LENDERS MORGAN #1

Colliding forces of repression and sexual curiosity in a small Southern Ohio town foster the disappearance of a young girl, Taylor Feazel. Swept away on a whirlwind of mania, she is thrust back home, everything changed yet still the same. Where is Taylor Feazel? Ninety-four minutes.

Strong sexual content. Adult language. Unrated.

“Lender’s Morgan” is a drama that is laced with mystery that features the character of Taylor Feazel, a teenaged girl growing up in a poor, rural community circa 1969. She falls into a dilemma, which pressures her into an unwanted marriage. It is a story of the true pain of poverty — that being the lack of an escape and the presence of never-changing ignorance.

The following is a recent interview with the Director, Jon Russell Cring:

Interviewer: What is Lenders Morgan about?

Cring: Lenders Morgan is an American tale of growing up in poverty and the painful conflict of two very confused teenagers.

Interviewer: Describe for our listeners the main characters.

Cring: Our protagonist in the movie, I guess you would have to say- yes, that's Taylor Feazel. She's a young girl with simple plans who is suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances by our antagonist, a character named CD, played by Jasson Cring. There are several other characters including a minister, and a fortune teller, but Taylor and CD really drive the movie. The actress playing Taylor, Stephanie Grote, is just luminance on screen.

Interviewer: Is it a comedy or a drama?

Cring: Well, it's certainly a drama, though there are things that are always funny, right in the middle of tragedy. This is a movie that's aiming for the heart strings and will stimulate the mind and the spirit on the way.

APPY FILM FESTIVAL: 'I'M TELLING HUMAN STORIES': Director Jon Cring Emphasizes Stories of Ordinary People

By Tony Rutherford
Huntington News Network Critic

Huntington, WV (HNN) – Welcome to a visual land where the “ordinary” becomes memorable. That’s the philosophy of Jon Russell Cring, Hendersonville, Tennessee, director and producer of F3 Films.

“One of the exciting things about my films is love them or hate them, people walk out the door and they talk about them,” Cring said during a telephone interview. “I’m telling human stories.”

Calling “everybody’s life a Ben Hur,” he explained viewers are “fascinated” about how you “got through” a challenge. And they nod affirmatively, “That’s just what happened to me” or “I’ve been in that situation before.” Thus, Cring ignores the spaceships and car crash popcorn crunchers in favor of films that closely resemble reality styled 1970s films , such as “Scarecrow,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” and “Chinatown.”

“If a movie is relatable emotionally, those movies last,” he said.

Two of Cring’s films, “Bernee” and “Lenders Morgan” screen at the Appalachian Film Festival which starts today, Thursday, April 19, 2007, at the Keith Albee, and continues through Saturday. “Bernee” screens at 3:45 p.m. Thursday and “Lenders Morgan” rolls at 6:45 p.m. Friday.

Cring, whose wife Tracy serves as technical director and associate producer, has special excitement about the inclusion of “Bernee,” which is one of the films made during what he calls “the extraordinary film project,” where he and his crew intend to make 12 films of entirely different genres in twelve months.

“We shoot it in ten days, we edit it in ten days and we do post production which includes scoring and color correction [in ten days].”

F3 Films recently premiered “Ought,” which tells the story of a hit and run driver from the driver’s perspective. Over the course of four years, the film follows how the driver “injects himself into the lives of a family … just so he can be close to the boy he hit.”

Cring will speak to a gathering of Marshall students today at 6 p.m. in Smith Hall Room 621.

“What I like to talk about is how I make them. Here are my tricks of the trade. Here’s the way that I get things for free. This is how you can break down the process of making films. I get sick of people making it difficult on people so they will not do it. I want to encourage people to make films. I want it to be an easier process so more of those independent stories are being heard by people.”

Instead of approaching the goal of twelve films in twelve months from the broad perception, Cring starts with simplicity: “I have to get eleven garbage dumpsters. I take it one piece at a time.” In fact, he laughed that “the making of one of my movies will be much more interesting than the movie itself. That’s one of the great things about independent filmmaking.”

An Interview With Jon Russell and Tracy Cring by Dale Pierce

Needing a name? How about Jon Russell Cring, the Director and Producer for the Extra/Ordinary Film Project. Enter Jonathan Richard Cring, my father and my wife, Tracy Nichole Cring, the cinematographer and editor, and miscellaneous Crings and others and you have our project, which has now finished eight films and is in pre-production on number nine. We were toiling away in zombie hell, producing for an independent horror company and realized zombies don’t talk so therefore never have anything new to say, so we asked my father, who is an accomplished novelist and award winning song writer to put pen to paper and give us a feature film script we could finish fast and on a small budget. Lenders Morgan, a psycho-sexual period piece set in 1969 was what he gave us, and it has become a film festival darling.

The Extra/Ordinary Film Project is an audacious attempt to make twelve feature films in twelve months. We were sitting at a Chinese restaurant and my father said he could write a feature film script every month, and dared us to produce the impossible. We had finished one feature and eleven shorts the previous year, and this sounded like a chance to fully immerse our creativity and passion into full-time filmmaking. One guideline: Every film has to be about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

We have premiered at eleven festivals and won four, for best screenplay, best actress, and two best feature awards. Impressive? I guess you'd have to understand the reality of film festivals. Honestly, sometimes they impress me and sometimes not. I could put up a screen in a parking lot and have the same crowd who attends my viewing at a festival, so to me, they really are about meeting up with other filmmakers who have a heart to champion the people they perceive as up and coming. Often I am asked to speak on panels about my experience and my particular film-making philosophy. It's really quite simple. I contend that it is important to remain inclusive and encouraging and that it is very powerful to demystify the film-making process rather than frightening new-comers with the harsh reality of legalities, sales figures. business plans, contracts and all the other shit that keeps people from pursuing their passion.

The project website is the place where actors and the interested innocents go to get all news and information Extra/Ordinary. At www.extraordinaryfilmproject.com! we have a weekly blog, DVDs for sale, festival news, trailers, premier info, and casting notices. We try to stay connected to the public, and keep the site updated and interactive.

Well, I think that’s like asking me to show you the ashtray I made in ninth grade pottery class. Other films I have worked on are hiding in the drawer of the banquette in the dining room. One day a renegade DVD might escape, but suffice it to say, I am excited by my current projects and have learned that it takes as much energy to make crap as to make gold.

Extra/Ordinary will be morphing in 2008 into finishing 6 feature films in 6 cities all over the U.S. Landing in Phoenix, Arizona first; we hope to continue to take advantage of the beauty and talent of the regions we will visit. This will diversify the look of the films and give us a chance to stir up each community and reach audiences that wouldn’t have been able to be a part otherwise.

Well there are things we have learned and mistakes we have made that make us who we are. As a director, I can envision what a montage of the projectpassing before my eyes would look like. Let’s see, it would have to include 4 near arrests, 2 cases of food poisoning (one urp in progress--filmed), a female crucifixion, several fires, $500 for the loss of food in a walk-in refrigerator at a restaurant location, a combined total of 1271 actors and extras working 15 hours a day for 82 days, shooting more than 256 hours of footage. It has been the ride of a lifetime. When I am old and gray on the front porch I’ll be thinking of all the richness of experience Extra/Ordinary brought me.

None of us went to college. That may not be an inight that high school guidance counselors want revealed, but the truth is you learn or burn, including burgers at the local diner. We all have creative strengths; Tracy won her first film festival in Los Angeles at age 18. My father tours the country and has since age nineteen, performing theater, music, comedy, and penning novels. Me, I found a way to be bossy for a living without incurring the wrath of the proletariat.

After taking his first pioss out next to the petrified dinosaur dung heap, the first men and women next felt a need to communicate their experiences to other people. Cave drawings were movies--depictions of the triumphs and tragedies that were the first visuals based on a true story . Add a marquee that says Starring Mel Gibson in Mammoth Hunter and you got yourself a blockbuster (although profit margins did tend to cave in). I believe all art was created to be a film. If Michelangelo had a 35mm camera, he probably would have made a helluva movie. Film is the combination of all art--music, painting, photography, theater, and comedy.

My wife and I recently dragged our asses out of bed and over breakfast she looked up at me with her puffy eyes and with a hint of snarl, asked, “Who the fuck came up with this fool idea?” When we started the Extra/Ordinary Film Project, we had no clue how long a year could be. How you can bend space and time to your will. Being the end of the year we are reflecting on the year prior to the project, and had a good laugh over taking five months to edit our first feature. I asked Tracy why it took so long and she said, “ I sucked back then. Now I know what needs to be done and in what order.” I think that sentence is pretty much the key to success in all things.

I love films of every genre; a great film can be anything. The stories that last are all about the struggle of an ordinary person. I think Halloween is different from Saw, I care for Jamie Lee Curtis, why does her brother want to kill her, why is George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life such a jerk to his family, have I ever felt as overwhelmed by the complications of life like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. I am a huge film fan, my wife claims to have watched 325 films in one month (weird), but you have to come away from a film with a revelation of emotion, or it will be as forgettable as Jack Black in Never Ending Story III. At a premier of the fifth film of the project $6 Man, the story of a homeless widowed father and his young daughter choosing to live on the streets, an older lady came up to me in tears talking about how the film touched her, a kid with a Mohawk stopped me on the way out, saying it was the most real thing he’d ever seen. My characters talk like you because they are you, at your worst and best.

Re-makes. Come on this is a great big world, do we need to have Denzel Washington displacing Frank Sinatra in the Manchurian Candidate? Netflix has the first one. There are stories yet to be told. I notice no one is touching To Kill A Mocking Bird. Uh-oh, don’t you get any ideas.

The only reason to make what you call “indy” films is to secure the fact that you own it. My films answer to me, not some test audience that scores every pixel and gets to determine every plot point, including the ending. I don’t consider myself independent, indy, underground; those titles have less and less meaning when their budgets are in the millions. I am making mainstream stories, like Network, Breakfast Club, Serpico, and Babe--just at a discounted bottom line. I am the Big Lots of cinema.

Making a movie in a month. Once you have it produced and paid for, the easy part is shooting it, making all the actors shine, editing together all the gold into a film which I get to sit back and watch on the big screen.

Living on tacos, little sleep, and tight budgets. No really, the big question after a film is always what to do with it now, getting it out in front of people. We have had distribution offers, but a famous record producer told my father once, “Never sign anything until you absolutely have to, and the only reason you have to is cash.” Distribution companies sometimes don’t have incentives to sign except for a lot of back-end promises, and I don’t know about you but I always try to avoid the back end of almost anything. We really want the E/O Project films to sell to a company that believes in these twelve films, and the six to follow directly after. We have had offers, on several of our “children” but would you sell one of your kids? Oops--perhaps that'a a bad example. But truthfully, you would want them all to have a happy home.

We cast through several wonderful talent sites--Mandy.com, ExploreTalent. CraigsList, MySpace, local talent agencies and we conduct auditions through Youtube and DVD. We also have breakdowns and casting info on the website.

I would like to extend an invitation to our premier of the Christmas film we just finished, WONDERFUL, in Flint, Michigan on Saturday December 8th, 2007 at 11:00 AM, at Cinema Hollywood off the Birch Run Exit. If you can’t come, go to the website, look around, email us and share your thoughts f3films@comcast.net.

Yeah. "Go into the world and preach. . ." Wait, I think that one's been used. How about, "Ask not what your country can do for you...?" Wait a second. Someone might have actually watched a special on Kennedy on Entertainment Tonight. Oh, well, I guess I'll have to go original. It's worked for me so far. Thanks to you for listening and go forth and make films that matter.