If you have never heard of the movie Atlantis Down, I don’t blame you, though it probably means you are not one of my Facebook friends. It is a American/Italian low budget Sci Fi Thriller that had its World Premiere at the Commodore Movie Theater in Portsmouth, VA where they flew me out for the event.
If you have never heard of the movie Atlantis Down, I don’t blame you, though it probably means you are not one of my Facebook friends. It is a American/Italian low budget Sci Fi Thriller that had its World Premiere at the Commodore Movie Theater in Portsmouth, VA where they flew me out for the event.
Why Portsmouth you ask? Because that is where we shot it! Why there? Because the producer’s family was there and they could use an abandon three story Masonic Temple as a studio and a nearby park that didn’t require permits as the weird foreign planet. Oh, and they owned the Commodore theatre, a cool art deco movie house that was re-furbished in the 80’s to include dining tables on the ground floor.
Where’s Portsmouth, you ask? Portsmouth is a small eastern seaboard town clawing its way back from the brink of desolation. Across the water from Norfolk, its urban core was falling apart and plagued with crime, as industry left and jobs were outsourced. 20 years later artists and entrepreneurs moved in, cleaned up the historic houses and a few are single handedly trying to start a film production studio there; this movie being the first of hopefully many.
The premiere itself was very fun, because it was like the exact copy of an L.A. Premiere only smaller and everyone involved was CRAZY excited, plus no one ducked out immediately after it started to get the party. But everyone did what you supposed to do; get dressed up, pose for pictures, hug, kiss, shake hands, that sort of thing.
Stretch limos? Check – but only two and they just circled the block to pick up the VIPs from a hotel 225 feet away. We were suppose to go one at a time, in alternating limos, but it was getting late, so the producer ask if “I was cool with going with a bunch of people?” which I was going to say, how about I just WALK THE HALF BLOCK but instead I said “it’s cool” and so we all piled in like it was prom night! Michael Rooker (Days of Thunder, Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer) had just drove up from a movie he was shooting in Greensville NC. In fact, he loves driving to all his movie shoots regardless where they are. (Note to filmmakers – if you are looking for a name and don’t think you can afford their fee and Airfare, It seems Mr Rooker would only need his fee and gas money! Think of the savings) He piled in with us too, and made merry all the way there, which was 3 minutes.
Red Carpet? Check, where the official media scrum consisted of one woman with a microphone and a guy with a cell phone camera. I am not even sure that she was recording or just standing there in a dress and talking to everyone. Either way, she was excited to be there too.
Once in the lobby there were three more cameramen getting shots of the cast in front of the brand wall but I have no idea who they were or if they were even involved in the production. At that point it didn’t matter, the whole town was giddy and I was half expecting that any moment a Mayor in a top hat and sash would present us with a giant key. Then a glass of champagne and to the dinner table where you could order food by picking the 80’s modular phone and calling the kitchen. Deep fried fish and chips to go with bubbly, yum! The director Max Bartoli and Producer Ethan Marten took stage and after some jokes about sleeping in their cars and the production office being in the back of a Mexican restaurant, we were off.
Atlantis Down is set in 2025, when Space Shuttle Atlantis is used as a mid space hauling frigate. After some weird flashes the crew mysteriously disappears except for the rookie and winds up on some planet where each one of them dies off due to some deep-seated psychological issue, or so you think.
The twist is that maybe it is the rookie’s deepest issues that may be affecting everyone else, or maybe it is not happening at all, or maybe it is very European and the ambiguous meaning can have different interpretations. It is Max Bartoli’s very non-American sensibilities that save this movie and bring a very refreshing RetroFutura atmosphere to it. Plus the conceit that all the events have mental underpinnings give the freedom to change locations on a dime and have scenes that seem to dangle in mid-beat.
The actors all turn in some great moments (I am killed off first, so I can’t really include myself) with Greg Travis and Michael Rooker bringing the gravity to a world gone crazy.
In a time when MGM can’t finance a James Bond film, and Robert Redford can’t find a distributor for his movie at the Toronto Film Festival, the current dilemma is that YOU will have to do some legwork to ever even find this movie, let alone see it projected on the big or medium screen But if you do, you might be pleased that something like this can exist.
Of course, no one said this at the after party that was a shorter walk than the limo ride from the hotel. There were laughs and food and an acoustic cover duo, and everyone got photos and autographs and drunk, in that order. The movie was going to run for six more days at the theatre and then…. festivals? Foreign Market? No one knew. But it didn’t matter, for the next morning some of the cast and crew were off to the local go-kart track to race each other and laugh some more. I had to get back on a plane and come back to L.A. for a finance meeting regarding our documentary. Maybe I will tell them, “I know this town where they will screen our movie…”
—Dean Haglund
