East Hampton Star story

[From The East Hampton Star - Oct 8, 2009]

“A Hamptons Homecoming”
By Kate Maier

on the set of "Schooled" with Alysia Reiner. Photo by Brendan Elms

The Hamptons International Film Festival might be surprised to find a true East Hamptoner in their midst this year.

Like many others, Brooks Elms, a Californian who recently wrote a script along with a longtime friend, Greg Cantwell of New York, will be in town to rub elbows with more established people in the film industry. But while he is here, Mr. Elms most likely will also be paying a visit to his mother at the house he grew up in on McGuirk Street. He’s also bound to meet up with some of the cast and crew members of the 50-some-odd films he churned out as a student at East Hampton High School.

The movie he will be pitching to producers, “Montauk Highway,” explores class division in a place called East Hampton. The lead character’s last name is Bennett.

After his most recently completed film, “Schooled,” became a “cult classic in the alternative education community,” Mr. Elms went back to the drawing board to create a script that would appeal to a wider audience, “instead of beloved micro-niches,” he said.

Enter Mr. Cantwell, a former high school buddy who is an advertising sales executive for Spike TV and Comedy Central in Manhattan. “Through my mom and through Greg, I have a sense of what’s going on out there,” Mr. Elms said. Mr. Cantwell “had the sort of base idea to do something in the summer when there was a scandal and the tensions were particularly high.”

The two tossed around a number of ideas before coming back to one that Mr. Cantwell had suggested before. In the script, a local girl is killed by a wealthy visitor from Manhattan in a hit-and-run accident.

Ultimately, the protagonist must decide between standing up for his friends, a group of “tough, sun-kissed, blue-collar kids who think college is a waste of time, and that rich people are a waste of life,” or adopting the privileged lifestyle that he has been invited to adopt.

“That other idea from the past came lurching forward, especially with the economic times; it’s so severe between the haves and the have-nots,” Mr. Elms said last week. “The Hamptons is such a known town, but very few people really know what it’s like from a local perspective.”

As a student at East Hampton High School in the late 1980s, Mr. Elms made short experimental films and videos with a core group whose members included Mr. Cantwell, Rich Morey, Fred Ryerson, Jed Laskowitz, Chris Kelly, and Jay, Matt, and Bryan Charron. [Plus, P.J. Cantwell, Matt Dauch and many more!]

Many were aired on LTV, and “at our peak, we made a 55-minute movie that we premiered in the E.H.H.S. auditorium in front of over 100 people,” Mr. Elms said in an e-mail.

Mr. Elms took his adolescent ambition to the next level as a film student at New York University. Fittingly, the first film he made there won him a production grant at the Hamptons International Film Festival. His thesis film, “Drew, Trip, and Zoey,” snagged a screenwriting award from New York University.

“Next up was an experimental narrative called ‘Disaster Video,’ about a nervous astronomer who isn’t sure if he’s discovered a meteor heading toward earth that will exterminate our species, or if his girlfriend is just cheating on him,” Mr. Elms said by e-mail.

“I learned two excellent lessons from that movie: Number one, I needed to learn more about story structure. And number two, I needed time off.”

Mr. Elms spent the next few years in Chapel Hill in North Carolina “devouring books on psychology, the human growth movement, and radical educational philosophies.” Since then, he has been exploring themes of authority and hierarchy in his work. “Montauk Highway” is a manifestation of this new perspective.

At the festival, Mr. Elms and Mr. Cantwell will be touring parties and panel discussions along with Tony Abrams, another filmmaker who has signed on to the project as the director. The hope is to forge a contact with an executive producer who can turn the dream into a reality.

Mr. Elms also hopes to run into Alec Baldwin, a task that many who live on the South Fork do not find that difficult. Aside from leading “A Conversation With Martin Bregman” on Saturday, Mr. Baldwin serves on the board and has historically been super-involved in festival activities.

Mr. Elms is also looking forward to seeing a few films made by former colleagues. Andrew Hollander, the composer who worked on “Schooled,” also wrote the score for “Serious Moonlight.” Directed by Cheryl Hines and starring Meg Ryan, the movie will be screened today at 1:30 and tomorrow at 9:30 p.m.

Alysia Reiner, the leading lady in “Schooled,” [produces] and stars in “Speed Grieving,” a short film that is to run in the New York Women in Film and Television series.

While Mr. Elms tries to visit East Hampton at least once a year to see family and friends, he anticipates being entirely consumed by the festival, which he hasn’t attended since college. He is likely to notice that a lot has changed over the festival’s 17 years, with more stars, films, discussions, and workshops than ever before.

If he has time, he said, he might make it down to the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett for a late-night drink and perhaps to run into some old friends — but his main purpose will be to talk to some of the heavy hitters the festival is known to attract.

“There will be more networking than Mom on this trip,” he said.

East Hampton Star Article

Here’s the article they wrote about me in The East Hampton Star about my trip home for the Hamptons Film Fest.