On the invisible border between Marion Cross School and the Norwich Green one balmy mid-afternoon last week, Thea Brooks waded through a swirl of schoolchildren
Nearby, a dark-haired girl of 8 or 9 with starry blue eyes sat on a bench, reading a book while the kids around her were shooting hoops or chasing a soccer ball.
Finally, one of the young men aiming a movie camera at the girl’s face stood straight, raised his arms and, mimicking an end-of-recess school bell with a call of “Ring-ring-ring-ring-ring!” summoned the ballplayers, who galloped toward the school Brooks last attended 20 years ago.
Then the girl looked up, closed her book, shouldered a backpack almost half her size and followed the parade past the camera.
“That’s me,” Brooks whispered before director Matt Celia, her fellow 2003 graduate of Hanover High School, called “Cut!”
Well, sort of her. On the first day of a weeklong Upper Valley shoot, New Jersey actress Eliana Brenden was playing Ella, the re-imagining of herself that Brooks co-wrote into the screenplay for the short film Green.
“This makes me really happy that we’re doing it,” Brooks said. “A little bit of history that’s being replayed. Trying to get that sense. That feeling.”
Green revisits Brooks’s teenage experience of moving closer to downtown Norwich after a logging company bought up land next to her family’s house in the woods. In this version, she follows Ella’s efforts to stop a clear-cut.
Over the past week, a crew that included Celia and Hartland-based filmmaker Jake Haehnel as an assistant cameraman, and a cast that included Vermont actor/performance artist Rusty DeWees, 10-year-old New London actor Jakob Vedova and Norwich-based golden retriever Abby, began bringing Brooks’ vision to life. Shuttling among locations ranging from residential Hanover, Norwich and Barre to the woods around Lake Fairlee, they filmed the raw footage for Brooks’ eco-parable.
“Cinematically, we’re telling the story through Ella’s eyes,” said Celia, who now works in Los Angeles. “She likes to be in her own world.”
After consulting the wizard-hero of one of her books, Ella confronts the skidder driver, Alf, played by DeWees, and learns that it’s more complicated than she imagines. Finally, she goes back to school with a show-and-tell tale that wins over her former tormenter, a boy played by Jakob Vedova.
“I like the reality check that kind of kicks in,” Jakob’s father, Peter Vedova, said while watching the first day of shooting.
It’s a reality that Brooks, who attended the Carnegie Mellon University’s school of drama after graduating from Hanover High, had been thinking about conveying on film for several years. Brooks is developing an acting career in New York; she was in five short films between 2010 and 2014 and is performing in one now in production.
After playing the title character in a national tour of a stage adaptation of I Love Lucy for much of 2015, Brooks began writing and whittling the script in earnest with Celia’s wife Katie Celia, and running a crowd-funding campaign on seedandspark.com that raised $14,973 for the project.
Meanwhile, working with Matt Celia and with Norwich-based producer Amanda Montenegro, Brooks lined up a team for filming in the Upper Valley in early June.
“It’s a good community thing to do,” Haehnel said last month, fresh off helping Vermont director Jay Craven complete shooting of his science fiction film Wetware on Nantucket.
In addition to winning the support of Marion Cross School Principal Bill Hammond, who had taken Brooks and Celia under his wing in Hanover High’s theater program, to shoot scenes in and around the school, Brooks auditioned Upper Valley kids, several through Northern Stage’s Youth Ensemble Studio program, for extras. Jakob Verdova quickly emerged as the go-to guy for the key role opposite Ella.
“When they announced that they were doing this,” Peter Vedova said, “they said, ‘We’re looking for a 10-year-old boy with freckles.’ I said, ‘Jake, That’ll be a stretch.’ ”
Jakob, whose interest in theater began during visits to the New London Barn Playhouse every summer with his grandfather, was one of several serendipitous discoveries.
“For me, it’s a homecoming experience that I get to share with these people,” Brooks said in May, during a get-acquainted session for Norwich residents at the school. “It’s a chance to be able to give back a little bit.
“It’s an exciting project for me.”
The next project is to edit Green to 12 minutes, both to stay within their modest budget and to qualify for short-film entries on the festival circuit. Celia said they will submit the movie to grassroots festivals such as Heartland in Indianapolis, where South Woodstock director Jim Sadwith showed his J.D. Salinger movie, Coming Through the Rye, last October.
Celia added that Green hits home for him as well, having witnessed the over-development of rural parts of his Connecticut hometown before his family moved to the Upper Valley in the mid-1990s.
“This is why I have to be involved with this movie,” he said.
For more information about the origins and the making of Green, visit seedandspark.com/studio/green#updates.
For the June installment of its monthly Thank You Thursday series of admission-free movies at the Woodstock Town Hall Theatre, Pentangle Arts next Thursday night will screen Shine a Light, Martin Scorcese’s documentary of a performance by the Rolling Stones at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The two-hour film mixes footage of the concert with appearances by Buddy Guy, Christina Aguilera and Jack White, and with film clips and interviews with and about the enduring ensemble from their five-plus decades together.
Next up in the series will be Billy Wilder’s comedy Some Like It Hot on July 14 and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove on Aug. 18. For more information about the series and about other film offerings at Pentangle, visit pentanglearts.org/events/category/movies/list/.
To kick off the next discussion of their series on sustainability, the Norman Williams Public Library and Sustainable Woodstock screen garbage activist Annie Leonard’s 20-minute, animated treatise, The Story of Stuff on Tuesday night at 6. The movie, adapted from a two-hour lecture that Leonard delivered on the subject, will be shown at the library’s mezzanine level. For more information about the film, visit storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/.
The library also will host a screening of Still Dreaming next Friday afternoon at 3:15. The movie follows a group of long-retired Broadway performers at the Lillian Booth Actors Home outside New York City, as they prepare to stage A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Admission is free.
The White River Indie Film Festival and the Main Street Museum in White River Junction will continue their “Alt: Cinema” series of the political movies of maverick director Robert Altman, with screenings on July 8, 15 and 22 of the TV miniseries Tanner ‘88, the presidential-campaign satire that Altman assembled with cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Each showing starts at 6:30 p.m., with filmmaker, composer and writer Allan Nicholls, a friend and longtime collaborator of Altman, answering questions at the end of each batch of episodes. Doors open at 6 for drinks and snacks. Admission is by donation of $2 to $20. For more information, visit mainstreetmuseum.org.