Stephen Cone returned to his apartment/production office the day after shooting wrapped on his sophomore feature, “In Memoriam: A Comedy,” to find his movie had been stolen.
A burglar had entered through Cone’s bedroom window, which was “mysteriously unlocked” that day, and taken thousands of dollars of electronic equipment, including a new desktop and hard drives containing footage of his films.
He lost “a brand new desktop, two external hard drives, a printer, DVD player, Hi-8 camera, still camera, DVD player and 11 years worth of DVDs.
“On the hard drives was all the footage from a couple of short films, all of my copies of the March dailies and the first hour of my first assembly,” or about a month of editing, Cone said.
Fortunately, DP Stephanie Dufford had copies of the footage, “turning what could have been a devastating setback into a relatively minor one,” Cone said.
“So on we press, taking this to mean nothing less than an increased special-ness.”
A playwright who made his feature debut last year with the Split Pillow-produced “The Christians,” Cone was inspired to make “In Memoriam” by a news story he ran across last year.
“Much like the main character in the film, I stumbled upon a news story about a couple of twenty-year-olds in South Carolina getting drunk, high and naked and falling off a roof, dying hours later,” Cone said.
“What apparently struck the rest of the world as hilarious struck me as tragic, sad and, frankly, strangely poetic. I became obsessed with how quickly their reckless joy and ecstasy had turned to horror.”
