Los Angeles filmmakers find ideal spot in Bath
by Jonathan White
June 26, 2001BATH — Filmmakers quietly finished shooting "Wake" on Friday, a low-budget film its producer and director hope will lead to other movie-making projects in Maine.
Producer Susan Landau Finch and her husband, director Henry Leroy Finch III, said they wanted to make a film in Maine to show that it could be done professionally and inexpensively. The couple, with Finch's mother, Margaret, in February bought a historic house on outer Washington Street they plan to renovate and live in part of the year.
The Finches, of Los Angeles, have plans for a second movie they want to film in Hallowell, "Sleepwalking," with Gina Gershon, Benjamin Bratt and Susan Landau Finch's father, Academy Award-winning actor Martin Landau, who came to Bath last week for a cameo role in "Wake." The two films are part of a screenplay trilogy by Henry "Roy" Finch, including "Drowning Room," also yet to be made.
"The inevitability of the movie industry," said Roy Finch, "is that you have to interface with Los Angeles or New York. 'Sleepwalking' is in the $3 million to $4 million range. The first step was to get a crew together we could work with in Maine."
Prospective backers of "Sleepwalking," said Susan Landau Finch, want the couple to film in Canada, where production costs generally are lower than in the United States. She said the movie in Bath was made to show that "Sleepwalking" could be done here.
"Wake" was shot on video, with the producers planning to give it the look of film in post-production.
"This is a micro-budget," said Susan Landau Finch. "It's to prove Roy can direct, and that you can make a film in Maine with limited resources." The couple plan on taking the movie to film festivals and art houses in hopes of getting a wider distribution.
Susan Landau Finch is an experienced Hollywood producer who went to work with director Francis Ford Coppola at Zoetrope Studios when she was 19, working in various jobs, including publicist and casting director. Since 1988, she has produced or co-produced numerous films, including "Mr. Destiny," "Bram Stoker's Dracula," "Cool Runnings," "An Ideal Husband," and the "Mary and Rhoda" reunion and "Princess of Thieves" for television.
She met her husband, Roy, while both were students at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.
Roy Finch is a scion of a literary and artistic family with ties to Maine. His father, Henry Leroy Finch II, taught philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College for 20 years and at Hunter College for 16, and for 18 years was chairman of the Columbia faculty seminar on religion. His mother, Margaret, is a poet, and his sister, Annie Finch, is a well-known poet and associate professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Finch's uncle was the late artist Fritz Rockwell of Boothbay Harbor.
Finch himself is a composer and writer and has worked in Hollywood in different post-production capacities, including music and dialog editing on films and documentaries.
He wrote the screenplay for "Wake" stimulated by the historic home on Washington Street. "Roy was inspired by this place and the drama came out of it," explained Susan Landau Finch. The screenplay was based in part on Roy Finch's uncle, Hugh, who left an unfinished manuscript of a novel when he died.
In the two-hour movie, four brothers return home, which the oldest brother, Sebastian, played by Dihlon McManne, has never left. The brothers drink and get into trouble. The film begins with McManne typing a novel, and also ends that way, with the character as an older man played by Martin Landau. Roy Finch described parts of the film, primarily a drama, as "outlandish comedy."
"It was a real thrill to have Martin Landau playing me as an old man," said McManne, a theater actor whose film credits include "Final Analysis" with Richard Gere and "So I Married an Axe Murderer," with Mike Myers. "We sat together so he could duplicate my cadence, the way I spoke."
The film takes place during one night, in which McManne is arrested. "I've been tied up, had an arrow stuck in my forehead. I've been beaten up, abused, handcuffed and tied at the ankles with a belt," McManne said.
Actors and crew were drawn from Los Angeles, New York, Boston and northern New England. Other actors in the movie were Gale Harold, star of the Showtime series "Queer as Folk," Blake Gibbons, John Philbrick, comedian Bob Marley, Rainer Judd and Amanda Painter.
Filming in a North Bath neighborhood, and trying to be unobtrusive, could be a challenge, Roy Finch said. A member of the film crew even volunteered to mow a woman's lawn later in the day so she would turn off her mower, the sound of which was ruining a shot.
Filmmakers used each room of the house, as well as locations at Finch's mother's home on Front Street, with dolly tracks set up on the floor to move cameras back and forth. Finch tried a technique he called diorama scenes, which are flashbacks within the same setting fed by dialog. Different rooms in the house were used for the memory sequences.
The Finches plan to spend two to three years restoring the Washington Street home, built between 1754-58. Part of the sale agreement was that they maintain the house's historic integrity.
A portion of the dwelling, on a small point overlooking the Kennebec River, possibly is the only intact, unrestored colonial trading post surviving on the Kennebec River, according to local artist and historian Jim Stilphen. A plaque on the grounds, then known as the King's Spar Dock, commemorates the capture of the British Royal Navy's mast agent, Edward Parry, by local Minutemen shortly after the Revolution began in April 1775.
"It's quite a beautiful house, and the site hasn't been touched," Stilphen said of the trading post section. "It's probably the last place of its type in Maine. That's where they would have gotten the news, where people would go to buy coffee, tobacco or tea." Old photographs show the home originally was on a small island in the river.
"You couldn't have recreated this place on a sound stage," McManne said. "It really made the film interesting."