SYNOPSIS/STICKY WICKET
In the small town of Brunswick, Maine, the Women-Only Croquet Club is the only organized resistance to a corporate takeover by an invading cineplex movie chain. In its direct path is a 100 seat, hippie-built theater called the Eveningstar Cinema, crunched into a tiny, jewelry-store-sized space at the local mall. The owner, Barry Norman, is barely holding on. He’s too tall for the 6’ high upstairs projection booth (at 6’5”), and too old (over 50) to be carting around the heavy reels back and forth between projectors. As the cineplex ground-breaking approaches, future plans are made for a big croquet showdown at city hall. With croquet balls smacked to the tune of ‘Drive That Fast' by legendary UK band Kitchens of Distinction, it begins to dawn on us that maybe these mallet-wielding women can get the job done. And they do.
Sticky Wicket (2015) is the fourth Barry Norman/Rick Schmidt co-production, and was shot at Norman’s Eveningstar Cinema in Brunswick, Maine, with Norman performing the lead role. On this feature, Schmidt applied his ‘Workshop’ techniques to solo directing, shooting and conceiving in a breezy, improv style while still creating traditional storytelling plot points, mannered film cuts, and a concise narrative flow toward an ending or “non-ending” climax.
Vic Skolnick, now-deceased co-director of Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington, NY, who presented Schmidt’s features for an early retrospective in the 1990s, valued the manner in which ‘Schmidt fashions a creative weave out of the threads of narrative, documentary, and docu-drama film forms (SEE REVIEW BELOW):
“Thirty-five plus years after his 1975 feature filmmaking debut, American Independent Rick Schmidt remains a free-wheeling derring-do filmmaker holding fast to the notion that people’s real lives are more truly dramatic, hilarious, exciting and as exasperating as those manufactured by Hollywood’s minions. Most everyone falls in and out of love, rejects and gets rejected, contends with failure and success, hatred, ambition, the death of loved ones...It’s all there. To capture real life on film, Schmidt fashions a creative weave out of the threads of narrative, documentary, and docu-drama film forms. His actors draw on their own experience enabling him to create a unique blend of fact and fiction. In the end, Schmidt makes art and life intermingle and imitate each other. Aware that the American Dream factory financiers would never fund his films, Schmidt, undeterred, remains the maven of low, low-budget feature filmmaking.” — Vic Skolnick, CINEMA ARTS CENTRE
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(Looks like STICKY WICKET is the only feature from USA on this”Nominations” list for BEST FEATURE!
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“Rick Schmidt, whose Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices is the undisputed champ of low-budget bibles, was the guru of choice for many of today’s top indie moviemakers long before this new trend (DV) began.” — MOVIEMAKER MAGAZINE
RICK SCHMIDT'S MOVIEMAKING WEBSITE (in development).
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