Eric Anderson and Amelia Dellos have seen their political doc “Red, White & Blue” grow into a $100,000 production with some major musical muscle behind it.
Cowboy Junkies guitarist Michael Timmins has signed on to write the score for “Red, White & Blue.” Among the musicians that have agreed to contribute material to the soundtrack are Natalie Merchant, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Dar Williams and Ben Folds, as well as Timmins’ band.
The filmmakers have already obtained the rights to use Merchant’s song “Motherland” and Williams’ “Iowa.”
Dellos and Anderson approached the contributing musicians, either through their agents or directly through the artists’ web sites. “They’ve all be been very responsive,” Anderson said. “They liked the idea and wanted to help.”
Anderson expected to have financing in place to start production in late March, shoot for about three weeks, and finish the film by this fall. Pete Biagi (Jeff Garlin’s “I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With”) is attached to shoot.
The husband-wife filmmaking team plan to tour nine cities in Illinois, Iowa and Kansas, conducting more than 100 interviews that they hope will show a broader spectrum of viewpoints than the polarized picture that’s often drawn of the political landscape.
Anderson, who runs the graphic design firm EBA creative, and Dellos, who is marketing director for the League of Chicago Theatres, are working with a local financier who has committed to fund the bulk of the budget.
“In the beginning we were looking at it entirely as a guerilla, man-on-the-street type of thing,” Anderson said. “But now we’re pre-arranging some interviews, and we’ve interwoven it with the idea of tracing the paths of the places we’ve lived and worked and gone to school.”
“While we’re exploring the idea of where people’s views come from, we’ll be illustrating how we came to be who we are,” he said, “and giving viewers someone to identify with.”
In mid-March, Anderson will be the third of seven screenwriters to contribute a chapter to Split Pillow’s collaborative feature “Realization,” the company’s follow-up to “The Cliffhanger” and “Brushfires.”
With Project Greenlight finalist Scott Smith, Anderson is also adapting Tribune editor Charles Dickinson’s news-business novel “Rumor Has It,” for Smith to direct.
“We found out there’s a Jennifer Aniston movie coming out called ?Rumor Has It,'” Anderson said. “So we bounced around another title and ?Ink’ is what we came up with.”
Los Angeles director Alex Ranarivelo is in post on the short “Morphin(e)” from Anderson’s script. Ranarivelo is attached to direct Anderson’s feature script “Black River,” with Anderson’s agent Alexia Melocchi of Little Studio Films producing.
