STICKY WICKET Director’s Statement By Rick Schmidt
In the small town of Brunswick, Maine, a women-only croquet club is seemingly the only organized resistance to a corporate takeover by a invading Cineplex movie chain. In it’s direct path is a 100 seat, hippie-built theatre called the Eveningstar Cinema, somehow crunched into a jewelry-store-sized space in the basement of a local Maine St. mall (in this town, Main street is named Maine St.). Brunswick is home to Bowdoin College, which inadvertently supplied three of our ‘Croquet Club’ players
This local “hippie” movie house is owned and operated by a film aficionado, BARRY NORMAN, who is barely holding on. He’s too tall for the 6’ high upstairs projection booth (he’s 6’5”), and too old to be carting around the heavy reels back and forth between projectors and rewinds (over 50, with two hernias in as many years). Run in shifts by a cadre of devoted twenty-somethings, the tiny cinema has a youthful and devoted crew, perhaps because workers know it is one of the last theaters in the US to be screening actual film prints since the advent of the digital revolution. Strips of 35MM film gets threaded on archaic arc projectors by Norman and these minimum-wagers – machines located up steep, worn wooden steps, positioned just feet away from the cash register below, near where popcorn with real butter is made available to the aging ‘art-house’ clientele.
Assoc. Producer/Cinematographer, Sarah Childress, acts the role of Vice President, Women-Only Croquet Club, Brunswick, Maine, and runs the important croquet game(s).
At the head of this croquet gang is a muscle-car driver, Sarah, who reports in to the club’s president, Kay, at her grand perch above historic Cundy’s Harbor, her home stationed above a lobster trap-filled pier. As the Cineplex deadline approaches, future plans are made for a big croquet showdown at city hall, where Sarah later gives her spiel on ‘Rules of the Game.’ All Croquet Club rules are Rule #1, including, “A stoke must be a blow, not a push,” told as double-entendre for battling the big, bad cineplex developer. At any rate, Norman struggles to accept that his only hedge against Cineplex developers is a rag-tag group of female croquet players. It’s apparent that this women-only club has been in effect since the 1800s.
Ironically, the architect of the new 3-screen cineplex, Paul, is married to Dorothy, one of the club’s most vocal and fanatical protestors. When she learns the mall’s video store is also trying to put her beloved Eveningstar out of business, renting the same movies playing there at 3-for-a-dollar, she joins Cinema manager/projectionist, Gracia, for a protest match there, later blocking the entrance with a sign that reads, “Stop All Wars…Or Else,” bracketed by threatening croquet mallets on each side.
Real-life stories abound in this narrative mix (writer/director Schmidt’s trademark), from which we get added background on the characters. We learn that Kay’s house burned down, almost with her and her young brother inside, also how Eveningstar employee Gracia saved a friend from riptide. Jesse, another projectionist, tells about a unexpected knee injury and being surrounded in a doctor’s office with star athletes. Norman story––he tells of once being a ‘golden-boy’ district manager for a Fortune 500 corporation––adds some logic to his secret decisions regarding the overall movie-exhibition enterprise.
As the narrative winds down, with croquet balls smacked to the tune of ‘Drive That Fast by UK band Kitchen's of Distinction, it begins to dawn on us that maybe these mallet-wielding women can get the job done. And they do.
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“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.
Dorothy Fortin (left) and Gracia Babbidge features on STICKY WICKET poster.
“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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PRAISE FOR SCHMIDT’S MOVIE, MORGAN'S CAKE, and book, Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices (Viking Penguin, ©1988, 1995, 2000)
“Schmidt’s Morgan’s Cake is a deadpan, unpretentious delight. The title character, played by the film maker’s son, Morgan Schmidt-Feng, is no less comically out of sync with the world around him than the gorilla-suited David Warner character in the 1966 movie for which Morgan was named. Morgan’s Cake adopts his point of view and reflects his bewilderment in sly, fresh, unexpectedly comic ways. One of the most promising films of this year’s New Directors/New Films series.”
— Janet Maslin, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“At last there’s a film (MORGAN'S CAKE) about adolescence that resounds with truth and humor.”— DENVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
“This is Schmidt’s personal attempt to answer his son’s and other young people’s questions: to understand what these kids really want out of life and what motivates them.”— BERLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
“Rick Schmidt’s approach to independent filmmaking doesn’t aim to beat down the doors to Hollywood. His latest “no-budget” film (Morgan’s Cake) has a refreshingly personal point of view and captures sympathetically and with quiet humor the life of a late-’80s California teenager.” (Nominated for GRAND JURY PRIZE, DRAMATIC COMPETITION, 1989)— Lawrence Smith, SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
“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———
The Films of Rick Schmidt, 1975-2015 (click HERE for book on Kindle)
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Barry Norman, lead actor/co-producer, STICKY WICKET (seen here in-character as owner of a small independent movie theatre under siege from a cineplex),i s also know for his series of books, mostly based on his own life’s adventures.
SEE Full Movie HERE: Sticky Wicket
STICKY WICKET (<https://vimeo.com/ondemand/stickywicket>), a CROQUET COMEDY (71 min. ©2015) written/directed by Rick Schmidt, Sandy Entertainment & Feature Workshops. STARRING: Barry Norman.