State-Journal.com - Nearly 400 attend Sellus' movie premiere

Photo By Hilly SchifferSellus Wilder greets Don Dykman of Frankfort, Dennis Van Horn of Frankfort and Susan Patrick of Lexington before they watch Wilder's movie, "The Dangers of Dreaming" at the Grand Theatre Friday night.

Photo By Hilly SchifferSean McNally, a cinematographer and co-producer, and Sellus Wilder, an actor, director, co-producer, writer and editor, answer questions about their movie, "The Dangers of Dreaming," at a premiere at the Grand Theatre Friday night.

On a rainy Friday evening nearly 400 tickets were sold to the premiere of Sellus Wilder’s first movie, “The Dangers of Dreaming,” at the 428-seat Grand Theatre.

Nancy Osborne, an attorney who worked in all three branches of state government before retiring last January, sat in the second row and loved it.

“I thought it was fab-u-lous – three words,” Osborne said just before leaving the theater. “It’s indescribable how exciting it is to have local talent of this caliber and sophistication.

“I’m not a film critic. I know nothing about films, but I liked the way it made me think, and I’m still not really sure about it all. I think I’m going to have to see it again. And I get to because I’ve already bought a DVD of the movie.”

The DVD can be purchased for $12 and Sellus – a Frankfort city commissioner who wrote the movie script in 2004 in his senior year at Beloit College in Wisconsin – said 45 movies were sold on opening night.

The second and final showing of the $10,000, 87-minute movie at the Grand was Saturday night.

The film combines romance, violence and humor, and is filled with familiar faces and locations in the capital where most of it was shot.

“I thought it was terrific,” said Nell Cox, a longtime filmmaker who lives on Wapping Street.

She liked the foot chase through the St. Clair parking garage, “and just the enterprise of getting all these people together and making a film like this,” Cox said. “It’s very complex. I think they did a great job.”

After the movie, Sellus and Sean McNally, the co-producers, went on stage and answered questions from the audience.

McNally, a Western Hills High School graduate who earned a degree in dramatic arts from Centre College, now works in audio production at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

McNally also was cinematographer for “Dangers of Dreaming,” and Sellus was a leading actor, director and editor.

Several of their college and hometown friends met in Frankfort in the summer of 2004 to work on the movie.

“It was an experience that was amazing and terrible at the same time,” said McNally. “It was a labor of love. It’s truly nice to finally be here. We had a lot of fun making it.”

Sellus said they had two incentives to make the movie.

“We wanted to learn how to do it, to get that real practical full-blown experience under our belt.

“And we wanted to create something we could use as a steppingstone to other projects, to create a calling card. That’s served us pretty well so far.”

A rough cut of the movie played at film festivals coast to coast in 2007, Sellus said.

“We were nominated for best sound track, best overall cast and best drama. We won an award for directing and won a couple of audience awards in best of festivals.”

He said $1-2 million movies are considered low budget, “and we won awards competing against some million dollar movies.”

Sellus said the biggest amateur mistake they made was, “in the first cut of the movie we included music we didn’t have the rights to. We thought it was a small enough, obscure enough band we could acquire the rights, but we were wrong.”

Five songs from two groups would have cost $250,000, so the soundtrack had to be changed, causing a major delay in the production, Sellus said.

Charles Riggs, local firearms advocate and instructor, had a brief role in the movie playing Reno, a tough black market gun dealer. His bright red and yellow house on West Fourth Street also was seen in the movie.

After watching the movie Friday, Riggs said, “I saw the original edit with the original soundtrack, and I know they agonized over the changes in the music, but this final edit was better. It was a distinct improvement. The integration of the music was more fitting.”

Sellus plays Max, a young man just out of college who develops the unfortunate ability to predict the future. His strange dreams include visions of his close friends getting killed on the side of the road by an eye-patched gunman.

The dreams also lead to misunderstandings with his new girlfriend, gun theft, escape from police and the long foot chase through downtown and the parking garage.

Other key Frankfort actors include Karen and Russ Hatter, Ross Wallace, Peter Ballman, Jackson King and Sarah Bishop.

Sellus’ weird dreams begin late one night after meeting a bag lady, played by Karen Hatter, in the Pic-Pac parking lot.

Russ Hatter is a veteran detective, Ballman is a young detective, King and Bishop are college friends leaving Frankfort for bigger places, and Wallace is Reno’s thug, who gets in the foot chase with Sellus.

“It was a joke for a while that the only real excuse for making the movie was to shoot the chase scene,” said Sellus, 28, a former cross-country runner at Frankfort High School.

“It took two or three weeks worth of work shooting the chase scene. I don’t think any of us realized how physically demanding the chase was going to be. It became clear it was going to be brutal, just the physical exertion.

“Ross was a trooper. Any number of people would have quit. We must have run all the way up the parking garage a dozen times, full sprint. I was so sore I could hardly walk the next day and we had to adjust our shooting schedule.”

The Dragon Pub on Main Street was Sellus and his friends’ favorite beer drinking spot.

“We were actually drinking cream soda,” said Sellus. “We had to keep people sober during all the repeated takes. And we got a little sick of the cream soda by the end of it.”

Most of The Dragon scenes were shot on one Sunday afternoon when the pub was closed to the public, Sellus said.

“The town was so supportive,” he said. “We couldn’t have made it without the special support of the community. The movie would have cost $100,000 if everybody had charged us the proper fees.”

Sellus said he plans to show the movie next in Lexington and Louisville.

“I would love for it to play at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington, but I don’t know if that will happen,” he said.

The Louisville Film Society and Lexington Film League are working to help him find venues. Sellus said he’s also grateful to 21C in Louisville “for donating the use of a high-end projector at The Grand Theatre.”

Sellus said he plans for the movie to play at other film festivals, “and we will be distributing it online, ourselves. We don’t have to sell that many copies to make back our $10,000.”

He said he’s also working on another movie script, “a sustainable thriller.”

“Conventional wisdom says you have to live in Los Angeles or New York to make movies,” Sellus said. “That might have been true at one time but in the digital age it’s certainly less true.

“I insist it’s possible to create a full-blown, sustainable film career while staying here in Franklin County. That’s really the goal. We want to make big, blockbuster movies, lots of them.”

McNally agreed, saying, “I prefer to live here. I tolerate Washington. We’re going to give it our best shot.”

Sellus said he hopes to someday make movies with his younger brother, Wilson Bessinger, who has a degree in filmmaking from Bard College in New York and is living in Los Angeles.

Sellus’ wife, Jessie Bessinger, said Friday, “I’m excited for Sellus. It’s a neat opportunity to get to show your movie in your hometown.”

She thought opening night “was a great success.”

A Purdue University environmental engineering graduate, Jessie is wet weather coordinator for the city sewer department.

She and Sellus took each other’s last name when they married in 2007, three years after the film was first shot.

Since she’s known him, filmmaking “has always been his passion and goal,” Jessie said. “He works really hard, and I do expect big things out of his movies at some point.”

Does she hope he becomes rich and famous?

Jessie laughed, while holding their 1-year-old daughter, Jamison Elise, in the lobby of the Grand.

“I’d like for him to be happy,” she said, smiling.

“And self-sustaining,” added Sellus.

In an interview a week earlier, Sellus was asked if one of his real dreams is to become rich and famous.

After a long pause, he said, “Not overtly, but I want to have a voice in the world and those are means to an end.”