Making Calvin Marshall — gary lundgren

Part II

The screenplay was called M.V.P. and the story followed nineteen year-old Calvin trying to play junior college baseball.

The irony of this original title possessed me while writing, because it was how Cal wanted the world to see him.

*Michelle Lombardo (Tori) and Alex Frost (Calvin)*

The flip side to Cal’s quest is Tori — the actual MVP of her volleyball team. And then there’s Coach Little — a bitter man whose failed minor league career is the albatross around his neck, tormenting and mocking him wherever he goes.

*Michelle Lombardo (Tori) and Steve Zahn (Coach Little)*

While writing and rewriting the script, the sad turning points of the story gradually took on humor and levity. Cal’s one big step forward would inevitably be pushed back two by outside forces. Switchbacks up the mountain of self-discovery.

This became a bittersweet dramedy that followed an unusual protagonist. The story wanted to turn sports tropes on their ear, so we could watch a young man be dragged down by reality.

This was never going to be Rudy. In this story we get to watch an extraordinary kid overcome his disappointment — which is one of the most important and underrated achievements in life.

The Production

Bringing this story to life began with our wonderful cast — flesh and blood in real locations. Hollywood talent flew out to Ashland, to come alongside some of our amazing OSF actors. They were all here to live in Calvin’s world.

I was so fortunate to have Patrick Neary shooting the movie. He has such a great eye and a kind way with people. A gifted camera operator. We had become good friends and had similar sensibilities. And, we had already developed a short-hand way of communicating with each other after WOW AND FLUTTER.

Pat and I worked out every single camera set up ahead of time, over many weeks during pre-production. And we did this fun work over pints at the late, great Standing Stone Brewing Company in Ashland.

During prep, we even shot photo storyboards at our locations with some of our crew. You can see some of them here:

This was an invigorating way to pre-visualize the movie, and a useful way for our crew to anticipate the work ahead of us each day.

Now here we are, fifteen years later, and our entire cast and crew still feels like a dream. Talented new friends, old friends and even family — all pulling in the same direction to bring Calvin’s story to life over 26 shoot days.

Every night after a long day of filming, we’d gather at Black Sheep. Everyone came out — cast and crew — taking turns picking up tabs. If I’m honest, I’m not sure I’ve quite seen this kind of camaraderie on a film shoot since.

I recently watched the film for the first time in years and it all came rushing back. The characters and the story are still up there on the screen, and I found it very moving. All the creative effort is there— so many details brought to each character, the camera moves, performances, props, wardrobe, production design. The inside jokes. The sound and music — which I’ll go into more in Part III of this series.

And the movie looks so beautiful and unique — so organic because it was filmed on 35mm. Richard Flores in Hollywood cut our negative — which means it was carefully spliced and glued together by hand based on our edit decision list. Our color-correction was then done photochemically at Deluxe. All those colors are still up there on the screen as we side-stepped the digital intermediate process. Deluxe’s film lab eventually closed in 2014.

We were certainly one of the last features to ever do this process.

So, it’s quite a thrill for us to screen the film again and share proceeds with a baseball program in town who can use it. It’s been a lot of work to put these screenings on, but going back to the sharing stage is what this exercise has been all about.

Thank you for supporting our efforts.

Finally, I’m leaving the first 8 minutes of Calvin right here, featuring commentary from myself, DP Patrick Neary and composer John Askew. The full commentary was recorded back in 2010 for our BluRay release and has never been online before.