For a filmmaker, it’s a daunting task to take an idea and get it onto a screen.
That’s true for a short film. But to make a full-length, independent feature film — to get it written, produced, shot and actually shown to audiences — is an even more daunting (and more expensive) task.
“It’s nearly impossible,” said Drew Lewis Brown, a 33-year-old filmmaker.
And to do it in Florida? It’s tempting to say that’s like a moonshot. But the odds of launching a successful moonshot in Florida might be better than convincing a production company to support shooting a film in Florida.
There are plenty of films about Florida, supposedly set in Florida but filmed somewhere else. California, New York, Georgia. Especially Georgia.
Drew Lewis Brown, who won a Student Academy Award while growing up in Northeast Florida, plans to return to Jacksonville to make his debut feature film, “Baby Tooth.”
So it’s noteworthy not only that Brown, who lives in Los Angeles, has made it this far in the process of making his debut feature film — he has written a script, shot a “proof of concept” video, cast a Tony Award-winning actress and is working on a deal with a New York-based production company to raise a $1 million budget — but that he plans to make it here in Jacksonville.
Still a ‘Jacksonville filmmaker’
Brown suggested meeting at Bold Bean in Riverside. It seemed fitting. It’s where he started writing a film called “Baby Tooth.” Sitting a table behind the coffee shop, he said that while his residence these days might be in Los Angeles — and he moved there last year after five years in Brooklyn — he still considers himself “a Jacksonville filmmaker.”
He moved to Northeast Florida at age 12, after bouncing between Alabama, South Carolina, back to Alabama and Georgia, relocating often amidst the tumult of what he describes as a broken household from divorce. Middleburg became home. He grew up there, before attending the now-closed Art Institute of Jacksonville, a for-profit college.
He’s successfully made a variety of types of films in Jacksonville. He made a short film, “Person,” that won a Student Academy Award. He made a six-episode mockumentary-style YouTube series called “Lemoncurd” about a Southern housewife who wants to be like Paula Dean. And he co-directed “The Grey Area,” named Best Short Documentary at the 2022 Jacksonville Film Festival.
But now he wants to make a feature film. And he wants to make it here.
That’s why he’s back in Jacksonville this week, kicking off a fundraising campaign Thursday evening with an event at WJCT Studios, doing interviews, meeting for coffee at a place that has a lot of memories.
“I lived about a block away,” he said. “And I would walk or bike over here nearly every day.”
It’s where in 2019, a few months after his grandmother died, he started writing a script that six years later has taken some major steps toward becoming a film that, as summed up in a press release, “is about a disconnected family coming together to care for their terminally ill grandmother.”
He says it’s about themes of safety and acceptance, both for the dying woman and her family — the daughter and granddaughter who were her primary caregivers and a grandson who, while growing up in rural towns, hid his sexuality and grappled with his own issues of safety and acceptance.
“‘Baby Tooth’ is a fictionalized retelling of the last few days that my grandmother was alive,” he said. “I’d say it’s probably 70 percent autobiographical. And, yes, it’s extremely personal to me.”
He wants to shoot it here, not just because the inspiration for it came while he was living in Northeast Florida, or because he returned here in 2023 to do on-stage readings in front of audiences at Babs’Lab and Players by the Sea — an exercise he says helped him refine the dialogue in the script.
He believes Jacksonville — the city that in the early 20th century was known as the “Winter Film Capital of the World” — has so much potential for film in the 21st century.
“We’re seeing Florida stories represented at such a large scale now, but so many of these Florida stories aren’t even being filmed in Florida,” he said. “I think it’s kind of an untapped market. I don’t think it’s really taken seriously, which is striking to me, because it’s no secret just how much money we see our neighbors in Georgia bringing in.”
Georgia, which has been offering film incentives for several decades, overtook California in 2016 for the most feature films produced that year. And Georgia claims that every $1 in film tax incentives generates $6.30 in economic impact for the state, adding up to billions of dollars a year.
Florida pulled the plug on a film incentive program in 2016. But a handful of counties now have their own programs — including Duval.
In 2024, Jacksonville introduced the Film & Television Program. It has two incentive tiers designed to attract film production to the area. The top one offers a 20% rebate for expenditures exceeding $1 million in Duval County, with a cap of $400,000. And City Council recently voted to approve a $400,000 transfer to negotiate with a production company, behind what is now only publicly known as Project T, with a plan to spend $3 million over a six-month filming in Jacksonville.
Even though that isn’t his project, Brown describes it as exciting news.
“It helps me out a lot with the production company I’m working with in New York,” he said. “It shows them that the people in Jacksonville really do want to make sure these projects are able to happen.”
That also applies to the fundraising campaign. He hopes to raise $100,000 of the $1 million production budget. Along with casting that already includes Judith Ivey — known for among other things “Designing Women,” “The Devil’s Advocate,” “Steel Magnolias” and Oscar-nominated “Women Talking” — that will make it easier for the production company, which last year had a feature film in the Sundance Film Festival, to secure the remaining financing through industry investors.
He says this is why he moved to New York and then Los Angeles — not to get away from Jacksonville, but to connect with the people who could help him return to Jacksonville to make films, starting with “Baby Tooth.”
Caregiving and ‘Lawrence Welk’
His grandmother was 95 when she fell and broke both her legs. She wasn’t able to walk again. For the last six months of her life, she lived in a medical bed in the middle of his mother’s living room. His mom and sister took turns as caregivers.
“When I was visiting them, I would see the sacrifices that they were making, the things that they were putting aside in order to provide for my grandmother,” he said.
Every day they would turn on “The Lawrence Welk Show.” And this show that his grandmother watched growing up would unlock something in her. As she was dying, it brought her to life. She would wave her hands, as if conducting the orchestra.
“I could just sort of see through her eyes that she was escaping through this sort of colorful, nostalgic, shimmery glamor that was on the TV,” he said.
After she took her last breath, he thought all of this should be a movie. A serious movie about topics like death and dying and caregiving. But also a movie about escapism and acceptance.
The title of the film comes from something he and the main character still have. A baby tooth that never came out. He wanted to get it taken out, wanted to get rid of this remnant of a tumultuous childhood. But when he couldn’t, he eventually accepted it.
“Maybe it’s kind of goofy and poetic, the whole baby tooth story,” he said. “But for me, it truly is this symbolism of how trauma, once worked through, you can move with it in your life.”
Brown says his mother, Jan, was a die-hard Floridian, but when her mother died, she needed to start over. So she moved to Maine. And his sister, Elizabeth, ended up there, too, pursuing something partly inspired by their grandmother’s final six months. After at one point catching a dangerous drug interaction that doctors and the pharmacy missed, Elizabeth went to pharmacy school. She’s now a Doctor of Pharmacy.
Drew Brown recently went to Maine to film a short documentary of his mother and sister talking about their experiences and caregiving. It will be shown Thursday night at WJCT. Tissues will be needed. It is sad and poignant but — as he also imagines “Baby Tooth” — has its moments of inspiration and laughter.
There’s one when his sister, talking about women often being the caregivers, says: “Just because we’re good at it doesn’t mean we’re the only ones that can or should be doing it.”
Then, speaking not to the camera but the brother behind it, she quips: “When Momma gets old, I’m just going to ship her off to you, and she’ll be your problem.”
You hear all of them laugh, then see Drew reach out his hand and say, “Let’s shake on it.”
In the end, his sister says: “There needs to be a societal shift in the way people approach end-of-life care. It’s so immensely important that we fund projects like this, because that’s how we are able to alter and improve people’s perspectives, especially on difficult topics like caregiving and death.”
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This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Filmmaker plans to make debut feature film in Jacksonville
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