Georgia-made throwback rom-com to play at Cobb International Film Festival

Jake Reiner and Alexis Abrams in Love and Taxe Photo by Craig Tollis Credit Craig Tollis Love Taxe a new film directed by Craig Tollis and Ken Feinberg is playing at the Cobb International Film Festival on Aug The film is set in the s following the tumultuous love story between a waitress Alexis Abrams and her accountant Jake Reiner each scene taking place during their once-a-year meeting where he helps her with her taxes The script was written by TV writer and producer Lloyd J Schwartz the son of Gilligan s Island and The Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz Feinberg who also founded the Atlanta-based acting studio Creative Studios of Atlanta met Schwartz through mutual friends upwards of years ago According to Feinberg Schwartz offered him the script to Love Taxe around that time but it was only during the pandemic that he uncovered the time and money to be able to make something of it Ahead of the Aug screening which takes place at p m Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Feinberg about the making of the film This interview has been edited for length and clarity I was listening to an interview with you and I heard you mention that Lloyd J Schwartz who wrote this script was a mentor of yours Could you talk about that relationship and how you guys met Ken Feinberg I met him like plus years ago Somebody who was friends with my parents I can t remember who it is now went on a cruise and they met Lloyd s parents Sherwood Schwartz and his wife Sherwood was the creator of Gilligan s Island and The Brady Bunch and Lloyd was his son who worked for him They became friends on this cruise I don t know if you have ever been on a cruise or not but you sit with the same people for dinner I guess they were at the same table with Lloyd s parents I got this phone call go meet Sherwood Schwartz He was very kind He was like I can t help you I m retired But you should meet my son I met Lloyd and Lloyd was very nice He would answer all of my questions He offered me this script a long time ago I got this script that you could make on a low budget Dilemma was I didn t have enough nickels to scrape together to make a low budget film at that point in my career Then during the COVID- pandemic I was like I ve gotta do something creative here What can I do that s not expensive This movie came up Wow So it s been percolating for or so years Feinberg Juan Feldman who s a producer of this film he loved the script too and he sought to direct it but he could never get it going He wants to direct the stage play he wants to do all kinds of stuff When it came about I was like Juan do you want to direct this He s like I just can t do it right now Lloyd was like I m so glad you decided to produce this because I was going to shoot next year if you hadn t It s been long enough The entire point of the whole thing was to take this play that Schwartz wrote and shoot it in one take That was the idea from the beginning In order to make this stimulating you have to find a way to shoot it all in one take You could shoot it conventionally but it s just not that intriguing because it s all in one room But when you shoot in one take and you move the camera around you move the actors around you feel like you re veritably in the room with them It s that intimate I want to talk about the one-take stuff but I m curious since this script has been around for so long has it evolved much What are the different iterations it has gone through Feinberg I don t think it s evolved much I think Lloyd wrote it in the late s or early s When we started to produce it he goes you want me to rewrite it and update it to at present No Don t do that It loses a lot of the charm Because the charm is about in the s if you had a meeting somewhere you didn t have a cell phone You didn t have a pager You didn t have anything You had to trust that the person you re going to meet is going to be at the location when you get there We had to teach actors how to use a rotary phone because they d never seen a rotary phone before It was sort of nostalgic and sort of a throwback Could you talk about the casting process and getting Jake Reiner and Alexis Abrams together Feinberg Because I was an actor I was on Star Trek and Buffy I knew that I longed to find the best actors I could This movie is solely on the acting I can t edit around their performances We put out a casting call for actors and we had over actors submit for these two roles Being an actor and being a director who wants to find the best actor I went through every single of those submissions I invited about actors to audition and from that audition I called back around actors As an actor I know you sometimes can be lucky or sometimes you can be slick in an audition I demanded to see if they could recreate what they did in the first one That s what the callbacks are can you do it again We narrowed it down to four actors We had what s called a chemistry read We would mix and match the guys and the girls have them perform the stuff and see who had the chemistry These two had just amazing chemistry together Alexis Abrams she d only done stage before She did Shakespeare A Doll s House all kinds Jake Reiner his dad is Rob Reiner and his grandfather is Carl Reiner He earned the part based on his work not on his name But having his name is nice laughs because it s his first leading man role And also his dad gave us a quote I wished to talk to you a little bit about directing actors You mentioned Alexis when someone comes in and they ve done mostly stage how do you work with them to get them adjusted to film acting which is a different type of acting Feinberg A lot of the emotional work is the same but the way you present it is different On stage you re using your entire body to indicate to have the person in the back row know without a doubt what you re saying what s going on In film you don t need to indicate that You just need to be You don t need to do Stage you do Film you be You don t need to show that you re angry or show that you re sad When you see someone s eyes you can tell The camera s right here in your eyes you know We did a lot of rehearsal went through a lot of the relationships and how the feelings change how the emotions shift during the scene what the lines mean where the jokes are how to set them up and that kind of stuff We shot this feature film in three days and I figured if I could get the actors in the emotional place I craved them to be then we could do this When I got on set I would say something like you re not performing you re just having a conversation My teaching method which I likely used when I was directing is based on what I call The Big Four which is connect listen feel respond You can connect by looking at someone in the eye holding their eyes to your eyes Then you put all your power attention and focus on them and just listen to what they say When you do that in real life you re going to have a feeling You re going to respond to that you like what they re saying or you don t like what they re saying What they re saying is going to be funny or it s going to make you angry or it s going to make you sad whatever it is If you re really connected and listening you really don t have to do much except allow yourself to feel whatever you re feeling Then you respond with whatever you re feeling It s very very easy once you know it but you have to take it from knowing and put it in your body and practice it so that it becomes second nature like muscle memory for an athlete So if Alexis didn t have any stage experience that might concern me more But the fact that she had done Nora in A Doll s House and she had done Ophelia in Hamlet and she had done several of these other things I was like okay I think I can trust her with the dialogue and the performance Then it s just a matter of getting her to understand the material and how to present it You co-directed this with Craig Tollis and you guys have done a ton of projects together What is that relationship like the sort of breakdown of duties Feinberg Our joke was I m in charge of the love and he s in charge of the taxes Craig would say that s really not a bad analogy For example I m in charge of working with the actors and having them find the relationships and having them find the moments and doing the blocking and really getting them prepared Craig was working with the lighting department and the camera department and the technical aspects of what was going on It s almost like we re editing while we re filming We have to figure out how we re going to shoot this beforehand A lot of times you shoot stuff and you get to post and you say okay I need a shot at this I need to cut away to that The joke is there s three versions of your movie the version you write the version you shoot and the version you edit But we don t have any edit choices here We take the one take that we like because if we didn t like the take we d shoot it again you know If you re minutes into the shot and you flub a line or you bump into the furniture you bump into the camera oh well we ve got to go back and start all over again That s the challenge right The big cinematic challenge is how can you create the longest shot you can Doing one take is very complex for all of the reasons you just mentioned How countless takes would you do on a normal scene Feinberg The first day there s the two actors and then there s the camera operator who s this amazing Latina woman Angelica Perez-Castro She s little she s a Steadicam operator so she can get into little nooks and crannies and stuff like that But then you ve got the sound guy the boom operator Jorge Del Valle he s got the boom and he s got to movement everywhere They had to learn how to dance together so they wouldn t bump into each other Then the two of them had to dance with the actors They had to figure out how they were going to work together The first take it took us a little while to figure it out because Perez-Castro had to see the action She had to figure out where she was going to go how she was going to do it But the more we worked together the easier it got We shot in the order of the movie So by the second day the third day we weren t taking as various takes This is the Georgia premiere for this film but I know you guys have been at other festivals What has the response been like Feinberg It has been fantastic We ve won awards for acting for best movie for writing for directing for production design so far I keep telling people this is a throwback to my childhood a movie with characters and story It s not a fast-paced quick-cut movie There s no extended action sequences there s no car chases nothing blowing up There s nobody getting killed There are no flashy superhero uniforms It s not a movie that people are making But the people that have seen it say this is the kind of movie we want to see because it s humorous it s heartfelt It s the kind of movie you want to see in a movie theater with a lot of people because you can hear all the laughter and be part of that power and part of that experience That makes me feel good This is the best part about making the movie when you show it to other people and they enjoy it The post Georgia-made throwback rom-com to play at Cobb International Film Festival appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta