Thursday, 6/5/97 Student finances six-year-old dream of
movie-making with winnings Messina features stories from his own
life in ‘Grandma and Me’
By John Nein Daily Bruin Contributor It’s a crazy thing trying
to finance a film. Thumbing through a book on the plight of
independent, guerrilla filmmaking will offer up some fairly insane
stories, like people crashing their cars for the insurance money,
people absconding with college trust fund money and a litany of
equally ludicrous but impassioned efforts to extract funds from
rarely seen, distant relatives. Biagio Messina, a student in the
UCLA theater department, has wanted to make a film about his
grandmother for about six years and he had a couple of ideas about
raising the cash. "I’ll donate a lot of blood and maybe some sperm.
I’ll donate my liver. Me and my cousin thought we could rob a
grocery store in West Virginia." And who knows what he might have
done were it not for the cool $38,000 he won on a now defunct
Dreamworks game show last winter – the biggest winner in its
short-lived history. "I think that was God saying, ‘don’t sell your
liver.’ " The beneficiary of this divine intervention is "Me and
Grandma," a script and soon-to-be feature film which Messina wrote
about, and for, his grandmother, a Sicilian immigrant to America
who settled in the heartland town of Parma, Ohio. A largely
autobiographical work, "Me and Grandma" began as a play which went
on to win several awards, including the Young Playwrights Award in
Cleveland. The story focuses on a boy who, in the midst of his
parents’ divorce, moves in with his Sicilian grandmother. He
endures a coming-of-age journey lined with the eccentricities of
his grandma, a best friend who drives him crazy and the pangs of a
first love. For Messina and producer Joke Fincioen, also in the
theater department, the game-show bounty, with a slice of their own
money thrown in, was enough to set the production in motion.
Messina and director of photography Sheldon Gleisser began shooting
what will ultimately be the flashback sequences to Sicily, using
locations in Griffith Park and San Bernadino and an old-fashioned
Bolex wind-up camera for its slightly antiquated look. The rest of
the film will be shot in Parma, Ohio from mid-June to mid-July.
With Messina taking one of the lead roles and his father playing
himself, the critical casting issue took center stage. "I thought
the hardest part was going to be finding the grandma," Messina
says. "We had more than 1,000 submissions. The Sicilian accent is
so crucial and I didn’t think we were going to find anybody who
could pull off the accent." But taking center stage is exactly what
grandma did. From the stacks of headshots, the very first woman to
audition was Elena Stewart. Not much after that mattered; she was
the one. "What is really nice about her is that she has it all
inside her," Fincioen points out. "We had to make sure she didn’t
go over the top, but it’s all there. She doesn’t fight and she’s so
excited to hear about this stuff. She opens her body to it and it
just clicks." Each weekend, Messina and Fincioen drive to Stewart’s
house in San Bernadino where they work on character, talk about
back story and rehearse scenes. And as "All in the Family" as a
film can be, the two stay for the whole weekend to the tune of
home-cooked meals in between work and play. Messina doesn’t run
into much trouble working out the finer points of the story with
any of the actors. "The one thing I can always fall back on is real
life. I know the back story because I lived it. If there’s a
question, I have an answer." Fincioen nods, "He always has an
answer." Fincioen grew up in Belgium. After a handful of recent
articles by the regional press covering her efforts to produce the
film, she doesn’t have any praise for her home-town’s attitude.
"They said what I thought were dreams, were purely illusions. It
made me so mad about the mentality they have," she says. "There’s
no opportunity and people don’t encourage you. There’s two movies
every year and they both have the same cast." The road has not been
all roses for Messina either. "I’ve gotten a lot of flak from some
of the film people here. They’ll ask, ‘Have you ever directed
before?’ It’s not that I resent the question. But I have a vision
and I feel like six years is a good investment." Fincioen met
Messina the first week of classes. Working out of production
‘offices’ ranging from dorm rooms and apartments to Messina’s
cousin’s house in Parma, they have assembled a crew of dedicated
friends. "Everybody involved is really committed to it. They’re
young and it’s a nice environment. If somebody makes a mistake,
it’s not serious. It’s nice to know that you have people you can
count on." The production team comes from both here and Ohio.
Jeremy Elwood and Christopher Messina serve as associate producers
and Mickee Schwinn plays the best friend, Brad. In Parma, Eddy
Tomecko is the sound designer and Mark Mitchell the editor. The
music, which Messina has already recorded, comes through
collaboration with UCLA student Spencer Lee, who wrote guitar music
for the film. "My whole idea was, I wanted to go with the clash of
cultures," Messina explains. "I don’t want people to watch the
movie and say it’s a whole bunch of Sicilians. I want them to watch
it and say it’s a bunch of people. I wanted to avoid the obvious
choices, you know." Following the charmed example of Ed Burns,
director of "The Brothers McMullen," Messina has big plans for "Me
and Grandma" and for the future. "My dream from day one has been to
go to Sundance and to win, so I look at guys like him and Kevin
Smith (the director of "Clerks"), and I think, ‘they really pulled
it off.’ "I wanted to make a film about my grandmother and now I’m
going to do it," Messina concludes. "And I wanted her to see it. I
feel that’s why it’s happening." Characters depict a Sicilian
flashback in Messina’s "Me and Grandma." Theater student Biagio
Messina acts in his film, "Me and Grandma". Related links: UCLA
School of Theater, Film, and Television