Spooner, the first feature film from Santa Ana and Newport Beach born and raised filmmaker Drake Doremus (Douchebag, Like Crazy), played at the Lido Theatre during the April 2009 Newport Beach Film Festival.
The director cut his incisors as a youth making original children's plays that he staged at his mother Cherie Kerr's Orange County Crazies comedy troupe stage in Santa Ana. Now, it's mom that's aiming to get her first feature film picked up by Orange County's most-established festival.
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Kerr said last week she is this close (picture a pinch) to having a director's cut of her dark comedy We've Got Balls ready to submit to the Newport Beach Film Festival in time for a January submission deadline.
Shot over the summer in Irvine, Newport Beach but mostly at Fountain Bowl, the Fountain Valley bowling alley, the film from the original member of the Groundlings comedy troupe in Los Angeles stars people plucked from the Crazies as well as every-day folks and community leaders acting for the first time.
Still Crazies After All These Years
Included in the cast are Gary Austin, the creator and founder of the Groundings, who plays the two-faced mayor of mythical Fountain Springs, and Andrew Dickler, Spooner's film editor and Douchebag's titular character, starring here as a bowling instructor, councilman and hopeful savior of a bowling alley facing demolition because a greedy developer wants to build a gambling casino over it.
Here's the trailer:
“The takeaway message of this film is to consider that what may mean nothing to
one person may mean everything to someone else,” explains Kerr.
It's amazing she has time for the project considering she runs both the Crazies, which teaches budding improvisational players, and ExecuProv, which trains business people to communicate using improv techniques, out of Santa Ana's DiPietro Performance Center, which she named after her parents.
Kerr told of burning the midnight oil getting her film color corrected and music added as that festival deadline nears. At least she can commiserate with Doremus, who is putting the finishing touches on his new film Breathe In before it premieres at the Sundance Fiilm Festival next month.
Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones Prepare to Breathe In Sundance Film Fest Again
Visit www.wevegotballsmovie.com to learn more about Kerr's movie.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.