Pulling some strings to get a movie made

At the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival , an alternative film festival that runs simultaneously with the Sundance Film Festival in Utah each January, there was buzz surrounding one of the more experimental flicks in the indie lineup, a full-length feature called "Dante's Inferno."

It was a retelling of the 400-year-old story of Dante Alighieri's trip through hell, a daunting storyline for any good filmmaker.

But the buzz wasn't caused by the subject matter. It stemmed from the fact that this narrative about the circles of the underworld does not feature any actors in the flesh. Instead, it stars two-dimensional, ink-on-paper cut-outs manipulated by rods and string.

"Toy puppet theater," director Sean Meredith proudly explained to his Slamdance audience, just before the screening.

At the end of the 78-minute movie, which features the voices of Dermot Mulroney as Dante and James Cromwell as Virgil, some viewers applauded, others looked pained. Some stayed to quiz Meredith about the distinctive creations he used to make the film, while others ran out the door.

Meredith, 36, a 1992 Emerson College graduate, will probably get a similar reaction when he attends the Boston-area premiere of "Dante's Inferno" on Friday. The film will be screened at the Brattle Theatre as part of the 2007 Boston Underground Film Festival, which runs from Thursday through March 25.

The director sat for a conversation after the Slamdance screening, and a few weeks later, he phoned in while on his way to the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival, which had rejected his "Dante's Inferno" until the festival director saw it and extended Meredith a personal invitation to show his film. "I think it's the reaction we expect," said Meredith. "Some people love it. Some people hate it."

This adaptation took years to make and is the result of Meredith's longtime collaboration with the artist friends he made after he moved from Boston to California.

Meredith had taken a few years off from filmmaking and was working for the Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, known for its avant-garde exhibits of everything from graphic illustrations to Christmas decorations. Gallery owner Tom Patchett, who knew Meredith's background at Emerson, asked him to do editing on movies by gallery-affiliated artists. Patchett himself was a cinema man; he was a writer and producer on "The Bob Newhart Show" and "Alf," and was the screenwriter for a few movies, including "The Muppets Take Manhattan."

One of the gallery's artists whom Meredith became friendly with was Sandow Birk, a surfer/illustrator who had created a series of detailed and imaginative scenes of a fictitious battle between Los Angeles and San Francisco he called "In Smog and Thunder."

The illustrations were to become Meredith's professional directorial debut. He and Birk adapted the art into an animated feature film called "In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias" that won praise from critics and was a hit at film festivals. Paul Zaloom, a puppeteer who is most famous for his work on the children's show "Beakman's World," helped Birk and Meredith with the script and production. The three brought "Smog" to Slamdance in 2003.

Within a year, the group decided to move forward with a second project. Birk was showing new illustrations of his modern interpretations of Dante's hell in galleries around California. The team brainstormed ways to bring them to the big screen.

"Paul had the dumbest idea of all, which was to do a toy theater film," Meredith said, in jest. "We said, 'You really want us to work with puppets?' It turned out to be perfect for [Birk's] artwork. It's a perfect solution when you don't have $120 million to make a DreamWorks movie."

The group's puppet adaptation of Dante stays true to the original story, modernizing the tale but keeping it free of a traditional arc and moral. In this version, Dante is a young man taken on a tour of the underworld by Virgil, who shows him where people like Hitler, John F. Kennedy, and members of the Boston Catholic Church wound up. Meredith says he and Birk are nonreligious, and Zaloom was raised a Quaker, so the group was open to discussion about what historical figures should be named sinners and doomed to an unpleasant afterlife. Hitler was an obvious choice. The team's condemnation of beloved entertainers such as Dean Martin is more surprising.

"The icon, to me, of alcoholism in American is Dean Martin on stage with his arms around his pals," Meredith says.

It took six months to write the script and seven months to make the hand-drawn puppets and scenery. Zaloom, who had worked with Bread and Puppet Theater , asked the toy puppet theater company Great Small Works for advice.

"It's all old-school stuff. There's no computer trickery," says Zaloom.

Meredith said that because of the group's limited budget, there was no room for error and the actual filming was brief. It was surprisingly easy to cast; Meredith met Mulroney, who has appeared in pictures such as "My Best Friend's Wedding," through a friend, and "Six Feet Under" and "24" star Cromwell seemed an obvious choice for the film's guide, Virgil. Martha Plimpton lends her voice as a singing lobbyist and Lizzie Borden.

"Dante's Inferno" was completed last September, just in time for festival season.

At Slamdance, it won some praise, but was not in competition. Shortly after, Variety called the movie "undetermined" and "too long." A few weeks later, San Francisco's Independent Film Festival gave the work its staff award for best feature.

"There were people cheering at scenes," Meredith said, of the reception in San Francisco.

Over the next two months, Meredith and his team will take the picture to film festivals in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Maryland, and, of course, Cambridge, where they expect the usual hot-and-cold response.

Anna Feder, director of the Boston Underground Film Festival, expects the reaction this weekend to be overwhelmingly positive, not only because Meredith has a local connection, but because BUFF embraces the weird and the visionary.

"Instantly, we loved that film," she said, by phone. "We were 20 minutes into it and we knew it was perfect for Underground."

For Meredith, it will be an artistic homecoming.

"I haven't been in Boston since 1996," Meredith said, adding that he's particularly excited to show his movie at the Brattle. "I made so many trips across the river to get my film history."

Meredith Goldstein can be reached at mgoldstein@globe.com.