Heartland Film Festival 2009

Bobby and Kevin Downes, producers of the Official Selection Dramatic Feature Like Dandelion Dust, first heard about author Karen Kingsbury’s work through their wives, who heard Karen speak at a women’s retreat.

Their wives pushed them to make a movie based on one of Karen’s novels and they eventually decided on Like Dandelion Dust. Karen has written 40 novels and has sold around 15 million copies of her books!

Bobby and Kevin, introducing the film at one of the screenings earlier in the week, said they are hoping to release the film nationally in either March or September of 2010 and are hoping to adapt more of Karen’s novels for the big screen in the future!

Did you know that Mark St. Germain, director of My Dog, asked people he knew to be in his film about celebrities and their dogs? The film features segments with stars like Richard Gere, Glenn Close and Greg Louganis talking about their relationships with their dogs.

Mark St. Germain, in a Q&A session conducted by cell phone with Jeff Sparks after yesterday’s screening, said that he was also a contributing writer for this year’s Opening Night Event film Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (which just happened to feature Richard Gere!)

My Name is Jerry is one of the only feature length films to be entirely funded by a university. It took director Morgan Mead two years to convince Ball State University to fund the film, but once it got going they shot the film in only 21 days!

They bought in only a couple of professionals from the movie industry for the filming. A crew of about 60 students filled out the rest of the production staff. They had to go through a two week boot camp prior to filming!

Morgan, alongside story-creator Andrew Janoch, created the film as a showcase for actor Doug Jones. They wanted to develop a role and a film to showcase his actual face (Doug has appeared in most of his films under heavy plastic makeup, such as when he played The Silver Surfer in F4: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Abe Sapien in Hellboy and Hellyboy 2: The Golden Army.) Doug has stated that he is eternally grateful to Morgan for the opportunity!