at 6:30. Tickets cost $9 online and $10 at the door. For more information, visit forgottenfarms.org or type the title into the search window of imdb.com.
Back to Basics
Before the invention of Technicolor in 1916, adding color to black-and-white film was a tedious process, involving hand-painting film strips with tiny brushes and dye. This inexact art produced a surreal, vaguely psychedelic effect, in which colors bled out of edges and shifted hue from frame to frame.
A selection of short films, hand-colored in this style between the 1890s and the 1910s, will screen at the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover on May 19. Scenes will include costumed dancers, windmills in twilight and the fountains of Versailles.
The screening will take place in Loew Auditorium at 7 p.m. Admission is free, and a discussion will follow. For more information, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
Coming Attractions
Hartland Public Library will screen Ruby Bridges tonight at 6. The 1998 film is based on the story of the young girl of the same name, who in 1960 was the first black student to attend integrated school in New Orleans.
The screening is part of the library’s “Movie Night” program, in which the library screens free films every Friday in May. On May 19, also as part of the program, the library will screen Freedom Song, about a group of high school activists seeking to gain voting registration rights for African-Americans in their Mississippi small town. Freedom Song will also start at 6. For more information, visit hartlandlibraryvt.org or call 802-436-2473.
Looking for a little cinematic escape on Mother’s Day? Or just looking for an excuse to see Amy Adams on a big screen in the wake of the Motion Picture Academy snubbing her transcendent performance in Arrival?
Either way, head to the Woodstock Town Hall Theatre on Sunday for a 2 p.m. screening of Enchanted, the 2007 Disney fantasy in which Adams portrays an animated maiden who, on the verge of her marriage to a prince, is banished by a jealous queen (Susan Sarandon) into real life in New York City. While other actresses might have played this role for cheap laughs, Adams plays it straight and gives flight to a vehicle that in other hands would crash and burn. Admission is $5.
And if your appetite for fairy tales still needs feeding, Pentangle Arts will be showing the live-action remake of Beauty and The Beast, starring Emma Watson (of Harry Potter fame) as the former and Dan Stevens (the doomed heartthrob from Downton Abbey) as the latter, at 7:30 tonight through Monday night. Admission is $7 for members of Pentangle Arts and $8 to $9 for others.
Sherlock Jr. and The Cameraman, two comedies from the silent film star Buster Keaton, will screen at the Mascoma Valley Regional High School auditorium in Canaan next Friday night. Jeff Rapsis, a silent film composer who lives in Bedford, N.H., will provide live accompaniment to the films. The free event starts at 7 p.m.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304. EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com and at 603-727-3216.
Correction
Tracktown, the new movie that stars former Dartmouth College distance runner Alexi Pappas, lasts for 1 hour and 28 minutes. An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect running time.