Marc Meyers: Filmmaker of "Harvest"

Harvest is the latest film by Marc Meyers. He and his movie made way onto Delmarva during the 2010 Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival. The movie was released theatrically in March 2011 in Florida, Kansas, South Carolina, Oregon and at Theatre N in Delaware. In April, the movie will be made widely available on NetFlix.

Harvest focuses on a Connecticut family that's introduced when the eldest grandson returns home from college for what unknowingly will be the last time he'll be with his grandfather. The grandfather is played by Oscar-nominated actor Robert Loggia. Some might remember Loggia as the store owner who danced on the big piano in FAO Schwartz with Tom Hanks in Big (1988).

During a phone interview last fall, 38-year-old Meyers told me that he wrote the screenplay based on journal entries of his own grandfather's death when he was 24 and just out of college too. Meyers sent the script out to casting agents like Stephanie Holbrook who has helped to cast movies by Wes Anderson and M. Night Shyamalan. Loggia agreed to the role two days after receiving the script from his agent.



Marc Meyers -
Writer/Director of "Harvest"



The grandson named Josh is played by 26-year-old Jack Carpenter, who fans of CBS' The Good Wife might recognize as Patric Edelstein, the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg. Despite the odds, Meyers said Carpenter's manager was aggressive on getting Carpenter an audition, but what was interesting was for that role and others Meyers didn't hold traditional auditions.

He would look at tapes of previous works, but, instead of having actors come and read lines, he wanted to get to know them as real people. Meyers met the young actors in coffee shops or at parks. He asked them questions and had conversions with them about the script. He listened to them, observed their answers and their body language. In one case, Meyers even watched how an actor walked, if he were awkward or not.

Meyers' wife, Jody Girgenti, who has worked on major television and film projects, helped to raise Harvest by producing money, hiring the crew and organizing the departments. They made the movie in Connecticut, which afforded them tax credits. It took them 19 days to shoot, which is very quick for a feature-length movie. Meyers admits they moved through seven pages of the script per day when three to five is the norm.

Meyers also admitted that his production had your typical technical problems, but thanks to the professionalism of his crew and actors, some of whom were veterans of stage and screen, including Arye Gross and Barbara Barrie, he was able mostly to direct a smooth ship. There's even a smoothness to the initial, handheld shots done on Sony's CineAlta F23 HDCAM. Instead of camerawork that's merely shaky, the handheld shots in this movie give the story breath.

Production wrapped in the summer of 2008, and looking back on it, Meyers loved directing but says he's himself a writer-at-heart. Penning this semi-autobiographical story, Meyers says it's not just about him or his family. Harvest is a brief examination of relationships as they exist through several generations and seemingly how they degrade through those generations. A loveable, gruff grandfather who's been married for 50 years has a relationship that is the pinnacle, pure and solid, and the relationships that follow within his family are less so.

For more informationm go to RaisingHarvest.com or follow the filmmaker on Twitter at Twitter.com/MarcMeyers.