A dark, funny romantic road trip through rural NW Ohio, coming to theaters in 2020
A Dark Rom-Com set in Cranwell County, a fictional county in Northwest Ohio, The Cran is a writer and director Tyler Savino’s first feature film. Shot from Bowling Green to downtown Toledo and up to Port Clinton, the filming should be finished this winter with the premier sometime in 2020. Savino calls it “an ultra-low-budget independent film” while clearly distinguishing it from zero budget student films. Savino was encouraged when Chase Crawford, a well-know Ohio executive producer agreed to work on The Cran after he read the script.
“The world is dead but it’s a beautiful decay” is the opening line of the script, which blends absurdity and anti-comedy with a darker and more honest portrayal of abuse through its character-driven story, set mostly in the industrial cornfields surrounding Toledo. The two main characters, anti-heroes Roy, played by Matthew Alan Porter, and Hannah, played by Marlee Carpenter, are high school lovers who have just reconnected after not having seen or heard from each other for seven years. Together they stumble their way on a Northwest Ohio road trip “blowing through like a really screwed up Bonnie and Clyde,” while encountering neo-nazis, rural cults, and porn stars in chimpanzee costumes, managing to escape scot-free while “everyone around them is feeling the reverberations,” according to Savino.
For Carpenter, who is from Northwest Ohio but who graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in NYC, it is also her first feature film. She was instantly drawn to her character, Hannah, who, according to Carpenter, “started out as a very stock rebellious character,” but “quickly become this incredibly complex character throughout the process of the script being written. You see this character arc throughout the movie. You see the reasons she becomes this rebellious person. The reason that she lashes out, that she makes the decisions that she does. She really makes the audience wonder and think if she’s right or is Roy right. You really can’t tell because you empathize with her.” Carpenter states that her relationship with Matthew Alan Porter “mirrored Hannah and Roy’s relationship” because they got into small arguments all the time. Roy and Hannah and their relationship is what drives the movie, and “all the stuff in between, with the chimpanzees and the neo-nazis, they are just the frosting on the cake. ”
And that cake itself is “abuse,” according to Savino: “At its darkly comedic core, the movie is about abuse and abusive cycles and very honest, sometimes selfish, reactions to those things that crop up in your life. Neither of the two leads are in the right. They are toxic for each other even more than they are toxic for the people around them.” It is very easy for Hannah and Roy to fall back in with each other even though the resentment has built up over the years because, according to Savino, “as humans at our lowest point, we tend to gravitate towards what we know.” In one scene, Roy and Hannah get in an argument in an alleyway, but as they are at each other’s throats, “they accidentally keep finding little inside jokes. They up finding the things that kept them together seven years ago before everything disappeared.”
Savino hopes to bring The Cran to a film festival in 2020, and has launched an IndieGoGo campaign to help fund the project. In its first 12 hours, the campaign raised one-third of their budget and became the fifth most popular campaign, as well as the most popular film project, on the website. To donate, visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-cran-feature-film–2/x/22295835.
The Cran is R-rated for language, but it does contain some sex and violence.
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