A few Baltimore-born filmmakers have made the leap to motion pictures that score at the box office, making movies that even your grandparents might have seen. But are we going to call it a day with John Waters and Barry Levinson? Let's hope not. The two talents most likely to join that club in the next few years are Steve Blair and William Whitehurst.

Blair and Whitehurst had written a few scripts between them, and were hoping to sell them to companies in Hollywood. Instead, they joined forces in 2004 and helped each other film their own scripts. The result has been feature-length movies that are good enough to debut at major film festivals, and accessible enough to play at the multiplexes. They feature well-known actors who live in both worlds—indie and Hollywood. Now, Whitehurst and Blair are shopping their completed movies around to distributors, and they hope to soon have more scripts in the hopper.

Twenty-some years ago, Whitehurst was a Gilman School student who wanted to make movies, and Blair, who went to St. Paul's School, was one of the few other kids Whitehurst knew who was also interested in film. They lost touch after graduation in 1986. Whitehurst moved to New York City for a time to act while Blair worked in local film and commercial production. Flash forward to 2001, when they happened to meet again at a screenwriting workshop at Johns Hopkins University.

When the formal workshop ended, they and a few of the other writers continued to meet in a kind of screenwriters' salon to critique each other's work. After a series of script options and leads that went nowhere, Whitehurst and Blair started to think about producing their own movies here in Baltimore, eventually starting a production company called B'more Pictures in 2005.

Whitehurst's Mentor came first. The film stars internationally known actor Rutger Hauer, who plays the title character, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and professor whose career has stagnated and who becomes involved in a tense triangle with his two favorite students. Mentor premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last spring, then went on to show at the Maryland Film Festival in May and the Hamptons International Film Festival in October, and is currently in negotiations with domestic and international distributors.

I Do & I Don't, a comedy written and directed by Blair, who has written for Urbanite, was shot this summer and is currently in post-production. The movie is about an engaged couple who, as a prerequisite for marrying in the bride's church, must complete a prenuptial crash course with a fortysomething couple. Actor Jane Lynch (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby) costars with Matt Servitto (The Sopranos) as the hilariously dysfunctional mentor couple, bitter and jaded after seventeen years of marriage. Grant Rosenmeyer (The Royal Tenenbaums) plays their 15-year-old son.

The film opens at the wedding, as the priest asks the young bride whether she takes this man to be her lawfully wedded husband. She answers with, "I do … and I don't." The groom, in voice-over, then fills in the viewer through flashbacks about the month leading up to the wedding.

For a chance to have a well-developed leading role in a quality script, a lot of big-name supporting actors would not only come to Baltimore, they'd come here for a fraction of what they're paid in Hollywood. When it came time to pull together a cast and crew for I Do & I Don't, Blair offered an egalitarian $100 per day for everyone, from the production assistant to the stars. They all accepted.

"I had to call in some favors," Blair says. "Some people had to choose between working on my film and another job that might have paid three, four, or five hundred a day."

A few days before shooting began in August, the actors arrived in town for a "table read." They circled around a big table in an under-air-conditioned sixth-floor conference room in Charles Village. The mood was upbeat and casual. Servitto, in particular, was already making the lines his own, getting laughs from the eighteen actors and crew there.

"I love doing smaller movies because a lot of the time, those are the scripts that take chances," says Servitto. "I try to do one student film every year. I don't get paid on those. But you never know who the next Spike Lee, the next Jim Jarmusch, or the next Ed Burns will be."

Lynch heard about the part after Blair's casting director approached her agent. "This character has an arc and a journey she goes on," she says. "I get to put a little more thought into it and map out the journey."

But not too much thought. Indie films have a certain appeal that is built into the necessary economy of it all. Talladega Nights was shot over three to four months, Lynch says. I Do & I Don't was shot in twenty-three days, making for a pace and intensity that Lynch finds artistically satisfying.

"Most of my friends are actors because they love the work. So we go where the work is good," says Lynch.

And the work is good here. For the last two years, Baltimore has made the list of top-ten cities for independent filmmakers in MovieMaker magazine. The Maryland Film Office now boasts more than 650 union card-carrying film professionals living and working in the state. That doesn't include the three thousand Screen Actors Guild members. Whitehurst and Blair, who used many of the same crewmembers on both films, draw on the experience of this large pool of talented professionals who have honed their skills working on the Hollywood blockbusters that come to town (think Die Hard with a Vengeance) and television series such as David Simon's The Wire.

Whitehurst and Blair, along with their producing partner, local businessman Jeff Eline, decided it was time to leverage these local commodities and start raising money locally. The team began working with local arts supporters who have the means to create a mutual or venture capital fund that would allow investors to spread their risk over, say, four films, instead of one at a time. It's a novel idea for Baltimore, but it recalls the very origins of the studio system in early Hollywood and the creation of United Artists.

"Investing in a movie is a really risky proposition," Whitehurst says. "So what Steve and Jeff Eline and I are looking to do is create a venture capital fund with a mission statement to make several films. Every investor in the fund is a part owner of each film. So if we raise $10 million, we would make four films for $2.5 million. And if we end up with three bombs and one success, everyone could still do
very well."

Blair envisions a way that even small investors with $1,000 can get involved, as with a mutual fund. "There's plenty of money right here in this state," Blair says. "We want to try to tap into those people. We have the talented crews here, we have incredible locations, and the [city and state] film offices are really helpful. All the elements are here except distribution."

Scott Carter, Blair's assistant director on I Do & I Don't, says those elements came together well with this film. "You just don't find a script like this and a crew like this and a cast like this in a local production, working for next to nothing," Carter says. "Steve has created so much good karma, and he's such a professional, that he has been able to bring all of this talent to the project. I came to work every day with a director who knew exactly what he wanted."

And what these filmmakers want next is to grow B'more Pictures into a viable outlet for producing and distributing quality local films. "We're all from here, so we take a lot of pride in the city," says Whitehurst. "I've had more movement in my film career in Baltimore than I did in New York."

—Anne Haddad is a cinephile and a regular contributor to Urbanite.