July 7-13, 2005

cover story

Going Long

FEATURED PLAYERS: Carolina Roca-Smith (left) and Jessica Graham. Photo By: Manuel Dominguez Jr

Thirsty's makers turned a short film budget into a feature-film debut.

by Eliza Ludwig

"We wanted to do something big," says Jessica Graham, star, writer and producer of the ambitious full-length film Thirsty, which premieres July 16 at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. Made in Philadelphia, the feature is something of a rarity for the festival, which, for lack of more entries, traditionally shows only shorts by local filmmakers. "We knew we wouldn't be sitting here right now if we'd made a short," Graham quips.

To hear Graham and her girlfriend, Carolina Roca-Smith, the film's co-director and producer, tell it, making something big was no easy feat. Roca-Smith first met Graham, producing artistic director of Theater Catalyst and co-founder of the *girL* parties, two years ago. Roca-Smith had cut her teeth as an Air Force TV and radio producer covering Kosovo (in 2000, she was honored at the White House for her work). After leaving the military, she moved to Philly to get her degree at Temple. By 2003, she had finished her course-work but needed a good idea for a senior thesis film.

Around the same time, Roca-Smith's classmate Lauren Anderson showed her a script she'd written about Eileen, a young woman who goes camping with her soon-to-be-unemployed father and alcoholic stepmother. Several beers, whiskeys and joints later, the holiday becomes a dysfunctional, interpersonal nightmare of Blair Witch Project proportions.

Roca-Smith liked the script but she was not entirely sold on the idea of making a short film. "We decided that we had two options: We could make a 15-minute short and really perfect it over the course of a year, or we could trudge through and make a feature and a lot of mistakes and try to learn from them for our next project."

They chose the latter, with Anderson and Roca-Smith signing on as co-directors. A long film, they reasoned, would give them more leverage for marketing themselves professionally. But rather than expand the 25-page script into a two-hour feature, they decided it would be better to find two short vignettes to bookend Anderson's story. At Roca-Smith's prompting, another friend, playwright Gin Hobbs, conjured up Marty (played by Michele Guidry), a woman who has a cell phone-inspired meltdown in a fast-food drive-in and leaves a series of embarrassing messages on a stranger's machine. Roca-Smith then worked with Graham to write a third segment, a "lesbian Harold and Maude love story."

The writing was collaborative; Roca-Smith devised the plot on cocktail napkins at O'Shea's Pub and Graham reworked and edited the scenes. "Neither of us had ever written a script before and I really didn't know what I was doing but I certainly had some opinions," says Graham. In the end, the three stories were only schematically linked, with Eileen, Hannah and Marty all looking for some kind of emotional satisfaction they may or may not find. But the filmmakers saw them as a whole, finding subtle connections between them.

Scraping together a $13,000 budget from their own pockets and a few fundraisers, they recruited friends and colleagues working in local film and theater who were willing to do the movie for free. Roca-Smith stayed at Temple another year, taking schedule-fillers like gymnastics while the production got underway. Each story was filmed separately and then the three were edited together, intersplicing scenes to complement the tone and mood of each component.

As Roca-Smith had predicted, making a feature under temporal and financial constraints turned out to be an enormous challenge for a senior thesis project. While they had support from family and friends, the filmmakers also felt discouraged by teachers and friends who doubted their ability to complete the project. They also suffered from skepticism from within their own ranks. "We all took turns having freak-outs and saying it would never work. But there was always someone — nine times out of 10 it was Jess — who believed we would make it happen," says Roca-Smith. The production, which ran from October 2003 to March 2004, weathered on-set meltdowns and feuding cast and crew, and nearly destroyed Roca-Smith and Graham's relationship.

Yet they also encountered unexpected generosity from the local community. "We'd walk into places and we were just a bunch of dirty, tired filmmakers without a big production-company name behind us, but people just embraced us," says Roca-Smith. "The owner at Twenty-Two Gallery Cafe was great and let us set up shop. In Lancaster, another guy gave us his Dairy Queen for three days." The staff at PIGLFF, particularly Andrew Preis and Kelly Burkhardt, were helpful in getting the film finished.

From the beginning, the plan was to premiere the film at PIGLFF, but it was a decision that reflects the identity of the filmmakers more than the identity of the film. "There's no real coming-out story here, no gay-bashing," says Roca-Smith. While Eileen is a lesbian, her sexuality is incidental to her story, and we only hear vague references to past girlfriends. And Marty, the compulsive message-leaver, is ostensibly heterosexual. "I can just see people now at the festival screening saying, 'What was up with that straight girl?'" says Anderson. " But I think she is an entertaining character."

The only lesbian relationship in the film is the May-December romance between Hannah and Ava. In that segment, Ava (Susan Moses), a 65-year-old widow, meets Hannah (Graham), a vulnerable young woman fresh from a breakup, via a coffeehouse message board. Ava needs a roommate; Hannah needs a room; and they soon find themselves drawn to one another. "Some people have been really offended by the story and the age difference," says Graham, who admits she was nervous during the filming of the controversial scenes. Still, Graham and co-star Moses manage to bring truth to an unlikely scenario; their gentle performances make the fantasy oddly believable.

Since the film wrapped over a year ago, Anderson relocated to Boston, where she teaches, edits legal videos and waits tables. She is also writing screenplays and would like to experiment, interestingly enough, with writing horror films. Graham has been pursuing her acting career and is moving to Los Angeles at the end of the summer. She has already been featured in national commercials for AOL and Southwest Airlines and a short film also appearing in PIGLFF, Inclinations, where her character is a little less tentative than heartbroken Hannah. ("I play a sexpot and I make out with boys and girls," she says.) Roca-Smith has been busy directing shows for Eternal Spiral Project, a theater company co-founded in 2001 by Graham and Kirsten Quinn.

After sending Thirsty on the independent film festival circuit, all three are planning to reunite to work on another project, a heterosexual love story. "We already have the script, the actors, the crew. We just need funders," says Graham. This time around should be much easier. It's going to be a short.

Thirsty screens Sat., July 16, 9:30 p.m. at the Wilma Theater, 256 S. Broad St and Sun., July 17 at the Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.*girL* afterparty Sat., July 16, 10 p.m., at Sal's, 200 S. 12th St.