Movies You Made: “LOCKER 212”
March is Movies You Made month at Go Into The Story where we feature the work of independent filmmakers.
Today: LOCKER 212.
Cast & Crew list
Actors: Jacob Leinbach, George McPherson, Luke Mitchell, Matt Mitchell, Nick Searcy
Producers: Josh Barkey, Rob Gordon, Stan Hollenbach, Greg James, Pat Keane, Michelle Wheeler, Matt Wyns
Music: Jeremy Snyder
Cinematography: Benjamin Joyner
Film Editing: Matt Nunn
Casting: Mitzi Corrigan
Production Design: H. Blake Edwards
Costume Design: Cigi Guz
Makeup Department: Renee Goodwin Heroy
Visual Effects: Chris Breeding
Stunts: Cal Johnson
LOCKER 212 is a fourteen-minute narrative short about a bully who gets his wallflower victim caught up in a conflict with school authority. The two young men get locked together in a classroom, and a few surprising revelations later their worldviews are forever changed. LOCKER 212 doesn’t attempt to answer the difficult questions raised by the issue of bullying in our schools. Rather, it suggests that the only hope we really have for positive change is if we, as individuals, can open our eyes to the pain around us.
LOCKER 212 was written and produced by me (longtime Go Into the Story enthusiast Josh Barkey), and was directed by Matt Nunn. It stars Nick Searcy (FRIED GREEN TOMATOES, THE FUGITIVE, JUSTIFIED), Jacob Leinbach (ENDER’S GAME, TURN) and Matt Mitchell (THE ULTIMATE LIFE). Our DP was the prodigious young Ben Joyner, for whom I went on to write the short film TWO FOR TEA.
Here is the 15 minute short film LOCKER 212.
I asked each of the filmmakers in this month’s series to answer this question: What inspired you about this particular story to make it a movie? Here is Josh’s response:
I was inspired (or perhaps “compelled”) to write LOCKER 212 after the Sandy Hook shooting. Like everybody else, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer insensibility of those events. And I wanted to enter into that conversation on a more human level than what was being argued about in the public square. Sure, yeah, we needed to talk about gun regulation… but what could I do? As a writer, I could sketch out blueprints for an empathy machine — a story — and find other artists to help me build it. I sent an early draft to a list of directors I knew, and Matt Nunn really resonated with it. From there we developed the script and then found other producers, a casting director, a DP, and finally, our talent.
It wasn’t easy. As passionate as everyone was about the story, we still had to grind our way through two kickstarter campaigns (the first one failed) before we were funded. Then there was a slough of red tape to wade through to get our location… only to have it fall through the day before we were supposed to start shooting. But with a last-minute save from a relative who worked at a local private school, we manged to get LOCKER 212 into the can. Which, of course, was followed by six painfully-slow months of in-our-spare-time post-production.
LOCKER 212 played a few festivals before we went ahead and put it online, hoping that teachers would see it as a valuable alternative to some of the eye-rollingly bad anti-bullying videos currently out there. So far we’ve heard nothing but good reports from classrooms, where it has sparked a lot of lively discussion. If you know know any high school teachers who might be interested in using it, please send it their way.
If you’re interested in checking out the first pages from the screenplay, you can find them HERE, AT MY SCRIPT-WEBSITE (along with a few pages from some of my other scripts). You might find it useful/interesting how even those few pages diverge in some significant ways from what we ended up with in our final cut.
Drop by Comments to give some feedback on LOCKER 212.
Tomorrow: Another Movie You Made.
If you have been involved in the creation of a film and want to participate, please email me with details. Note: Need an embeddable trailer or movie.