IOW: LADIES lead the charge
In the weeks leading up to the debut of LEADING LADIES in Champaign, we realized that C-U Blogfidential had yet to show anything from the production even though we’ve been title-dropping it for some time now! To correct our sorry wrongs, we present the official trailer below which gives you a good look at the principals, played by Melanie LaPatin, Laurel Vail, Shannon Lea Smith, Benji Schwimmer, and Nicole Dionne, along with several redressed C-U settings including the just-closed Jerry’s Round Barn IGA grocery store, Village Inn Pizza Parlor, the gymnasium of Franklin Middle School, and the long dormant movie house, the Rialto Theater, transformed with mondo bohemian aplomb into an underground swing club called “The Top”:
Hopefully a small influx of LADIES material will make its way to CUBlog in the coming months, peppered with quality screen grabs and on-set photography to illustrate what Team Beahm and friends accomplished in the summer of 2009. Until we get our mitts on the gems, take a gander at what little your humble editor has been able to salvage from picture-taking during the Rialto shoot, which possibly resulted in the most chiaroscuro-plagued images that he’s ever snapped. Don’t take this as visually representative of what you’ll witness when LEADING LADIES plays in a darkened theater near you, but it does help you understand to what lengths the producers were willing to go to set the scene:
So much for doggedly stretching the use of consumer 35mm beyond reason…
~ Jason Pankoke