Film
Indie Man Curt Hahn
How hard is it to get a simple human drama made in the current film industry? Curt Hahn has a dream project he hopes to shoot this fall: the life of Ella Sheppard, the former slave who helped lead the Fisk Jubilee Singers to glory. It’s a story that goes from near-death on a muddy riverbank to an audience with Queen Victoria. Yet Hahn says he’s been told three separate times at meetings in Hollywood that it needs something to spice it up—a rape scene.
That’s one reason Hahn, CEO of the Nashville film and digital-video production company Film House, is working to raise enough capital to get the film into theaters himself, through a service deal with a distributor. The plan dovetails with the aims of his Film House subsidiary Transcendent Films LLC, which intends to produce what Hahn calls “the kind of small, inspiring film Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.” Case in point: Transcendent’s second film, an indie comedy-drama called Two Weeks starring Sally Field and Ben Chaplin that opens this weekend in limited release across the country, including Nashville.
Picked up last fall by MGM after successful festival screenings, Two Weeks concerns a dying woman (Field) who calls her four grown children to her deathbed—where they find her somewhat healthier than expected. Hahn had just finished his own first feature, the 2004 romantic comedy No Regrets, when he got the script from first-time writer-director Steve Stockman. Stockman already had Oscar winner Field on board, but with her commitment came a time crunch: the movie had to shoot by late March 2005 to meet her schedule.
For Stockman, a friend and fellow veteran of TV commercial work, Hahn agreed to trade a production stake for the use of Film House’s resources if the shoot moved to Nashville. “We were just the last piece in the puzzle,” says Hahn, who is listed as the film’s executive producer. That explains how, at a time when film companies routinely skip the Volunteer State to shoot next door in incentive-rich North Carolina, Hahn actually convinced a movie set in Wilmington to set up shop in Music City.
Ah, sweet revenge. Now if only Two Weeks could get even with the MPAA ratings board. In a move that Variety critic Robert Koehler described as “bizarre…harsh and unwarranted,” the board slapped the mostly innocuous movie with an R rating for a single sexual profanity used once as a verb instead of an exclamation. Hahn calls the rating “downright goofy,” as the movie contains no violence or nudity. “This isn’t Pulp Fiction we’re talking about,” he says.
But it’s not out of step with Hahn’s stated intent to tell stories for adults. His next film is a documentary portrait of Nashville sculptor Sylvia Hyman, made to coincide with a major show this summer at the Frist Center. For Hahn, a former architecture and film student who opened Film House in 1976, Hyman is an inspiration: an artist who will be 90 this year and who has done some of her most vital work in the past decade.
“They say grown-ups don’t go to movies anymore,” Hahn says, echoing remarks he made to an attentive audience Monday at the Downtown Rotary Club. “Maybe they’re just not making movies anymore for grown-ups.” Two Weeks starts Friday at Green Hills, Opry Mills and the Carmike Thoroughbred 20; watch for Hahn and assorted crew opening day at Green Hills in the downstairs lobby, where they plan to greet viewers.