COVER STORY:  First Run Features to Open Suspense Thriller SUSPENDED ANIMATION in Theatres.
a John Hancock Film

     A small cabin, hidden deep in the snow-covered hills of Northern Michigan is Hollywood animator Tom Kempton's only refuge after getting separated from his friends on a snowmobile trip. What started out as a relaxing getaway, becomes a waking nightmare when Tom finds himself at the hands of two psychotic sisters who plan to make him their next victim. A last minute rescue leaves both sisters presumably dead and Tom narrowly escaping with his life. Upon his return to Hollywood, however, Tom develops an unhealthy obsession with one of his captors that ultimately threatens the life and welfare of his family.

Los Angeles Times Review by Kevin Thomas


FROM HOLLYWOOD/By Gary Dretzka,  Chicago Tribune,  Shooting a thriller on a tight budget

John Hancock takes his Indiana-based film on a voyage to Malibu

MALIBU, Calif. --  Hard by the Indiana dunes and Hesston Steam Museum, LaPorte County does for director John D. Hancock what New York does for Sidney Lumet, what Baltimore does for John Waters, and what the North Shore does for John Hughes.
     So what was this veteran filmmaker - who, in 1998, opened a production facility called FilmAcres within a whistle’s call of the South Shore Line – doing in the sun-drenched hills above Malibu on this lovely morning during Holy Week?  After all, he could be back home in Indiana waiting for the blossoms to bloom on the trees of the family fruit farm or counting the hours before the Fighting Irish begin spring practice.
     The 62-year-old Hancock and his team of fellow Midwesterners were in Southern California for a week, shooting exteriors for his company’s third LaPorte-based feature film, “Suspended Animation.”  Northwest  Indiana may be able to pass for a lot of places on Earth, but the craggy, fire-scarred canyons of Malibu are not among them.
     “We’ve already done all the interiors, back in LaPorte, in our 20,000-square-foot soundstage,” explains Hancock’s producing partner, Bob Hiler:  “We’re shooting in about a half-dozen locations here, because one of the characters in the movie is a successful animator, and, unlike John, he wouldn’t  be able to live in Indiana.”
     In fact, Hancock interjects, a friend “gave us the use of his house, for free.  He’s leased it for as much as $25,000 a day  for film shoots, and we have it for two days.  That’s a nice neighbor.”
     Hancock might have been able to use his own Malibu abode, if it hadn’t burned down in 1993, in a savage brush fire.  Today, a production trailer sits on the concrete slab that once provided the foundation for his home.
     “Suspended Animation” is a low-budget suspense-thriller that moves from the snows of a generic Great White North, where an avalanche buries a pair of cannibalistic sisters, to the sands of Southern California.  Hancock and Hiler hope to complete principle photography this week, post-production soon thereafter, and have a buyer in place before fall.
     “I have other stories to tell, but, right now, I’m demonically  focused on making this picture as scary as I can,”  Hancock allows, during a break for lunch.
     Long before creating FilmAcres, Hancock directed an Oscar-nominated short film, such features as “Bang the Drum Slowly,” “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death” and “Weeds”, and episodes of “Hill Street Blues” and “The Twilight Zone.”  In 1989, he shot the family Christmas film, “Prancer”, on location in LaPorte and Three Oaks, Mich., and that modest hit was followed up 10 years later by “A Piece of Eden”, which, like “Suspended Animation” and “Weeds”, was written by his wife, Dorothy Tristan.
     “The people we worked with in LaPorte loved ‘Prancer’", recalled Hancock.  “We got a beach house, building materials and vehicles for the cast and crew on deferment…the mayor’s wife made props.  We had to see our financial obligations to completion, of course, because we’d run into these same people in the supermarket."
     "We cast ‘Suspended Animation’ in L.A. and New York, but the crew is mostly from Chicago.   Unfortunately, we lost a couple of them to the Tom Hanks movie (“The Road to Perdition”) that was also shooting there.”
     It’s been quite a journey for the Chicagoans, who were enjoying the Malibu sunshine.  When the snow ran out in LaPorte, the production moved to a frozen lake in Canada.
     “The weather requirements on this picture made it almost impossible to come up with a workable schedule,” said Anthony Aguilera, Hancock’s Chicago-based assistant director.  “For more than a month, this crew averaged 20 to 22 setups a day.  On our best day, we did 34 setups, when the average shoot that I’ve worked manages 14.
     “These guys rocked all day long.”

Thrills and Chills

Director/producer John Hancock concocts a $2 million suspense movie set in snowy Indiana

 By Ruth L Ratney
     LaPorte-based producer/director John Hancock’s second feature in two years is somewhat of a departure for him.  The $2 million, R-rated “Suspense Animation” is a suspense thriller about a Hollywood animator whose vacationing friends are killed and cannibalized by two psycho Indiana backwoods women.
     "I’ve always liked action,” Hancock stated, “but somehow I got typed as warm and human.”  He is probably best known for “Bang the Drum Slowly” and “Weeds” during his 18-years as a studio director, then becoming a director of episodic television and commercials.
     Hancock and producer Ken Kitch worked together on “Eden.”  They distributed it themselves to 45 cities but are still struggling  to find cable and home video distribution.
     They believe this genre will release quickly, given the young demographics of  movie-goers and the success of other thrillers.
     After last year’s distribution disappointment, said Kitch, “our philosophy was, we were so beaten up over the difficulty in selling ‘A Piece of Eden,’ that we could either bury the horse or charge.  We decided to get back up and produce another feature.”  They raised the $2 million from local investors and began preproduction last June, setting a 43-day production schedule over the winter months, since heavy snow was integral to the plot.
     The budget dictated shooting in digital video with HD cameras, “since the upfront cost is less but lost in post when it’s transferred to film", said Kitch.
     Hancock’s wife, the writer Dorothy Tristan Hancock, wrote “Animation” as a novel.  She also had first written “Weeds” as a novel.
     Alex McArthur, who plays Thomas Kempton, the animator who is determined to avenge his friends’ deaths, is best known for his role as the young detective in “Kiss the Girls.”
     Playing his wife is Rebecca Harrell, 21, who was the eight-year old star in Hancock’s perennial classic, “Prancer,” that was filmed in LaPorte 13 years ago.
     Another Hancock-repeat actor is LaPorte’s Jeff Puckett, who also had a role in “Eden.”  Kitch considers him “one of the best actors I’ve ever seen” and has the credentials to judge; he and Hancock had been co-directors of the San Francisco Actors Studio years back.
     The deranged Boulette sisters are portrayed by New York theatrical actress Laura Esterman, making her film debut, and Los Angeles actress Sage Allen (“Conspiracy Theory”).
     The DP is Misha Suslov and editor is Dennis O’Connor, both L.A.-based, who have worked on other Hancock pictures over the years.  The crew of 50 “is a good mix of Chicago, Los Angeles and LaPorte people,” noted Beth Behler, Hancock’s assistant.
     The Chicago contingent includes unit production manager Paul Marcus, first AD Tony Aguilera, sound man Alex Riordan, special effects head Don Parsons and stunt coordinator Rick LeFervour, co-Producer Dean Jacobson, prop master Merje Carroll, gaffer Brad Barrett, boom operator Kevin Becker, music supervisor Chris Ussery, and assistant editor Chris Brown.  The HD equipment was rented from Fletcher Chicago.
     Interiors were shot on FilmAcres sound stage, that covers a city block in LaPorte.  FilmAcres has a quarter of the space, which includes a large studio with thick sound baffling walls, offices and an Avid suite.
     “We’ve accumulated some people that we trust, and it’s good to work with people and know their capacities from the previous film,” said Hancock.  “We’re working in an area I know already.  The only trouble so far is with the snow.”
     The rest of the snowmobile action will be resolved this week when cast and crew head for still snowy Sault Ste. Marie.  They will take a week off, and then wrap in Los Angeles in mid-April.

            FilmAcres is located at 352 N. Fail Rd., LaPorte, 46350; phone, 219/326-9331.

Calabash Handles “Animation”

          Since John Hancock’s new movie is about an animator, he turned to the experts at Calabash for authenticity.  "The movie starts out with an animation sequence they produced", reported Beth Behler, assistant to Hancock, "along with bits of animation used in the picture.
     “They came to the set and helped Alex McArthur (Tom, the animator-hero) with his role as an animator, and also were the hand-doubles for the close-ups.”
     Calabash also provided caricatures and portraits for Tom’s office on the set.  “They’ve been wonderful,” she added.

EDGE OF THEIR SEATS

John Hancock’s ‘Suspended Animation’ generates excitement at test screenings

By Andrew Tallackson

The News-Dispatch

     Audiences at test screenings of John Hancock’s thriller “Suspended Animation” are screaming, squiring in their seats and talking back to the screen.
     That’s precisely the reaction Hancock and editor Dennis O’Connor want.
     “It’s good to hear them scream at the screen,” O’Connor said with a hearty laugh.  “Screaming at the screen is good.”
     “Suspended Animation,” which Hancock shot in LaPorte County earlier this year, follows an animator and his friends who, while on a snowmobile trip, are tormented by serial-killer sisters.  It stars Alex McArthur (“Kiss the Girls”) as the animator, Rebecca Harrell, who also starred in Hancock’s “Prancer” and “A Piece of Eden,” as the animator’s wife, local actor Jeff Puckett as one of his friends, and Laura Esterman and Sage Allen as the crazed sisters.
     Hancock and O’Connor were to wrap up editing on the picture this week.  Hancock heads to New York next week to discuss the soundtrack with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who also wrote the music for Hancock’s “A Piece of Eden,” and then to Los Angeles to loop some of the actors’ dialogue into the film.
     (Hancock, by the way, is in negotiations with companies to release “A Piece of Eden” on video).
     O’Connor, who also worked with Hancock on “Weeds,” “Steal the Sky” and “Prancer,” and served as the supervising editor on “A Piece of Eden,” said he and Hancock went through five or six edits of “Suspended Animation.”
     O'Connor’s first version was what he describes as the “editor’s cut.”  In it, he assembled all of Hancock’s available footage.  Subsequent edits arrived closer to what O’Connor calls the “director’s cut,” or Hancock’s vision of the film.
     For O’Connor, the challenge in editing a thriller is to keep audiences on their toes.
      “You try to keep people on the edge, to surprise them,” he said.  “For example, there’s a scene where a bad character jumps out of a closet, so to scare the audience, you send them in another direction so the surprise is stronger.
     “That’s why sound is crucial.  I’m putting in the sound of a train going away in the distance, and just as it disappears and all is quiet, the character jumps out.”
     O’Connor worked with Hancock at his side while editing the film, and said that type of relationship has resulted in a better movie.
     “I think we have a good relationship because we have allowed ourselves to have conflicts,” O’Connor said. “John is strong and determined, and so am I, and that has led to the best of the best to come out of the picture.”
     And during the editing process, Hancock said he’s been struck by how effective Esterman is in the key role of Vanessa, one of the serial-killer sisters.
     “The performance is much stronger than I ever anticipated,” Hancock said.  “The part kind of got to her on the set.  Her behavior was so strange, so zombie-like.  It was like she was having a nervous breakdown.
     “Now that I’ve seen the performance, I understand now.  It’s all there…in the movie.”
     In preparing “Suspended Animation” for test screenings, Hancock and O’Connor tried to insert as many sound effects into the film as possible, and used soundtracks from films like “Pearl Harbor,” “The Sixth Sense” and “What Lies Beneath” since Badalamenti’s score has not yet been added.
     “We try as much as we can to put music and effects in so the film is the closest representation of what it will be like in the end,” O’Connor said.  “Music is such a key ingredient, such a big part of a film.”
     Hancock tested the film to a primarily young demographic – 18 to 25-year-olds, in Chicago.  The crowds for each screening continually grew in size, and proved quite savvy of current films, from “The Fast and the Furious” to “Shrek.”
     And what was their response?
     “Well,” Hancock replied, “they were scared.  They hoot and hollered.  It was great.”
     Once “Suspended Animation” is completed, Hancock will pitch it to movie studios and enter it into film festivals.  A trailer cut by O’Connor already has been shown at Cannes Film Festival.
     “The essence of a good trailer is to never answer any questions and to confuse the issues,” O’Connor said.  “As long as the trailers are interesting and make you think, ‘What is this about?’, that will get audiences back into the theatre.”
     Based on the trailer for “Suspended Animation,” audiences should have their appetites sufficiently whetted.

You can contact Andrew Tallackson at andrew@michigancityin.com

"The essence of a good trailer is to never answer any questions and to confuse the issues.  As long as the trailers are interesting and make you think, ‘What is this about?’, that will get audiences back into the theatre.” - Editor Dennis O’Connor