Teen dreams
With her third indie film, Still Green, now in limited release, local producer Andrea Ajemian, 33, has high hopes that her fourth, We Got the Beat, will open wide.
So did you really produce a feature-length movie from your parents’ house in Rutland? (Laughs.) The first film I produced was in 2001, and at that point the offices were in my parents’ basement. It was a wacky comedy called Rutland, USA. But we have a legitimate office now in Worcester.
There are so many jokes about vanity producer credits in Hollywood. What does a producer actually do? A producer is like a CEO. They raise the money, start the company, hire the crew, find the script, hold casting sessions, plan the schedule, manage the whole shoot, and sell the film.
Which brings us to your latest movie, We Got the Beat. What’s it about? It’s a teen comedy set in 1982 about a high school football quarterback who quits the team his senior year to turn his heavy metal band into the first-ever boy band. It was shot last summer entirely in Massachusetts.
How did you get the funding to make it? In 2006, we had an investor who was going to put in $250,000, but he backed out. So I sent my partner and director, Jon Artigo, to Los Angeles to hold auditions. We said we had the money even though we didn’t. The actor who got cast in the lead role, Michael Copon from One Tree Hill, knew Lou Pearlman, who founded the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync. So we met with him and he offered to invest several million, saying, “Tell everyone I’m your executive producer.” In February 2007, he said he was ready to put the first half million in our account. Two days later, I hear he fled the country because he was being sued for a $300 million fraud!
Yikes! What did you do? My passion is about creating opportunities for local talent and promoting our state through cinema, so after two years and 85 meetings, I found a committed group of people in the area that believed in me and liked the idea that we’d pour all the money back in the community and involve a lot of local youths. Not one investor was a family member or anyone I knew.
You’ve got some known actors like Ming-Na from ER in your film. So how about those “local youths”? We cast over 20 local actors for speaking parts, and hundreds as extras. Two got lead roles. The band in the movie is multicultural, so we wanted two African-American actors who could break dance. We contacted Status Quo, a Dorchester dance crew that was on MTV, and really liked Ernest “E-Knock” Phillips and Lorenzo Hooker III. We had hired casting director Mary Vernieu, who had worked on films like The Wrestler and Scary Movie. When I sent her their audition tapes, she said, “Book them immediately. They’re stars!”
How did you land a top Hollywood casting director? Because she loved the movie. It’s a very funny movie, Tina!
So you have high hopes for it? Teen films are the buzz right now, and this is a fresh film with a new voice. Think Footloose meets The Full Monty in the indie style of Napoleon Dynamite, with some Judd Apatow-type humor and a lot of music and dancing.
When will we get to see We Got the Beat?
We have interest from distributors, but before its official release, we’ll hold a pre-screening in Boston on July 7 at Emerson College. It’s free, but you have to go to wegotthebeatmovie.com for tickets.
