West Michigan goes Hollywood

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - The first feature-length film to be made by students at a Michigan university begins shooting this month in West Michigan.

Grand Valley State University’s Summer Film Project, “To Live and Die in Dixie,” is drawing professional actors from Hollywood, Chicago, Detroit and Grand Rapids. The production crew of more than 60 students will work with four professionals, including Director (John) Harper Philbin from Grand Valley and Director of Photography Jack Anderson from Hollywood.

“This is terrific,” said Michigan Film Office Director Janet Lockwood. “While other, much larger, schools have programs in film theory, I consider Grand Valley to have the best true film program in Michigan.” Lockwood gives a lot of credit to the determination of Philbin. “He has spent years seeing this project through to fruition,” said Lockwood.

Established in 1995, the GVSU Summer Film Project has offered junior and senior students in the School of Communications an opportunity to work side-by-side with professionals to produce a 30-minute film in 12 weeks. Now in its 13th year, the project will produce its first ever feature-length motion picture.

The screenplay, written by distinguished novelist John Dufresne, a creative writing professor at Florida International University, and Donald Papy, a lawyer in Miami, is a true crime story about a murder on a college campus.
"It involves the women's basketball team - a love triangle with two of the players and the killer, who is the boyfriend of one of the women," said Dufresne, who will have a small role as a college professor in the film.

Los Angeles actor Scott Lowell, best known for his lead role of Ted
Schmidt in Showtime’s “Queer As Folk,” plays the detective. Marcus Hendricks, a professional actor from Chicago, plays the killer Bowie. Heather Prete, who worked with Arthur Miller, plays Eve, the university secretary who becomes consumed by the murder case. Filming begins June 16.

For more information contact John Harper Philbin at (616) 331-3668 or visit www.gvsu.edu/filmvideo .

Photo caption: Hollywood actor Scott Lowell, who plays detective Bryant, is one of the many professional actors appearing in “To Live and Die in Dixie,” GVSU’s first feature-length film production