The Virginia Film Festival brings some big-name actors, directors and producers to town, but it also gives some local people a chance to show their work.
As a young, single woman living in Richmond, Amanda Patterson knew that Hollywood rarely portrayed sexual encounters accurately.
It’s all beautiful and nobody sweats or accidentally kicks each other in the face. I mean you’re never wearing the right underwear. You don’t know if your sheets are clean. There’s a party going on outside when you’re with the guy for the first time. I mean these are the things that are true.
She got to talking about that with a fellow film major at VCU – a friend from high school named Michael Leonberger. Together, they crafted a script about their own bedroom misadventures and those of their friends. He wrote the guys’ lines, she wrote the girls’ lines and they called it Goodish:
"Bascially they’re asking each other how was the night … good – ish."
They raised money for the project through a crowd-funding website called Indiegogo-- all $6,000.
"I mean nobody makes a movie for $6,000. That’s pennies in Hollywood."
Fortunately, they had lots of friends in Richmond who agreed to help, including VCU Professor Pam Turner who lent them her house.
“And she was like ‘Hey, that week I’m actually going to be out of state, and I’m looking for a cat sitter, and I was like, ‘Yes!‘Can we film in your house?’ And she was like,’Sure,’ and I was like, ‘Can we sleep in your house?’ And she was like, ‘Sure. I have couches and cots,’ And I was like, ‘Fantastic!’ And she was like, ‘By the way, I have seven cats.’ And I was like, ‘Uh – okay.’”
Also making her debut as the associate producer of a feature film, Charlottesville’s Erica Arvold.
“I grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, and I worked at the Lyric Theater as the ticket girl and the popcorn girl and my very first experience in film was – I was an extra in Dirty Dancing.”
In college, she majored in theater.
“I went to theater school in Chicago, because I wanted to be in the business of film, but I grew up without a television and I barely saw films, which was very difficult to overcome, but the best part of doing that is I approached it as an architect or engineer would. The fame factor was not a factor at all. I just loved the creative process of making moving pictures.”
Moving to Los Angeles after getting her degree, she signed on with a casting company and worked for many years on major motion pictures: Runaway Bride with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, Natural Born Killers with Oliver Stone, Quenitin Tarantino, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis. When she returned to Virginia to raise her son, the phone continued to ring. She helped cast Lincoln, Meg Ryan’s film Ithaca, Big Stone Gap, which opened this year’s Virginia Film Festival, and Wish You Well, based on a book by author David Baldacci. It tells the story of two children who go to live with their great grandmother in rural Virginia after their father is killed in a car crash. It was shot in Giles County and stars Ellen Burstyn.
Wish You Well shows Saturday at one in the theater at Piedmont Virginia Community College with a panel discussion including David Baldacci to follow. The makers of Goodish will speak after their film shows Sunday at 4:30 in the Regal Theater on Charlottesville’s downtown mall.
