It all began with a five-minute pitch. Aspiring Toronto-based filmmaker Daniel Perlmutter stood in a room of industry experts, including director Ivan Reitman, for the Pitch This competition at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.
Perlmutter was trying to sell an idea about a newspaper reporter who makes up stories based on the plots of old movies to boost the dying paper’s circulation.
“I had a really rough draft of a very silly film,” Perlmutter tells The CJN. “The idea was to pitch to get some development money to go write a script. Actually, working on the pitch helped me figure out what the movie should be.”
The pitch only took five minutes. However, as soon as Perlmutter won the competition and prize money, it was a five-year wait until the film with that quirky synopsis would see its first audience.
That comedy, Big News From Grand Rock, is currently screening in small towns across the country as part of TIFF’s Film Circuit. It will also open in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton on Feb. 27.
Budgeted at $1.2 million, Big News From Grand Rock was a big leap for Perlmutter. Prior to filming, his biggest big-screen credit was writing and producing the micro-budget comedy Peepers, which he made as a member of Automatic Vaudeville Studios (AVS).
AVS, which Perlmutter co-founded, uses the same company of actors and crew members to make a variety of low-budget genre movies and experimental shorts. Perlmutter says it was like an alternative to film school, and gave the aspiring director the freedom to hone his craft.
As a young man in his 20s in Montreal, Perlmutter was also lucky to get a job running a writers’ room – an English-language one, too – for a YTV series called Seriously Weird. It was that small-screen work, often done on deadline, that Perlmutter says taught him about discipline and the importance of re-writing.
“[It was about] figuring out how not to be precious, and how to be able to break down everything you’ve worked on and see what’s really not working and let go of things,” he says.
Those lessons proved to be valuable when he was writing (and re-writing) Big News From Grand Rock. He says the story began as something more silly and absurd and slowly moved into a more grounded tale.
In the current film, the main crisis is that the small-town paper where protagonist Leonard works struggles to stay afloat. This brought a timeliness to the story that situates it within the modern fragmented media landscape, where many small papers are shutting down.
“So many of these towns are just holding onto their newspaper or they’ve lost them,” Perlmutter says. “Midland lost their newspaper in June and we started filming there in September. Those communities really feel it.”
Despite the serious topic, Big News From Grand Rock has a light tone and screwball flavour. Perlmutter tells The CJN that he did not want to rely much on vulgar, R-rated jokes, since family comedies are so rare in contemporary cinema.
While refining the script, Perlmutter applied to the Telefilm Canada Features Comedy Lab, a development program of the Canadian Film Centre (CFC). There, he got input and direction from various heralded people in the industry, including producer Daniel Goldberg (The Hangover), writer Kirsten Smith (Legally Blonde) and The Devil Wears Prada director David Frankel.
“It’s something that’s kind of rare in Canada,” he says of the Comedy Lab. “It focuses on how to make films successful, not just how to get them made.”
Another big help came from one of Perlmutter’s comedy heroes. Eugene Levy chose to mentor Perlmutter as part of a program co-sponsored by the CFC, and gave advice on a few drafts of his screenplay.
“He was very honest and very upfront, in a great way,” Perlmutter says of the SCTV and American Pie star. Due to Levy’s schedule, though, he could not star in the final film.
After several years of getting Big News From Grand Rock together, the shoot in Midland, Ont., only lasted 18 days. Since no feature film had ever been made in the town, locals helped out in various ways, from bringing wardrobe options to the set to starring in bit parts.
The film is stocked with talented Canadian comics, including The Listener’s Ennis Esmer as Leonard and Gordon Pinsent as the owner of the struggling paper.
“[Pinsent] came in and all of a sudden, there was a new atmosphere on set,” Perlmutter says. “You can feel that everybody was bringing up their game.”
Perlmutter is now getting another film into development, a horror comedy set in the woods that is limited to a few locations and characters. He says he hopes to shoot it next winter.
“I’m hoping the next one doesn’t take five years,” he says. “But we’ll see.
