Reel Report

REEL REPORT WHODUNIT?

Don’t Film the Crime if You Can’t Do the Time. In the three years since filmmaker Michael Eric embarked on shooting his crime drama, Connected, here on digital video, the director-producer-writer has gotten married, had twins, seen a Hollywood crew come and go in his footsteps, literally, and rewritten his own script (co-authored with David V. Allen) numerous times to accommodate the unplanned entrances and exeunts of various key actors. He’s shooting again this weekend, and hopes to premiere the finished feature next year: "The end is in sight. I think we’re going to be done shooting this summer. The editing is already being done, we’re in post-production stage." The Strongsville resident describes Connected as the story of a kid growing up in a mobbed-up section of Brooklyn, N.Y., torn between the right side of the law and the glamour of crime: "He gets involved in some trouble and he gets himself and his family in some trouble." Except for some second-unit location work in New York, Connected was shot in Cuyahoga County, finding an East Coast flavor in a neighborhood much frequented recently by 35mm Hollywood movie folk shooting their own crime flick: "The Collinwood area had a look we wanted." Eric also found that the Welcome to Collinwood crew frequented the same locations he had previously used during his once-and-future shoots, such as Broadway and East 55th. While Welcome to Collinwood got quite a bit of media attention, Eric has deliberately kept Connected low-key, despite the participation of literally hundreds of local folks and extras along the line. So, as Connected edges toward completion, what has first-time filmmaker Michael Eric learned? "The biggest lesson is I don’t want to do another project that’s going to take three years to shoot. It’s been a great experience, but I learned that I want to try and at least shoot in a concise time frame."