Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic, November 2, 2007
Actors who have been
in the movie business a while know that sometimes
you can't just wait for the work to come to you.
Sometimes, you've got to go make the work yourself.
That hit veteran character actor D.B. Sweeney (
Eight Men Out, The Cutting Edge , TV's Harsh Realm
and Life as We Know It ) a couple of years ago. Into
his 40s (he's now 45), he figured he needed to write
and direct something.
"The roles available to me haven't been all that
great, with the best scripts always going to guys
named Tom, Russell, George and Tom first," he says.
"A script that passes through all those hands first,
before it gets to me, has got to have something
wrong with it.
"I just thought, 'I can write myself a better part
than that.' Directing and producing Two Tickets to
Paradise were just ways to get the project done."
Sweeney and his film are among the 19 feature films
showing Thursday- Nov. 11 in this year's Orlando
Film Festival.
Sweeney found a cheap location, Wilmington, N.C.,
that could double for everywhere from Pennsylvania
to North Florida. He cast the movie, a road
picture-midlife crisis comedy, with friends. "John
C. McGinley [Scrubs] and I went to NYU together. Ed
Harris and I did a Broadway tryout together back in
1984."
And he called on an old co-star to play his
character's wife, the one whose cheating inspires
Billy, a failed musician, to join his pals for a
road trip to a college bowl game. Moira Kelly and
Sweeney first worked together on the skating hit The
Cutting Edge back in 1992.
"We weren't going to do a sequel to The Cutting Edge
unless it was a good one. The scripts they offered
were bad, so when I put this movie together, I told
her 'Let's make this our informal sequel to Cutting
Edge.' "
The finished Two Tickets has shown in a few film
festivals, with Sweeney tinkering with it,
reshooting bits in Los Angeles and Miami. But even
though he hasn't sold it, it has paid off by raising
his profile. Will he be here to introduce it at the
Orlando Film Festival?
"That's up to Mr. Spike Lee," he says, laughing.
He's in Miracle at St. Anna, a World War II drama
about war, race and sunny Tuscany that Lee is
filming in Italy. Sweeney plays a colonel, "the one
white officer sympathetic to the plight of the black
soldier. A good part. I sort of get to explain the
movie to the audience. I'm hoping I'll be done in
time to fly to Orlando. It's going to be close,
though."
Sweeney is just one of the filmmakers expected to be
in attendance for this, the second year of the
Orlando Film Festival. Joe Pantoliano, star of
Canvas, will join the film's director Joseph Greco
for a Q & A. Documentary filmmaker John Lawrence is
here with I Am an American Soldier. Director Luis E.
Sala and his documentary film's subject, Luis
Martinez, will attend a showing of Lejos de la Isla.
They still don't have a real cinema as a venue,
thanks to the delays in the planned Plaza multiplex
downtown. But after a shaky, thinly attended first
year, the Orlando Film Festival is trying something
new to draw film-lovers downtown next weekend: free
movies.
No admission will be charged to the features and
five shorts programs shown at a couple of downtown
venues: City Arts Factory and The Gallery at Avalon
Island.
If you missed Taxi to the Dark Side at this year's
Global Peace Film Festival, it's back. If you worked
on and wondered whatever happened to the indie
comedy The Karaoke King (filmed in Orlando in 2005),
it's here.
Some other highlights:
'Nanking'
Website for this full article can be seen by clicking here!