By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Tyler Savino is a credit-packed semester away from graduating with a degree in film.
He’s not waiting to have the paper from Bowling Green State University to stake his claim to being a filmmaker.
This summer he and a cast and crew spent three intense weeks filming scenes for what he envisions as his first feature film. “The Cran,” is an absurdist comedy that involves Neo Nazis, cultists, and two former lovers who are toxic for each other.
Savino hopes those initial scenes will help him land the funding he needs to finish the film this winter, so it can be sent off to film festivals.
The summer work went well enough that he’s hoping the local businesses that provided support to get the film going maintain their support as well as expanding the financing bubble. He may even do some crowd-sourced funding.
The footage now in the can means “I’m able to say: ‘This is a movie that’s being made’ not ‘this is a movie that a film student wants to make someday.’”
Savino, 25, wrote the script and is directing as well as handling some producing through his company Bucketnaut. Chase Crawford, founder of the Ohio-based production company Four By Three Productions, is “the big man doing the production,” Savino said.
Savino worked on several short films on campus. “I got to know a couple good guys early on in my time here who really knew what they were doing. So we started doing short films.”
His fellow students asked him to direct.
He had been trying to develop ideas for genre films, tending toward “the big and bombastic.”
“Nothing was really sticking,” Savino said. “I’d move on to the next idea before I’d really fleshed out the first one.”
Then he read an interview that reiterated the advice: Write what you know.
Savino took it to heart. “I sat down and wrote a scene. I liked it. So that scene turned into a bunch of scenes and those scenes turned into a movie,” he said. “The film itself is a character study disguised as an absurd comedy.”
“The Cran” is an affectionate nickname for the fictitious rural county that’s at the center of the film. The story’s two main characters, played by Marlee Carpenter and Matthew Alan Porter, are former high school sweethearts. “He’s had some trouble letting go, and she invites him to go on a road trip to reconnect as friends,” Savino explained. “But the road trip quickly goes off the rails and a cult gets involved, and there are some Neo Nazis.”
The IMDb listing summarizes the plot as: “After reconnecting with his unstable high-school ex, a failed comedian becomes complicit in an absurd revenge crusade that puts him in the crosshairs of a rural cult.”
Each partner in the couple is highly manipulative, and “not good for each other.”
Porter, of Chicago, answered a regional casting call.
Carpenter is someone Savino worked with in the past. He involved her in the film as early as the first draft to get her feedback on the character.
He said he needs the performances to be “rock solid” once they start filming.
With a bare-bones financing, he has to capture a scene within a few takes.
Still, he said, he has a budget. “This is not a spit and string movie.”
For him as a filmmaker it’s important that his cast knows he values their time and professionalism.
Brett Wineland is his “partner in crime” on the film. He’s the cinematographer who has the expertise to turn Savino’s abstract ideas into “pretty pictures.”
That process started with scenes filmed on the streets of Toledo and, for the more “decrepit look,” a property outside Port Clinton. Most of it was filmed in Bowling Green — LMARIES Laundromat, Grumpy Dave’s, and Savino’s apartment.
The goal is to enter it in film festivals so it can be seen by folks who may be interested in buying it. In the past that would have been a movie studio, now it’s more likely Netflix or Amazon Prime, outlets with a lot of hours to fill.
Savino picked up his love of movies at home. He grew up in west Toledo near the Botanical Gardens. His father loved movie trivia. Everyone in Savino’s family was involved in the arts in one way or another.
Home schooled through grade 8 by his mother, who was an English teacher, he was drawn to language and writing early. He attended the Toledo School for the Arts where he studied theater.
There he performed as Seymour in “Little Shop of Horrors,” the father in “Hairspray,” and Lenny in Neil Simon’s farce “Rumors.”
Savino found himself drawn to directing.
After graduating in 2012, he enrolled in BGSU as a broadcast journalism major. But then, he said, “I took a couple years off to figure out what is like to be an adult.”
When he came back, he was committed to being a film major, and pursuing what he loved.
In an age where anyone can make a film on their phones, getting film school training is even more important.
“The quality of the work between before film school and close to the end of film school has increased leaps and bounds. It’s helpful to surround yourself with people who know more than you about your field.”
That, Savino hopes, will be evident in his first feature and will set him on the road to Hollywood.
“I see it as a first feature,” Savino said. “It’s definitely something all my friends look at and say ‘that’s something you wrote.'”
His goal is “not to be the biggest director on the planet but make something that’s undeniably mine so it can be picked out of a crowd.”
