GREENFIELD — A short film shot in downtown Greenfield in 2017 is generating new buzz after past media coverage started re-circulating online last week.
Director Cameron Grimm — who filmed “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” based on a Stephen King story of the same name — laughed when asked if the social media buzz was the result of a clever media ploy on behalf of his company, 5 after 5 Productions.
“It seems to just be happening organically,” said Grimm, who has had dozens of friends and followers reach out to him since the posts started circulating.
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“Friends at work and various people have said they’ve seen it being shared on their feeds. It’s been crazy,” Grimm said last week. “I think it’s blowing up more than it did the last time it was online.”
Since a friend first tagged him on a three-year-old Facebook post about his short film, Grimm has received an onslaught of emails from people wanting to share their screenplays with Grimm or somehow get involved with his production company, which is based out of his home in New Castle.
As a child growing up in Greenfield and then New Castle, Grimm always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. He got his shot in 2017 when he was granted permission to shoot a short film based on Stephen King’s short story, “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” through a program sanctioned by King called Dollar Babies.
The program invites aspiring filmmakers to apply for the chance to make a movie adaptation of various stories written by King, a native New Englander who spent part of his youth visiting family in nearby Fort Wayne.
Grimm was thrilled with the finished project, which he is told now sits on a shelf in King’s office in Maine. Unfortunately, the Dollar Babies program requires that the film not be shown publicly but instead be kept under wraps to be entered into film festivals.
For now, the movie has only been seen by Grimm and a handful of his production associates.
On the bright side, the film kick-started his production company, which has since completed five or six more projects and is working on seven or eight new projects this year.
On Jan. 20, the company released a short film called “Wing Chun,” based off Bruce Lee’s martial arts, onto YouTube.
This spring, Grimm will finish filming a Christian film called “I Only Want You,” which features local talent including Patty Spitler from WISH-TV; Don Stuck from WFBQ-FM, and Morgan Pyle, a young actress who appeared in the Netflix Ted Bundy biopic released last year.
Grimm’s company is also developing a TV pilot based off a short film set in North Carolina, and a 30-minute animated film called “Cookies” that he hopes will make it big. “It’s going to take two to three years to finish because animation takes a very long time, but we think it’s going to be huge once we get done,” he said.
Last winter, Grimm shot a web series in Indianapolis called “Paragenics,” a horror/sci-fi series about Indiana superheroes.
“I like to stay busy,” said Grimm, who spends his days working as a machinist in Markleville but his nights focused on family and filmmaking.
Grimm had a blast shooting “The Man Who Loved Flowers” in downtown Greenfield in 2017. Having lived here until the age of 11, he was familiar with the city’s quaint, picturesque Main Street lined with historic buildings and homes.
“We picked it because it was a very Stephen King-esque type of downtown, with a small-town, historic feel,” he said. “Even my crew came in the first day and said ‘This really feels like a Stephen King kind of town,’” he said, referring to the New England author’s penchant for setting stories in charming small towns.
With their film location determined, the company spent roughly $750 on props and equipment, raising some money from T-shirt sales. The actors and crew members were all volunteers, mostly assembled after a two-day casting call at the Hancock County Public Library in Greenfield. Most actors were from Greenfield and Indianapolis, said Grimm.
While filming, Grimm was blown away by the local hospitality as much as the scenery.
“Greenfield opened their arms to us, and we’re forever grateful for all the support we had,” said Grimm, who filmed nearly the entire short film in a one-block stretch of Main Street, between State and Pennsylvania streets, mostly on the sidewalks in front of the assorted shops and restaurants.
Curious onlookers would grab a table on the patio at Griggsby’s Station restaurant to get a first-hand view of the action during filming, recalled Grimm, who was allowed to do some filming on the patio.
The owner at Lincoln Square Pancake House let the production company film a diner scene inside the restaurant, and Hancock Regional Hospital staff let the crew film an office scene there. A few key scenes were also filmed at the Bradley Hall event center.
The staff at Hometown Classic Pizza gave the crew free pizza, and the owners at Andree’s Florist donated the flowers used in the film’s opening scene.
“We did it as a thank you for bringing something cool like this to our community,” said Jill Johnson, who provided the pizza. “We wanted to make them feel welcome and to show them some appreciation, because they surely brought business to other places here in the community while they were here,” she said.
Karen Maslek, owner of the florist that provided two buckets of flowers for the shoot, also relished the chance to support the film crew. “We are all here for the same goal, to generate good exposure for downtown Greenfield, so anytime we can pull together to support something like this, we’re happy to do it,” she said.
Grimm still marvels at the downtown merchants’ show of support. “People would hang out of the windows of the buildings to watch us film. Everybody was just completely open to us coming in and doing what we were doing,” he recalled.
That’s not to say their filming didn’t cause some concern. “We’re doing a horror movie about a guy with a hammer who is killing people, so at times we had people walking around in makeup with their eyes gouged. We saw a few people speed by in their cars a little freaked out, but mostly people were intrigued. The overall experience was awesome,” said Grimm, who isn’t allowed to profit from the film.
Rather, Dollar Babies gives budding filmmakers a chance to make films that will hopefully help grow their companies, which has certainly been the case for Grimm.
While he’s disappointed he can’t yet share his King-inspired film publicly, he was thrilled with the learning process as well as the finished product. The film mostly followed King’s original story, but Grimm had creative license to write a couple of new scenes to help the story transition from the page to the screen.
Grimm said the overall filmmaking experience, set on the streets of his hometown, was an experience he’ll never forget. “It’s the most amazing thing, seeing the words come to life and jump from the page to the screen. There was no greater feeling until I got to the editing process, which was an equally awesome experience. It made me realize this is what I’m meant to do with my life,” he said.
His daughter has even caught the filmmaking bug, recently shooting a 60-second horror film she submitted to an online film contest.
Grimm will forever be grateful to the friend who first told him about the Dollar Babies filmmaking opportunity, which essentially launched his career. While he hasn’t heard from King personally since submitting the movie, Grimm feels encouraged by the fact King’s publisher liked the film enough to invite him to enter it into film festivals, a privilege not granted to all Dollar Babies filmmakers.
“Knowing our film was green-lit to be entered into film festivals tells us it has to be good enough for (King) and his publisher to let us do that, and that feels great,” said Grimm.
“In the meantime we’ll just keep doing what we love, and hopefully all this will take us to the next level someday. We believe in making dreams happen for people who want to be a part of this industry.”
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