Eric Anderson and Amelia Dellos launched their production company Corn Bred Films last March “with the goal of establishing a film studio in the Midwest dedicated to finding and encouraging Midwestern talent,” Anderson says.
The husband-wife writing/producing partners planned the $250,000 horror feature, The Devil’s Promenade, as their first feature production. But Anderson says “budgetary concerns amidst an uncertain economy” put plans for that project on hold.
So instead they’ve turned to the semi-improvised end-days comedy Zompocalypso. They’re raising an initial $10,000 on Kickstarter and an additional $24,000 on the start up social crowdsourcing platform SoKap, which offers financial incentives for a project’s grassroots promoters.
Chris Meister and Mike Manship star in Zompocalypso as “a conspiracy theorist and his brother, who believe that the Mayan Apocalypse is coming in December 2012, and that it may well include zombies,” so they’ll wait it out in the family farmhouse, Anderson says.
“It’s not a horror film, but a takeoff of horror films and found-footage films like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity that is intended to be one thing only: funny,” Anderson says. “I was lucky enough to find two great local improv actors.”
Meister and Manship acted together in the Mintel2015 corporate campaign for UK market research firm Mintel International that Anderson cast, shot and edited. Anderson plans to shoot Zompocalypso this spring and summer in Kansas and Illinois.
Dellos working on two Bertha Palmer films
Dellos recently wrapped production on Love Under Fire: The Story of Bertha & Potter Palmer, her 24-minute, $125,000 Ch. 11 documentary about how the wealthy social queen and tireless advocate for working women was civic instrumental in helping to rebuild Chicago after the 1871 Great Fire.
Corn Bred is also developing Courting Bertha, a Bertha Palmer biopic from Dellos’s script, among several projects in the works.
Send your indie cinema news items to Ed M Koziarski, edmkoz@gmail.com.
