Kyle Prado and Carson Grant (Stonepark Productions)
Stonepark Productions premieres their debut feature One Penny tomorrow night at the DC Independent Film Festival. More than two years in the making, the project fulfills a long held dream for director Michael DeVita and producer David A. Melendez. Best friends since high school, DeVita and Melendez also co-wrote the film. But they never went to film school, and took an unusual path to their first feature: real estate.
DeVita was five years old when he started to dream of making a movie, creating the kind of fully developed world in his favorite movie, Star Wars. Melendez had always wanted to be an entertainer, a comedian; his biggest influence as a film maker was American Beauty, which he first saw when he was 17.
The friends were still in their teens when they combined forces and started making short films, but soon their passion became expensive beyond their means. To finance bigger projects, DeVita, whose stepfather was in construction, suggested they buy a house and flip it. Melendez was 19 and DeVita 21 when they flipped their first house, and another, and then four more.
They began to flip houses before the real estate bubble burst, at a time when it was easier to get loans. When the market tanked, Melendez (who’s now 30) and DeVita remembered why they were doing this in the first place: to make movies. So around 2008, they started to put money aside for equipment.
The real life experience may have been more valuable than an NYU degree. “A lot of the real estate practices that I learned,” Melendez says,”—managing crews, negotiating deals, construction—a lot of that applied to movie making. Real estate wasn’t my passion, but it was something I was interested in, and it made us money and gave us the ability to make a feature film.”
That feature is One Penny, part coming-of-age film, part action movie. It tells the story of Dylan (Harrison Samuels), who was abandoned as a young boy after the murder of his mother. Young Dylan (played by Kyle Prado) is taken in by a homeless man known as the Professor (Carson Grant), who has a mysterious past.
Will Roland and Harrison Samuels (Stonepark Productions)
Much of the film takes place among the residents of a tent community called Shepherd’s Cove, where Dylan and his friend Collin (Will Roland) live and try to develop a plan to help their homeless friends become more self-sufficient. (Stonepark has since partnered with Interfaith Works, an organization that works to empower the homeless.) The film was shot on locations around the D.C./Baltimore area, a number of which came about through the real estate connections the filmmakers had made over the years.
The film shoot took 40 days, six days a week, with working days running sometimes 18 to 20 hours long. Production costs were just under $250 thousand, “ultra low budget’ as Melendez describes it, but that figure was kept down in part because the filmmakers didn’t pay themselves.
Grant, who has worked in theater and has a long career as a character actor including a bit part in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, was a lucky find for the filmmakers. “He taught us a lot on set and was a mentor to a lot of the young actors. This was our first feature, and he really knew the business.”
While DeVita and Melendez bonded over their love of movies, their friendship strengthened over another activity that fueled their film’s action sequences. For ten years, the friends studied Kung Fu.
“We’ll always want a bad-ass actions scene in our movies,” Melendez says. “It doesn’t matter what kind of movie. If we make a romance, we’d have a fight scene.”
One Penny is the realization of a dream, but it hasn’t been easy. “When you’re young you have all these dreams, but when you get older it gets harder to attain,” says Melendez.
Still, it’s been worth it. “Mike and I have tried things to get rich quick, but it doesn’t work. You gotta do what you love.”
One Penny premieres on February 16 at 7 p.m. at the Miracle Theatre. Buy tickets here.
