Who Needs Matt and Ben?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Filmmaker and Project Greenlight documentary star Pete Jones is back, thanks to Judy Baar Topinka and the family and friends who’ve bankrolled his latest effort, which will premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival October 10. After winning the first Project Greenlight script competition in 2001, Jones got to make his entry, Stolen Summer, into a movie that ultimately bombed while his directorial missteps were showcased for a national television audience. Then the 34-year-old Deerfield native fell off the radar for a while. He wrote another film–a “rotten” attempt at a new Diner, he says–and wasted some time on television concepts that didn’t go anywhere, but mostly he downed Frappuccinos, played Xbox, and lied to his wife about how he was spending his days. Eventually he sat down to write a commercial script about an Irish Catholic family in Chicago. No surprise there–that’s the same autobiographical ground he mined in Stolen Summer–but Jones says he became fascinated with how this family would react if one of the kids turned out to be gay, and that character’s “comedic but real” story took over. He shopped it around LA, where he now lives, under the title “Doubting Riley,” only to find no studio would touch it. “They said they loved the writing, loved the characters, they’re just not looking to go in this direction,” he says. “The studios don’t believe mainstream America is ready for real gay relationships.”
Jones rushed to meet last year’s Sundance Film Festival October submission deadline. “I had two days in the editing room and sent them an hour-and-53 minute film,” he says. After it was rejected, he cut it to an hour and 27 minutes, and in August he had a screening in LA for potential distributors. The hope was that one of them would pick it up, paying enough to settle the loan and pay back the investors. Jones says there were offers that included a 10- or 20-city release, which sounded good to him, but the up-front money–less than half the movie’s cost–wasn’t enough. Going directly to cable would have brought in more, but he says the investors, including family members who “were let down by the [lackluster] marketing Miramax put into Stolen Summer, are looking for someone to come in and really be behind the film.” Now he’s counting on a positive response at the festival to help land a deal.
