Like Crazy, Drake Doremus' third film, was picked up by a division of Paramount Pictures at January's Sundance Film Festival for theatrical release this fall.
Douchebag, Doremus' second film, was bought after the previous Sundance and had a short theatrical run last fall.
Now Spooner, Doremus' debut film, opens in two Southern California theaters on March 4: Laemmle's Sunset 5 in West Hollywood and the Regency South Coast Village in Santa Ana, the young filmmaker's hometown.
]
Spooner, which, like Douchebag, screened at the Newport Beach Film Festival, made its debut at the 2009 Slamdance festival, the grungier event held in Salt Lake City concurrently with Park City's more chichi Sundance.
Matthew Lillard, the only actor in the world to have attended high school in Tustin before going on to play Shaggy in a live-action Scooby Doo movie, plays Herman Spooner, a used-car salesman who
lives at home in Monrovia with his parents, who try with little success to kick their slacker son out of the house by his 30th birthday.
Herman is
just as lost on the car lot (which is in real life run by Doremus' older half brother), but when he rescues a pretty
young stranded mortorist (Brick's Nora Zehetner),
he is forced to grow up fast if he wants to keep her. Shooter McGavin himself, Christopher McDonald, plays Spooner's dad, and Reno 911's Wendy Mclendon-Covey nearly steals the picture with a hilarious cameo.
In April 2009, I called Spooner a “hidden gem” and “an impressive first-time outing from Doremus and his screenwriter, Lindsay Stidham” (who went on to co-write Douchebag).
Rated R for brief language and sexual content, Spooner was produced by Jonathan Schwartz, who filled the same role on Doremus' next two films. Corona del Mar resident, Chapman University film-school grad and Doremus' childhood pal Ben York Jones has a blink-and-you'll-miss-him part in Spooner, but he went on to co-star in Douchebag and co-write Like Crazy.
Maya Entertainment releases Spooner on DVD March 15.
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.