It’s a war on war

Perpetual war, like oil, seeps into every gear of society; an agent of change altering the viscosity of our always-untenable culture. Eventually it gets into places the powerful never intended for it to go. Shopping malls, schools, small towns once called idyllic, now called dead. And there, push-pinned into the quicksand ledge of the American Dream, the Inland Empire of Los Angeles, sits Calabasas, Calif. where they had come to see a film about the great ghastly breakdown, a film called Anytown.

The competition was Method Fest, a popular showcase for new independent films. Baton Rouge filmmaker George Kostuch, one of the Anytown producers, paced in the back as the opening credits rolled over the alarming sounds of an unseen assault. It might as well have been an attack on Kostuch’s nerves. He can never sit down for these screenings, but now he couldn’t even stay in the room. Time for a drink and a cigarette. Kostuch slipped out the theater and headed for the bar.

A tall, wiry 22-year-old was on his way already. Anytown star Matt O’Leary smoked anxiously as a card catalogue of possible audience reactions to his eye-popping performance plowed through his head. Playing a delusional, ultraviolent racist was challenging enough. Sitting in a room full of strangers studying the performance might have been unbearable. “We were both so nervous because we were world premiering our riskiest film ever,” Kostuch says.

They tried relaxing at the bar, but kept checking their watches. They knew exactly when things would get ugly on screen, the grotesque turning point when audiences would lean forward in their seats or leave them altogether to thump against the seatbacks. Kostuch marked the time. It was about to get real.

A year earlier the K|2 Pictures co-founder pulled O’Leary aside for a pep talk during production in Donaldsonville. “You’ve got to take charge,” he told the young, but experienced actor of noteworthy performances in Frailty, Brick and Live Free or Die Hard. “These guys need to listen to you.”

O’Leary took the advice literally. His gang of four delinquent teens was already separated from the rest of the cast and crew at a small bed and breakfast miles away. O’Leary ordered they retreat even farther, this time to a farmhouse with no electricity and no beds. There they crashed on sleeping bags and grilled their own meals in preparation for the intense shoot ahead.

It’s hard to imagine Jesse McCartney doing that. The teen-friendly pop singer was first cast as the lead and then dropped out. Tarnishing a squeaky clean pop idol’s image with a role like this might have lent a certain amount of poetic justice to the film, but O’Leary’s reckless intensity serves the role perfectly. He embodies a wayward 17-year-old who, inspired by his older brother serving in Iraq, decides to combat terrorism on his home turf. The war is a desperate act by desperate leaders, he thinks. So his American duty is to react in desperation, too.

Made for less than $1 million, Anytown is one of those rare historical dramas set in the near past, but it is a story that demands a watermark from 2004. That’s the year the original Saw sparked a new genre of gruesome horror movies perhaps influenced by the proliferation of terrorist beheadings posted online. Saw’s sequels and its imitators have since been termed “torture porn.”

Anytown inhabits this same cognitive arena but as a sly and slightly removed anthropological study of ignorance, racism and violence at the height of post-9/11 War on Terror hysteria. What starts with four guys skipping school to swill some beers and smoke cigars slowly turns into a nightmare. It’s senioritis gone sinister. “It starts off slow to sort of lull you in,” explains Kostuch’s K|2 Pictures partner Matt Keith. “So, you feel exactly how they feel, the boredom of this small town.”

O’Leary and Kostuch timed it just right, settling inside the theater at Method Fest to witness the audience reaction to O’Leary’s violent turn. Nominated for a handful of awards, Anytown only took one. Director Dave Rodriguez earned the Director’s Award for Excellence trophy. Kostuch thinks they got robbed. “Man, I wanted to win them all,” he says with a smile. “I honestly think we deserved it.”

Kostuch was vindicated soon, though, when the film nabbed the Golden Crescent Award for Best Feature at the Charleston International Film Festival. Anytown co-stars Prison Break’s Marshall Allman as O’Leary’s corruptible friend, and Natasha Henstridge of Species and The Whole Nine Yards fame appears in a bookend role as a TV reporter covering the gruesome hate crime.

Kostuch spent the last several months promoting the film and looking for the right distribution deal. Normally K|2 would be in production on the next project by now, but with some festival awards and good press, Kostuch is taking his time and riding the Anytown wave.

“I see this as our springboard, our door opener,” says Kostuch. “What I’m proud of is our last five films have each gotten better. And the fact is an indie film shot in Louisiana can get a good write-up in Variety. It can win at international festivals. Anytown shows it can happen.”