At Home, On Location

Local filmmaker brings Blacksburg to the bigscreen.

It might look like Anytown, USA to viewers who don't know Blacksburg, but watching a Jack Bennett movie for those in and around the 16 blocks could best be described as a familiar experience.

Scenes dealing with misspent youth, unheralded creativity, and twenty-something romance are as familiar to Blacksburg residents as the places where they are shot, be it dinner at The Cellar, or an afternoon beer at The Underground. He will take a familiar foggy walk across the drillfield or hike around Mountain Lake and use them as the setting for macabre tales of murder in a B-grade horror-flick. It may even feel like you live in that apartment where the party sequence in Beast was shot, and that just might be yo u walking down Main Street in the background of a scene from The Goat.

With three full-length features in the can, another one in the editing stage, and a new movie in pre-production, Bennett has successfully eschewed New York and Hollywood to develop a burgeoning film career here. Quiet on the 16 Blocks, our de-facto local auteur is about to call "Action."

Write about what you know.

Seated among the flat-screens and high-end gear in Torgersen Hall's plush New Media Center, Bennett takes his headphones off. He clicks the mouse, freezing the image on the screen.

"It's about that point when you get strained because you're approaching the time where you can no longer call yourself a young and aspiring whatever," he said. "You get to a point that you think, 'Isn't it about time I became successful with what I'm doing?'"

Bennett was not speaking directly of himself, however, but describing the subject of his newest film The Goat. The film is based on a Noah Tyler short story about creative writing graduate students struggling with their identities and lack of success. Bennett continued voicing the internal conflict of the film's characters. "Is this what I should've been doing with my life? What sacrifices have I made? Did I give up too much, or do I even want to be a writer? Do I even enjoy it anymore?"

It is clear that Bennett has answered these questions for himself. He speaks confidently, keeping the natural feeling of self-doubt that surely comes with being a 29-year-old filmmaker working out of Blacksburg. And if Bennett's newly finished film is semi-autobiographical, he has clearly left that transitional stage of his life behind. Write about what you know is the line. Looking back at his body of work, it becomes apparent that Bennett has done just that.

Walking Shadows both on and off the screen.

Bennett stands tall above a red sea of empty seats in the darkened Lyric Theatre, his voice echoing off the dark screen, tall walls, and looming balcony. He is much at home here, both to the flicker of the camera directed at him, and to the airy confines of the nearly 100 year old building.

"I didn't have the kind of constitution where I could be drunk every time I wasn't working like a lot of my friends were doing," Bennett recalled bluntly, speaking of his college days at Virginia Tech. "I needed to find some activity that could be a reprieve from that... so, for a very long time, I watched the Lyric movie every weekend. I'd come see it even if I didn't know what it was."

The movie that came out of that period in Bennett's life, his first attempt at filmmaking, was Walking Shadows. He'll tell you it's no surprise he didn't finish it, describing it as a movie about a depressed college student living a decadent lifestyle that doesn't fulfill him, surrounded by a group of friends that have an immediate connection through their drug use and partying.

The movie has never been shown publicly.

No Fool's Errand.

After Walking Shadows, Bennett graduated from Tech and became involved with the university's theatre program. This would turn out to be one of the most important moves in Bennett's short career, and one that would encourage him to continue making movies in Blacksburg. With the theatre department, he acted in four plays in three semesters, bolstered a newfound creative outlet, and met people that he would later collaborate with and cast in his movies.

Around that time his ex-girlfriend found some comic vignettes about breakups that he had lying around, and told him he should make them into a movie. These vignettes became Fool. The production took two years, and Bennett borrowed cameras and worked through the difficulty of staging shots with second-rate microphones and scheduling difficulties with actors that have day jobs and are in school. Seneca Haynes was one of those actors.

"That is the first time I acted in front of a camera, everything I had done before was on the stage," said Haynes, who has worked on nearly every Bennett production since. "It was great because lots of people trusted us to come into their businesses to use as locations, which wouldn't have worked in say Richmond or Charlotte." When it was completed, Bennett showed the film to a crowd of 80 at Squires' recital salon. "Fool is what happens when I make a romantic comedy. It's about how we should laugh at people who are going through acrimonious heartbreak," Bennett said. "And it is the first movie I ever finished and showed to an audience. It's the basic reason anybody knows me around here as being a filmmaker."

River of Dread and the best place to show a movie in town.

Bennett is quick to reiterate the following statement when speaking of his following project, River of Dread. "This is not my movie, this is Seneca's movie," he says. Bennett produced the film, which basically means he helped bring the elements of production together, while also playing a leading role. Once again everything was shot locally, with most of the action occurring at Mountain Lake. He described the movie as a "stoned-at-three-am-watching-pulp-1950s-science-fiction" flick. "[We had it] here at the Lyric, a midnight screening, Halloween 2005," Bennett said, his eyes widening. "It was a huge party; 200 people showed up. It was great watching it with that audience."

If the movie theatre is a church, then the marquee is the steeple, and Bennett professed that seeing the film up there was one of the things that made the movie a success. "We took pictures of that. This is the place to show a movie in town."

Beast and Buried.

Bennett walks past the brassy old-projector that the Lyric has on display in its lobby, up the stairs to the balcony, and up further into the darkened projection room. A film is wrapped tight around a wheel of the newer projector, poised for the night's viewing. Bennett finds a box of old film and sifts through it, holding the strips up to the light.

The beginning of the summer of 2005 Bennett remembered as being the time when he was tired constantly. He wanted people to know that filmmaking for him wasn't just a phase, and that he was planning to continue shooting movies in Blacksburg. He was tired because while he was working on River of Dread, he was also filming two new projects, Beast and Buried, two horror movies he recently completed that are currently awaiting release. Bennett calls Beast a learning experience. "You can tell it was shot over time. Sometimes it looks professional, sometimes it looks somewhat amateurish," Bennett said of his take on a long-running campus horror story.

One thing that came out of Beast was collaborator F.M. Turner, who played a leading role and also laid down the soundtrack for the film. Both his acting performance, which was an exercise in reticence, and the music he provided, which was mostly picking out old-time tunes on acoustic instruments, were highlights of the movie. "There's an Irving Berlin song that I made creepier, and there's and old Irish tune on there. Everything else I wrote for the movie," Turner said while visiting Blacksburg from Houston, where he now resides. Buried was another movie in the horror genre Bennet made around the same time period, and also another film about misspent youth. Actor Cullen McKay played Curtis Grieves, a character he described as "waffling, and who is stuck where he is because of money and life and everything."

McKay met Bennett through Tech's theatre program, and played a part in Fool before Bennett cast him in the leading role of Buried. McKay said: "I am very proud of the entire experience. [Jack] has a strong ability to envision characters, not as stereotypes but as real people," speaking over the phone from Sterling, Virginia, where he is currently working as a fireman. "I think he has a real chance of making it, and I want him to."

Cut and Print.

Back at Torgersen Hall, Bennett hands over the headphones and pushes play on a nearly-completed music video he conceptualized and directed for F.M. Turner. He walks around the desk to help a collegeaged kid who is editing some footage of his own.

This is also the room where Bennett recently edited Hokie Nation, a movie he helped produce that was recently shown at Lyric. In a room down the hall, he filmed a promotional piece for a group of Virginia Tech researchers. "It's not so much a 'big fish, small pond' story where I don't want to pay my dues," Bennett said. "The fact is that right here in Blacksburg, I'm doing exactly what I want to do and learning so much about telling a story." It has recently been rumored that Bennett has a working script for his next film, and has even begun the casting process. As for the shooting location, just look out the nearest window.

Beast, Buried and The Goat will be coming soon to a theatre or DVD player near you. Check out Jack's production company at looksharpfilms. com