It’s a big summer for Mark Harris. After writing several unproduced scripts for hire, his directing debut “Why Men Cheat” is in post-production at Day For Night Film in Virginia, on its way to a November video release. And his script “Hard Knock Life” is slated for production in Los Angeles this August.
Harris made “Why Men Cheat” over a rapid-fire week in May in his South Side Englewood neighborhood on an under-$50,000 budget. Don Winter (“13 Days in April”) shot on 24P DV.
Stage veteran Mel Roberson stars as a straying husband seeking a solution to his chronic infidelity. Vanessa Fraction (“Barbershop 2”) co-stars along with comedians BLT (“The Evil One”), Dirty and Ray Love.
Harris launched his career by sending his 2002 spec script “Zombies in the Hood” to Tim Reid’s Virginia-based New Millennium Studios, producers of the 2000 comedy “Nothin’ 2 Lose.” “Nothin'” producer Martin Jones “liked my style of writing,” Harris said, and hired him to write the sequel.
“It never got shot, which was disappointing,” Harris said. “‘Zombies’ got me a lot of writing jobs, but the things never got made. It forced me to go out and do my own project.”
Larry Duke is cutting “Why Men Cheat” at Jones’s Richmond, Virginia-based Day for Night. Harris expects to complete post-production by August and premiere the picture here in September before it hits video stores in November.
Meanwhile “Nothin’ 2 Lose” director Barry Bowles and star Brian Hook (“Soul Plane”) are producing Harris’s “Hard Knock Life” script through their production company B-Love, for Bowles to direct and Hook to star. And Bowles is shopping another Harris-penned Hook Vehicle, “Step Sister.”
Harris is gunning for a bigger budget for his next directing job, the hip-hop romance “Brooklyn Bridge,” which he hopes to shoot here.
“I want people to embrace Chicago film as they’re embracing the Chicago music that’s doing so well, with Kanye West and Twista and Common,” Harris said. “We embrace everybody else’s talent, which is fine, but we need to look to our own first.”
Reach Harris at markharrisfilms@aol.com.
? by Ed M. Koziarski, edk@homesickblues.com
