The three of us – Lisa, Jenn, and John – love working together and we’ve teamed up to make a new feature film with Seattle talent called BROWN’S CANYON. Lisa and Jenn are seasoned actors who also produce through BASH Theatre, and John is an independent director, screenwriter and editor. In 2014, John made an indie feature – developed through improvisation with the actors, and shot in the neighborhoods of Seattle – called PHOEBE’S FATHER, which premiered last month at the NYC Independent Film Festival.
Soon after PHOEBE’S was finished, Lisa and Jenn proposed a new idea: let’s do another movie, also created through improvisation, and let’s shoot entirely in one house in the Utah mountains. We were off and running.
We couldn’t wait to dive back into this process, and to create a new story together from the ground up. We brought on three more actors – Sara Thiessen, Carter Rodriquez, and Eric Jordan – and started work in the fall of 2014. For several months, the five actors and John met several times a week as we evolved the backstory and relationships of the characters. Come January, we moved into the scripting phase, and began finding our talented crew, including cinematographer Ryan McMackin.
We started shooting February 20, with cast and crew living and working together 24/7. We picked our team well – everyone worked together great, solving problems collaboratively, and we got all our footage in ten days of shooting!
The story we discovered is this: two self-help gurus set out to host a women’s retreat at a remote mountain home. When one of their husbands and his ski bum friend show up, things start to fall apart – the road washes out and the motley group of friends is trapped. A secret emerges and resentments surface, as they spend a weekend pulling apart a tangle of love, friendship, failure and desire. At the core, Brown’s Canyon is about these characters coming to terms with how life hasn’t turned out like they’d planned, and having to navigate a new reality. These are ideas we’ve loved digging into, and think audiences will too.
We love movies about real-life characters in situations we all relate to; but it’s all too rare to see this kind of work in movies these days. We think the process we’ve built up is the best way to achieve these kinds of stories and performances. We want to keep making these movies with a network of talented actors and committed crew. It’s like a repertory company for cinema – with a mission to create honest, funny, compelling stories about what it is to be human.
We’re asking for your help now to cross the finish line on BROWN’S CANYON post-production – to complete the edit, compose music, mix the audio, and color correction. All these pieces cost money and they’re essential to turning our footage into a movie, a story you can experience in the theater or at home.
Bash Theatre, the producing partner for BROWN’S CANYON, is a 501 (C) (3) non-profit and as such all donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Tax ID # 61-1505951
Thanks so much for joining with us in this last push to complete BROWN’S CANYON!
Your love and support mean the world to us.
– Lisa, Jenn, and John