Hollywood stars coming to Columbus for filming of modern-day Romeo and Juliet movie
Marketed as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet tale, this movie featuring Hollywood stars is set to be filmed in Columbus early next year.
Academy Award nominee Eric Roberts (“Runaway Train”), French Stewart (“3rd Rock from the Sun”) and Quinton Aaron (“The Blind Side”) are billed as the top actors in the cast of the movie with “Caketown” as its title.
Other actors listed in the cast so far are Elizabeth Posey (“Euphoria”), Eva Hamilton (“The Swing of Things”), Andrew Kai (“Valley Girl”), Paige Searcy (“Days of Our Lives”) and Eric Martinez (“Better Call Saul”).
According to the summary on the IMDB website, the story is centered around a fallen athlete who becomes a drug dealer and meets a high school senior “with the right zip code searching for something real.”
Filming is on track to start in January or February at Flat Rock Studio, Catalyst Productions CEO John Mock told the Ledger-Enquirer. Locations for exterior scenes haven’t been finalized but will include A.J. McClung Memorial Stadium because football is part of the storyline, he said.
“We’ll put a call out for extras to fill the stadium and probably get two of the (local) high school teams for the football scenes,” he said.
Catalyst cofounder J. Penberth “Jason” Rabold is the movie’s director and writer.
“We initially were going to film in western Pennsylvania,” Mock said, “but once we saw the studio and drove around here, the director was like, ‘This is what I want. This is great.’ … And the Georgia tax credit is phenomenal.”
The state offers qualified productions a 20% income tax credit and an additional 10% if the finished product includes an embedded Georgia Entertainment Promotion logo and a link to ExploreGeorgia.org/Film on the landing page of the project’s website.
Catalyst Productions is moving its headquarters to Columbus from Pittsburgh and plans for this move to be the first of many it films here. Catalyst is negotiating with the W.C. Bradley Company to become the manager of Flat Rock Studio, Mock said, and signed a lease in August for its production office to be at Heritage Tower in downtown.
W.C. Bradley Real Estate president Pace Halter told the L-E in an email Monday, “I would categorize the two statements regarding Flat Rock as inaccurate. We have had one meeting with the principals of Catalyst, but there is no agreement in place with Flat Rock Studio for filming or management. We are excited about having Catalyst in Columbus and look forward to hopefully working with them on their projects.”
Asked for Catalyst’s response, Mock told the L-E in an email Monday, “We are very excited to produce movies and TV shows in Columbus and to have the opportunity to work with a great company like W.C. Bradley, who’s clearly invested in making Columbus a great place to live and work. We look forward to continuing the dialogue with them.”
The “Caketown” title comes from the term that’s used in western Pennsylvania to describe the wealthy part of a town, Mock said. The movie title is sometimes stylized as “Cake(town).”
Kai will play the male lead in the movie, Mock said, “and we’re working right now on the female lead.”
Catalyst has secured a “nationally known” executive producer for the movie, Mock said, but he wasn’t at liberty to disclose the name yet.
The movie’s budget is approximately $1.7 million, Mock said, and it’s targeted to be released in theaters next summer after being shown at film festivals.
“We’ve raised good bit of private equity already, which has allowed us to get to this stage, to the presales and minimum guarantees,” he said. “The extra financing our partner brings to the table, that’ll be all secured and wrapped up in a month.”
Catalyst also is seeking an incentive grant from the Columbus Film Fund to help the production pay for costs associated with filming the movie here, Mock said. Columbus Film Commission president Peter Bowden told the L-E in an email Tuesday, “This is an evolving series of conversations and hope to have something finalized very soon.”
Columbus State University being one of the sites for the Georgia Film Academy is another asset in the local film industry that attracted Catalyst.
“We have not started the conversation with them yet,” Mock said, “but that is a key piece of our business plan to help grow that local talent and keep it in the area.”
Origin and message of the “Caketown” movie
Rabold has worked for more than 15 years as a director, first assistant director or unit production manager on music videos, short films and features in the Los Angeles area. He directed the short film “Connected,” which won the runner-up jury prize and runner-up best visuals award from the 2019 Filmmakers Collaboration Challenge. His writing for the TV series “Ghosts of War” received second-round recognition at the 2021 Austin Film Festival, and his writing for “Caketown” won the Screenplay of the Month award in January at the Festigious International Film Festival.
But he yearned to remake a timeless story.
“I always wanted to adapt Romeo and Juliet in a fresh way,” he told the L-E.
Rabold moved back to Pennsylvania in 2020 after reconnecting with his high school sweetheart, Shannon, who became his wife. While coaching kickers on the Newcastle High School football team in 2021, he heard eight gunshots a block away during a practice.
“I hit the deck,” he recalled. “… The player I was coaching looked at me, and he was like, ‘What are you doing, Coach? This is life in Newcastle.’ I got up, and everyone is just practicing like normal. That resonated with me.”
And so did the opiod epidemic and the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots in Newcastle.
“If everything around you is destroyed,” he wondered, “how do you find love in a place like that?”
Rabold started writing “Caketown” in November 2021, and he finished the script in only one month.
“It definitely flew,” he said. “I kind of just let the characters do the talking, and it really kind of molded itself from there.”
The message he wants folks to get from the movie, Rabold said, is “really a story of hope, about finding love in even the darkest moments in our lives and being able to hold on to that and allow that to not be defined by our circumstances — where we’re born, what we’re doing — but being able to understand that life’s bigger than that, and letting love destroy us in the most profound and deep way can be very powerful.”
By destruction, Rabold said, he means “allowing all of those preconceptions and all of those judgments to be destroyed and to create something new and better. It’s a beautiful thing.”
This story was originally published October 10, 2022 at 12:08 PM.
