Cleveland is getting whole lotta love on the screen this year.
First came James Gunn’s “Superman” and now “Lost & Found in Cleveland,” which opens Nov. 7 on 500 screens nationwide.
Both filmed here, but the latter will likely be far more personal for natives in Northeast Ohio as directors Keith Gerchak, a Lakewood native, and Marisa Guterman, a Los Angeles native, who loved it here so much during filming that she ditched Cali for Cleveland, have cracked the code to enjoying what the North Coast offers.
Telling four stories that converge at a “Antiques Roadshow” like show, it gets to the heart of what it means to be of Cleveland if not from it.
There’s the liberal college professor (Santino Fontana) worried about what his Black friend will think about his inherited collection of Aunt Jemima figures, the pretentious Hunting Valley socialite (Liza Weil) who is focused on her piece from Tunisia. The boy (Benjamin Steinhauser) who has an affinity for Pres. McKinley, the senior couple (June Squibb, Stacy Keach) whose male half exhibits signs of early-stage Alzheimer’s and the mailman (Dennis Haysbert) with dreams of being a restauranteur.
Dennis Haysbert and Martin Sheen in a scene from “Lost & Found in Cleveland.”
All have dreams of their items scoring a large payday in some form or fashion. Each story presents a uniquely Cleveland perspective.
It’s been a 12-year odyssey for Gerchak and Guterman to get their film and those perspectives to the screen.
“We always said that this film was like a re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz. So, there was this Yellow Brick Road aspect to it and this kind of hero’s journey, which is really what that film is about,” Gerchak said during a recent Zoom conversation, “and we had set out to tell the journey of everyday heroes, which doesn’t really get reflected in movies in Hollywood anymore.”
The challenge in making ‘Lost & Found in Cleveland’
That lack of representation is a significant challenge for smaller films in Hollywood today, which is why “Lost & Found” has taken the independent route. There are those in the Cleveland area who are investors, including a book club, Guterman revealed.
“I mean, inherently filmmaking is a miracle. Each film that comes together is its own sequence of impossible events,” she said. “And I think just where we are in the macro environment of films, a movie like ours would never get made in a conventional system of what Hollywood puts out. It’s an ensemble comedy with heart. It’s nostalgic, it’s hopeful, and it’s not what studios do.”
Finding that North Coast vibe in ‘Lost & Found in Cleveland’
It’s also a film that deals with the eccentricities of Cleveland, good and bad, humorous and otherwise. Cleveland, until recent years, has been a polarized metropolitan area. Despite being within the same city limits, east siders didn’t migrate west and vice versa. The sometimes-obsessive sports culture gets the spotlight along with the toxic masculinity that can come with it gets needled.
And, of course, there’s the racism that has been an issue in the city for seemingly eons that is exposed both covertly and overtly within one scene filmed at the West Side Market with Cleveland favorite Haysbert (“Major League,” “Major League II”).
June Squibb and Stacy Keach in a scene from “Lost & Found in Cleveland.”
A cast with local and Ohio ties in ‘Lost & Found in Cleveland’
But they also bring that Cleveland flavor with actors such as Haysbert, a last-minute addition to the cast, who has been adopted by the city because of those “Major League” films.
“I think that this character is going to make people believe and have hope again,” Guterman said, “and so I think that is a quality that is so unique to Dennis’s talent and gift. There’s something soulful and almost godly about him that the people of Cleveland just have such a connection to him.”
The cast, in fact, is peppered with actors who have ties to the city and the state.
Martin Sheen portrays Dr. Austin Raybourne one of the antiquities experts on the fictional television show. Sheen, a Dayton native, has never been shy about his Ohio ties. The unknown surprise: Squibb’s ties to the area. The star of films such as “Nebraska,” her breakout role, began her career at the Cleveland Play House in 1951 and was inducted into the Play House Hall of Fame in 2014.
“There’s an authenticity that they bring, that there’s a full immersion into the world of what Ohio is like that I think people were reacting to,” Gerchak said of the cast. “It also attracted the kind of actors who didn’t frankly do it for the money. It was an independent film, but they did it to work with each other and they did it to tell this kind of story that Marisa’s talking about. When they read the script, Dennis wept because it just touched him in a way. Martin Sheen said he hadn’t had a role where he could do the monologues that he did at ‘The West Wing’ in like 25 years.”
Finding its audience at the Cleveland International Film Festival
It certainly struck a chord earlier this year at the Cleveland International Film Festival where it set records not only for an audience for a single screening with close to 2,500 in attendance, but it was the largest audience to view a film at Playhouse Square since its inception in 1973.
“It was emotional, honestly and I don’t think we had any idea that that was going to happen,” Guterman said. “We went into it just hoping that people would love the film, but to see people in lines and have the lines be down Euclid down to the parking lot at Playhouse Square, getting to be on stage.”
Gerchak said it was an eye-opening moment.
“It was interesting to see it. It really clarified who our audience was as well,” he said. “I mean, there were people, Hollywood says that people over the age of 35 don’t go to movie theaters. They don’t factor into the analytics…So we set out to prove that people who are over the age of 50 would go out to the movie theaters if you give them something that they want to see. And that really proved to be true.”
George M. Thomas covers a myriad of things including sports and pop culture, but mostly sports, he thinks, for the Beacon Journal.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Directors find vibe and soul of city in ‘Lost & Found in Cleveland’
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
