Mechanic Falls Town Manager Dana Lee stars in a comedy about an “immortal idiot.”
One man looks like a shy Robin Hood: masked, mostly green and billowing a long cape. The other appears dressed in brown burlap. He wears a horseshoe around his neck and a wide, rapturous smile.
Apparently, he loves to tango.
For more than two minutes, the camera lingers on the two men while a voice croons:
“When we are dancing, and you’re dangerously near me, I get ideas. I get ideas.”
Matt Power, the director of “Throg: The Movie,” sang the old Louis Armstrong song himself. He also ran the camera, co-wrote the script, edited, paid for the $35,000 production and played the man behind the green mask.
But does he know what the scene means? Not really. He doesn’t care, either.
“Throg” is a silly movie. That’s exactly what it’s meant to be.
And it began with even smaller aspirations.
‘A natural comic’
It started when Power bought a digital video camera. He called his high school buddy, Dana Lee, to goof around with the new toy.
“Matt wanted to learn how the thing worked,” Lee said. They spent a few weekends creating a trailer for a nonexistent movie. Then, they decided to create the movie.
Lee, who serves as Mechanic Falls’ town manager, became a movie star. Power, an editor with a boating industry magazine, became a director.
The men, both 41, created a dolt from the middle ages: Throg.
“I see him as the immortal idiot,” said Power, who wrote a rough outline of the script with Lee. They began shooting on weekends about three years ago.
And they gathered a huge company of actors for such a small film. The final credits list 79 people, including both men’s wives and children. Actors from Portland, where Power lives, joined in.
And Lee took on the role of the bumbling hero wanna-be.
“He has always been a natural comic,” said Power, who has known Lee since the fourth grade. They were students together at Falmouth High School, where Lee was elected class clown three times. He was also elected class president once. Meanwhile, Power was voted to be most creative.
“I guess I’ve known Matt for 30 years, at least,” said Lee. They acted together in school and loved movies such as “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Time Bandits.”
They decided to fashion their own comedy, traveling through several different eras.
Olympus in the gym
Principal photography lasted for nearly two years. They shot in the woods of Cumberland, spent a day in Casco Bay and shot in and around Mechanic Falls. They took over the town’s wastewater plant, the library and the Town Hall gym, where they hung a blue tarp from the ceiling and shot a scene set on Mount Olympus.
About a third of the way into the project, everyone seemed to go for broke, Power said. He tried increasingly complex shots and special effects. The actors gave up weekends with their families and struggled to move equipment to often out-of-the-way spots in the woods.
And Lee let his inhibitions fly .
“Throg gets humiliated, killed and mangled,” said Lee, who takes the brunt of the film’s jokes. “He’s sort of like Wile E. Coyote.”
Like the coyote, he keeps coming back.
The final cut of the film lasts about 85 minutes and represents the last year of work by Power. He estimated that he spent at least five hours a night, editing the movie in the upstairs of his home near Portland’s Back Bay.
The final product has about 900 special effects, including the blue-screen Olympus scene, objects that hover and fly and even an animated sequence.
Few people have seen it, though.
Power and Lee hope to enter it into some film festivals. They might even pick up a distribution deal, so it will go into theaters someday. Power has created a Web site, www.throgthemovie.com, to help promote the film.
Though its production values look a lot better than its $35,000 price tag might imply, it’s still a lot rougher than studio films.
It’s funny, though.
“There’s no meaning to it whatsoever,” said Lee. “More than anything, I hope people have some good, old-fashioned belly laughs.”
And there’s no worry that it could hurt his day job, he said.
Besides working as a town manager, Lee also became a spokesman for the Maine Municipal Association’s property-tax-cut plan. Prior to the November referendum, he was a regular on local talk shows and TV ads.
“I love to debate and I love to laugh,” he said. “I can do both.”
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