Shark Attack: The movie "Megalodon" will debut at the Fort Myers Beach Film Festival
By Richard Ferrara
Special to the Daily News
A 60-foot shark rampant on Fort Myers Beach?
Settle down, it's only the world premiere of the new movie "Megalodon" debuting at the upcoming Fort Myers Beach Film Festival.
The film is set to be one of main attractions when the festival comes to life April 25-28 to celebrate the independent film industry and showcase the talents of local and upcoming filmmakers. Fort Myers' Beach Theater will be open to the public for three days of movies, luncheons and film discussion forums, while a host of other movie-related events will be taking place about the town.
"Megalodon" shows at 6 p.m. Saturday, April 27, and at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 28.
"Megalodon" takes place off the coast of Greenland in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, where Nexecon Petroleum has constructed the largest drilling rig ever built, Colossus. In its quest for oil, the rig is prepared to drill deeper into the ocean floor than ever attempted. The media swarms to cover the project as geologists and environmentalists decry the drilling, warning that disruption of fault lines in the earth's crust could result in catastrophe. Their worst fears are proven correct when the drill cracks open a subterranean cave system teeming with prehistoric life.
Enter Megalodon.
"It's the ancestor to the Great White," said Stanley Isaacs, writer and producer of the film. "They were approximately 50 feet long and the most ferocious predators ever to swim in the ocean. This one's bigger than Jaws. It kills people, it just devours people. It's been freed from prison for all these millions of years and it's on a mission."
That's not great news for the Nexecon crew, who find themselves trapped on the rig with the 60-foot Megalodon stalking the waters. Will they prevail, or will they be lessened to so much human chum?
As gory as the movie might sound, in actuality the amount on-screen violence is minimal. Isaacs and director Pat Corbitt preferred the film to focus less on grotesque visuals and more on suspense and action, like sci-fi thrillers used to be.
"It's not an ugly film to watch," Isaacs said. "Today the emphasis is more on harsh language and grotesque imagery. This movie doesn't have any gratuitous language and the blood and violence is kept to a minimum. Most of it is offscreen rather than thrown in your face. I have a 6-year-old son, and I raised him watching all the sci-fi movies of the 50s, you know, the giant creature movies. You look at the pitures then, they were kind of innocent and silly in a way, but yet entertaining.”
“Megaladon” even has a bit of an environmental message it hopes to get across subtly.
“It’s a movie that touches on issues about the preservation of the planet without being preachy or lecturing," Isaacs said. “It manages to have something to say in terms of who we are as a people right now.”
Isaacs also wanted to create characters that the audience would care about, rather than mere shark fodder to enhance the movie's shock value.
"Most of the time you're not invested in the characters in these movies where people just get killed left and right. In this movie you care about the people, they actually are real humans," he said.
The cast of the film mcludes Robin Sachs ("Galaxy Quest," ”Ocean's Eleven"), who plays Nexecon CEO Peter Brazier, a conscientious businessman who is misinterpreted as a greedy oil baron. Actress and model Leighanne Littrell ("My Fellow Americans") portrays news reporter Christen Giddings, who comes to the rig to cover the story and ends up stranded along with the rest. Al Sapienza, perhaps best known for his role as Mickey Palmice on "The Sopranos," also appears in the film.
For an independent film with a limited budget, "Megalodon" manages to make efficient use of the resources of modern special effects. Unlike the mechanical shark used in the movie “Jaws," the shark in "Megalodon" is totally computer generated, done by the director’s special effects company, Corbitt Design, Inc. In fact, the majority of the movie can be attributed to digital effects wizardry, including all underwater environments, submersibles, and the Colossus rig itself.
Shooting for the film took only 30 days, while over a year's work was dedicated to computer imaging. Thus, a movie set off the coast of Greenland was able to be filmed in New Jersey.
“It’s a very ambitious picture," Isaacs said. "Its the biggest that I’ve gotten produced in terms of the complexities that needed to be done. It has somewhere close to 500 computer images in it, an astonishing amount of imagery for a low-budget film."
In his 25 years in the movie business, Isaacs has produced and written a number of independent films. He enjoys the creative liberties afforded filmmakers outside the big studios, but also abides by the constraints. He didn't always have fancy computers, and like many solo filmmakers, he had to improvise.
“What independent filmmaking does is kind of makes you run-and-gun,” he said. “You’ve got to be inventive. I remember doing a movie years and years ago when we didn't have the money for any kind of equipment to do anything. We needed to do a zoom shot on a character, so we came up with the idea of putting a piece of velveteen on this long conference table with the camera mounted on top of it, and we had two guys to either side pulling it across the table. It was a little jerky, but it worked.”
Isaacs is looking forward to the premiere of “Megalodon” at the Fort Myers Beach Film Festival, which he will be attending along with director Pat Corbitt and actress Leighanne Littrell. The feedback from the audience may even help polish the movie for completion.
"I'm very excited about bringing the movie and having people see it for the first time and getting their reaction," he said. “It’s intriguing to be at a festival speaking in front of hundreds of people and discussing the picture. I guarantee you when we screen the movie and the audience has a problem with something or responds favorably to something else, we’ll go back and tweak the movie one more time”