Student director's project becomes full-length movie By Matt McDonald, Globe Correspondent, 1/12/2003 High school senior writes script for school project. Gets professional actors to appear in production. Shoots it with camcorder. Edits it on home computer. Six months later, world premiere.
Sounds like the plot of a movie, but actually it's just an outline of how a movie got made - ''The Carving'' by Sudbury resident (and college freshman) Adam N. Greene, who at 19 may not be the youngest moviemaker ever but is surely among the most precocious. His 89-minute feature film is to debut tonight in Arlington. It's the culmination of a project he started last March to fulfill a graduation requirement at the Rivers School, a private school in Weston. At first he had planned to make a short film, but the story demanded more time. ''Because what I had in mind was a feature-length film, I couldn't compress it,'' Greene said. So, the movie was not finished when it was time to turn in the project in late May, but Greene kept at it after graduation, shooting scenes in June and editing video as much as 10 hours a day in July. In August, he headed to Bard College, a small liberal arts school in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where he has finished his first semester. Greene, a Sudbury native, attended the town's Peter Noyes Elementary School from kindergarten through fourth grade. He went to the Fessenden School, a private school in West Newton, for grades 5 through 9. When he arrived at Rivers for 10th grade, Greene was reserved, according to his Spanish teacher, Kyleen Carpenter. ''He was a very sort of shy student, a little bit nervous,'' Carpenter said. Short video projects for class, though, brought out his creativity and helped establish a reputation among his fellow students - especially for comedy. ''Every one of his movies is hilarious,'' said Carpenter, who is now the head of Blackstone Academy, a charter school in Pawtucket, R.I., for grades 8, 9, and 10. ''They're such a high level of humor. He's not just sort of throwing teenage boy stuff together,'' she said. During the summer of 2001, Greene worked as an intern at the public access channel at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, which helped hone his editing, and he also attended the New York Film Academy's High School Film Camp at Harvard University in Cambridge, where he created three short films without dialogue. ''Sometimes I imagine that my eyes are a camera,'' Greene said in an interview. ''Every time I look away, that's a cut.'' ''I see stories, I see movies in my head,'' he said. ''And my goal is to show people what I see, show people what I'm feeling.'' So, how do you make a full-length movie? Greene wanted professional actors, so he got access to a casting Web site through the New York Film Academy. He began calling actors with a straightforward if unlikely pitch: I'm a high school student making a movie for a school project, and I'd like you to consider being in it. I can't pay you. ''I called 50 people in two days, ... And I only had one person say over the phone, `I don't do this for free,''' Greene said. Actors are perennially looking for exposure, but one of the actors who said yes recalled that Greene's demeanor also enticed him. ''His manner was so professional,'' said Kelly Brice of Natick, noting that many movie producers are curt toward actors. ''And I respect that about him.'' In all, Greene cast about 20 actors, all professionals except for a few small roles filled by relatives or friends of the family. The lead actor, Gabriel Field, heard about the film from Greene's father, who is Field's dentist. ''I actually had just gotten the Novocain when he told me about this project,'' said Field, a Cambridge resident who has appeared in independent films and television commercials. Field said Greene was organized, easy to work with, and honest. ''Adam seems so dedicated and into it that it made sense to do,'' said Field, who has acted in movies he never got to see because the producers never finished them. ''When it works it's because people come together and they have their head in the right place, and they make something happen.'' The plot of ''The Carving'' is a closely guarded secret. No one outside the family has seen the movie yet, and tonight's showing is by invitation only. Greene allows that it is a drama, that it has nothing to do with either horror or Thanksgiving, and that it was inspired by an art object his father bought at an art gallery in Palm Beach, Fla., more than 30 years ago. Greene found it - even the precise nature of the object is not for publication - in the basement of the family home last spring when he was looking for ideas.
The object intrigued him, and Greene decided to create an imaginary history of the object to tell a story. ''I think ... this piece of [art] reveals to the protagonist things he would not have realized without it,'' he said. Most of ''The Carving'' was filmed in Cambridge between Harvard Square and Porter Square, including the lunchroom area on the third floor of the office building in which Greene's father practices.
Portions were filmed at and near the Greene home, Crane Beach in Ipswich, as well as on Nantucket.
Greene, who has a cameo role, also directed, composed the music, and shot the scenes, without a crew, on a digital camcorder. (He used a Steadicam JR that allows the camera holder to move with what the manufacturer calls ''jiggle-free shooting.'') After the shooting was done, he edited the movie on an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop computer.
His major expenses, Greene said, were workers' compensation insurance and coffee - which he estimates totaled between $1,000 and $1,500.
No matter what kind of reception it gets tonight in Arlington, ''The Carving'' is not coming to another theater near you, at least not anytime soon. Greene said he will use the audience's response to the movie to gauge whether he should try to get a film festival to show it. Only after that would it be possible to get a distributor for the film. Though hopeful, Greene is realistic about the film's long-term chances for success - and hopes it is just the first of his feature-length films. ''I'm not an expert. I'm just a beginner here,'' Greene said. ''That's what the 12th is for,'' Greene said, referring to tonight's premiere, ''to see if I pulled it off.'' The world premiere of ''The Carving'' is scheduled for 7 tonight in The Capitol Theater at 204 Massachusetts Ave. in Arlington. Attendance is by invitation only. This story ran on page W1 of the Globe West section on 1/12/2003.
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