Tucson native Christian Frelinghuysen is bringing his debut feature film to the Loft Cinema this weekend.
At 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 20, he will join 20 friends and family members for an invitation-only screening — the first public screening of his rom-com/coming-of-age movie “Stroke of Luck.”
“I’ve waited my entire childhood to do this, so it’s hard to digest it actually happening,” Frelinghuysen said last week. “It might have been a lot more work and patience than I had initially intended to get this done, and as good as I hope it will end up being … I just hope people can see my writing style and a piece of me while they watch it.”
“I was always scared of screenings, but now I feel like I can handle it,” the 27-year-old budding filmmaker added. “I’m 99.9% confident.”
Frelinghuysen’s other screenings were shorts he made while attending Florida’s Lynn University as a film and TV undergrad and grad school at New York Film Academy in Los Angeles.
“Stroke of Luck,” which he filmed at his uncle’s farm in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, started life as Frelinghuysen’s master’s thesis for the New York Film Academy. But after parting ways with the academy over artistic differences, he turned to his father Fred, a retired business consultant, for financial support.
Frelinghuysen, who grew up in Tucson and left his freshman year of high school to attend boarding school in Connecticut, wrote the screenplay for “Stroke of Luck” in the spring of 2019 after getting the OK from his uncle to use the farm. The setting inspired the story, he said.
They began filming in October 2019 with seasoned producer Mark Farrell (HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” A&E’s “Biographies” series and more than 200 hours of music, comedy and specials for HBO, Showtime, MTV and A&E), who also was first assistant director to mentor Frelinghuysen.
“I read the script and the script was fun. It was a fun coming of age movie that had this quirky side thing going on,” said Farrell.
“Stroke of Luck” is the story of young man who gets kicked out of school in New York City after an ill-advised and costly prank and has to work on his father’s Berkshires farm to earn money to pay for the damages. There’s a love story weaved into a father-son coming-to-terms plot that’s complicated by the family’s financial hurdles that could cost them the farm. And in the backdrop of all that is the quirky side thing Farrell alluded to: a plot by a few thieves — including one played in a cameo appearance by John Popper of Blues Traveler fame — to steal semen from the family’s horses. Horse semen is apparently valuable enough to save the family farm.
In July, they filmed the final scenes, following strict COVID-19 protocols set out by the Screen Actors Guild.
“It was pretty serious,” Ferrell said, noting that protocols covered everything from how the craft services snacks were distributed to creating indoor and outdoor spaces to socially distance the crew. “The makeup person had to not only wear a face mask but also a face shield.”
The film still needs to be color-corrected and the audio mixed before it is finished, which Farrell said could be completed by late January. When it’s done, he and Frelinghuysen hope to enter it in some film festivals and look for a distributor. Farrell is confident the movie will find a home possibly on Netflix or Amazon, two platforms that he said are friendly to independent films.
“This is a film that is a genre (teenage coming of age films) that is highly touted and sought after,” he said.
Frelinghuysen said he hopes “Stroke of Luck” is a springboard for him to make more films.
“I hope to get another opportunity to write another film and hopefully many more to come,” he said, adding that he is already working on another script.
