debut
feature Gretchen wins the Best Narrative Feature
Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The film stars Courtney
Davis, John Merriman, Becky Ann Baker ("Life As
We Know It," Freaks and Geeks," A Simple Plan) and Stephen
Root (Office Space, "NewsRadio," "The West
Wing"). It is based upon the award-winning short film, Gretchen
and the Night Danger, that won Best Short Film at the 2004 SXSW Film
Festival and Best Short Film at the 2003 Cinematexas Film Festival.
Collins’ inspiration for Gretchen comes from two sources:
his experiences working as a counselor at a teen center and stories that
he and lead actress, Courtney Davis, swapped about their own
adolescence. Drawing from these two sources, he crafted this
coming-of-age story dealing with the awkward struggles of adolescence.
The film is meant for "adult adolescents" or as he says,
"people who didn’t conveniently grow up at 18." Collins
elaborates, "The film is entertaining, but I pushed it to be a film
for everyone out there who is still trying to grow up. I think that’s
why I needed it to go to dark places, and why I needed it to come out of
the dark and have some answers. I wanted the film to be about how we fix
ourselves."
Gretchen details an awkward girl’s struggle to overcome an
obsession with Boone High School’s most powerful dirt-bag, Ricky
Maraschino. Her affliction is so severe, she’s banished to an
emotional treatment center, where she begins to question why everything
that she wants in the whole wide world is a boy. Gretchen is an
extreme tale of ordinary things: prom, boys, and going to 2nd base, told
with the unique gravity of a 17-year-old heart.
The film was directed and written by Steve Collins. Rajen Savjani (Old
Joy) is the executive producer and Lars Knudsen (Old Joy, Wild
Tigers I Have Known), Anish Savjani (Old Joy), and Jay Van
Hoy (Old Joy, Wild Tigers I Have Known) are the producers
for the film. P.J. Raval is the director of photography, and Mike Shen
edited the film. Graham Reynolds (A Scanner Darkly) provides the
orchestral score for the film
