Indie film 'Lost & Found in Cleveland' premieres at California film festival

An architect-turned-actor from Cleveland and a singer-songwriter-actress from California have written, directed, and brought to life an independent film called Lost & Found in Cleveland , which is premiering at the Newport Beach Film Festival in California.

The movie, which was filmed on location in Cleveland, is a comedic love letter to the city and its people. Its colorful palette resembles Wes Anderson's and the vintage music could come from a Woody Allen film, but the overall confection springs wholly from the minds of writer-directors Marisa Guterman and Keith Gerchak.

“Making the film was my homecoming story,” said Mr. Gerchak, the Cleveland native in the husband-wife partnership that wrote and directed it.

His deep affection for his hometown is evident in the local details that are liberally sprinkled throughout the story. From the early shots of the Guardians of Traffic at the Hope Memorial Bridge to Malley’s Chocolates and their pink Choc cars, from Discount Drug Mart to Arslanian Bros. rugs, from shots of the iconic Cleveland skyline to the standing joke about the popular reluctance to venture from the city’s west to east side and vice versa, the film is steeped in the local scene.

It also has a local investor in Block Communications Inc., the parent company of The Blade, which is one of its backers. BCI is the largest financial investor in the film at more than 30 percent.

Part of a growing Ohio industry

The film was also a major contributor to Ohio’s budding film business. According to the Ohio Department of Development, the film industry on the whole has brought over $500 million to the people of Ohio since 2009.

“This industry has doubled in size in this decade,” said Bill Garvey, president of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission. “Today it’s a $243 billion industry. We’re competing globally to attract that business. This movie is a story set in Cleveland, so it makes sense to film it here. It spent a lot of money and created a lot of jobs in Cleveland. We’re grateful to the filmmakers for coming home to make their movie here.”

Cleveland isn’t the only northern Ohio city to get a piece of the filmmaking business. Earlier this year, scenes from the upcoming film Eenie Meany were shot at Toledo’s Hollywood Casino and in a Toledo neighborhood. Other scenes were shot in Cleveland and Sandusky. The film, which has a budget of $50 million, is expected to premiere on Hulu.

More recently, scenes from a mid-budget film called The Toast were shot at the Toledo Club. And a scene for the 2022 film A Man Called Otto , starring Tom Hanks, was shot at the Central Union Terminal in Toledo.

“We work to bring larger productions to Ohio, and we train people for jobs in the industry, said Mike DeSanto, the executive director of FilmToledo.

Those jobs include work as crew members, production assistants, and actors. The local vendor and service industries also benefit when scenes from a movie are shot in town.

Cleveland, though, is attracting a large part of Ohio’s film industry cash. Two major upcoming movies were filmed there. A remake of Superman is expected to be released on July 11, while Stickshift , a movie about a reformed getaway car driver, will premiere on Hulu.

Other films that have been shot in whole or in part in Cleveland include White Boy Rick , Captain America: The Winter Soldier , Judas and The Black Messiah , and The Avengers .

A Cleveland native, a Cleveland story

The maxim that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” might apply to Cleveland and other overlooked Ohio cities that could easily serve as locations for any number of films. But it could also serve as theme of Lost & Found in Cleveland . Some of what the characters bring to the appraisal is indeed trash, but there are also treasures among the most innocuous of objects.

The picture is unique among the major films shot in Cleveland in that the city and its character are essential to the film’s themes and storyline.

“Cleveland is a microcosm of the country,” said Mr. Gerchak. “There’s an earnest quality to it.”

And he should know. Mr. Gerchak performed Shakespeare in Cleveland as a child and acted in productions there at Playhouse Square.

He took an unusual route into the film business. He first got a master’s degree in architecture through Tulane University and Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. But he never lost his love for theater and eventually became a co-founding member of a small professional theater company in downtown Cleveland.

Back when he was just 4 years old, he had what he calls a “parlor trick”: he was able to recite the names of all the presidents of the United States in order. It was an unusual facility that made its way into the film. One of the characters, Charlie, an 11-year-old boy, is fascinated with William McKinley, who was born and raised in Niles, Ohio, and later in life settled in nearby Canton.

Mr. Gerchak met his wife and eventual co-writer, Marisa Guterman, at an audition. She was from Los Angeles and had received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she created her own major in art's potential for social and political change.

“We were auditioning the for same part,” Ms. Guterman remembers. “We met in the waiting room, and I tried to pick him up. He said he was spoken for, but I invited him for coffee and he accepted.”

The couple began working on the script for the film together — and eventually came to Cleveland.

“All I had heard were the negative things about the zeitgeist in Cleveland,” she said. “But Keith said, ‘Don’t knock Cleveland till you’ve tried it.’ So the first time I was in Cleveland was in January. It was snowing. I was caught off guard. It was magical. It was almost exotic. But eventually it was the people there that I fell in love with.”

A 10-year project

Lost & Found in Cleveland took 10 years to bring to the screen. Mr. Gerchak and Ms. Guterman began working with a casting director who told them they would never get the actors they really wanted for the film. So they revised the script and, in Ms. Guterman’s words, “ditched the naysaying casting director.”

They then set about casting the film themselves. It proved to be a fortuitous decision.

“We knew the vision we had for each character,” Ms. Guterman said. “We went after each actor through individual means, through windows, through the back doors. We wrote passionate letters directly to them. And we started getting yeses. Actors are compelled by material they can sink their teeth into.”

One of the film’s inspired casting choices came about almost by accident.

“Dennis Haysbert signed on just 48 hours before filming,” Ms. Guterman said. “We had wanted him for the role early on, but our casting director told us we’d never get him. So we cast another actor, but he had to drop out on short notice for family reasons. We were in a pickle.”

The film’s choreographer’s representative called a friend who knew Mr. Haysbert and sent him the script. Mr. Haysbert was moved and signed up on the spot.

Other cast members include Stacy Keach, Martin Sheen, Santino Fontana, Liza Weil, June Squibb, and Jon Lovitz.

“We trusted the actors,” said Mr. Gerchak. “They were the essence of these characters. Stacy Keach and June Squibb were master classes. They are one-take actors.”

“The most critical thing was that we cast the film ourselves,” said Ms. Guterman. “Orson Welles had this thing about how the director is the least important person on set. If you get the right people for the role, you really don’t have to direct.”

By showing the film on the festival circuit, the couple hopes to interest distributors in a deal that will get the movie into theaters nationwide.

A gentle comedy comes to life

The film is a comedy that relies on the fundamental silliness of modern life rather than slapstick or bawdiness to make its points.

In making the film, Ms. Guterman and Mr. Gerchak could have been inspired by the opening lines of a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem: “Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience ...”

The movie follows five Cleveland-area residents as they converge at a televised antiques appraisal program that strongly resembles Antiques Roadshow . Deliberately anachronistic, the film conjures a Cleveland where vintage Country Squire station wagons and 70s televisions mingle with contemporary iPhones and state-of-the-art dental equipment.

The prop mix reflects the film’s main characters, all of whom have one foot in an antique age and the other in the modern world. That’s a delicate balancing act, but it works most of the time.

The filmmakers’ gamble on casting the film themselves has clearly paid off, both in the star power they were able to attract to the project and in the strong performances they got from lesser-known performers.

Dennis Haysbert appears as a mailman who dreams of opening a restaurant and talks to himself in his magnificent voice as he plans his menu, talks to his dead mother, and delivers the mail. His is the most poignant performance, shifting from grief to frustration to hope and sometimes managing to convey all three simultaneously.

Santino Fontana is a college professor who suffers from (or perhaps secretly enjoys) an overdeveloped sense of white guilt over his inadvertent possession of an embarrassing collection of Aunt Jemima figurines. But in the end, he himself is schooled in the cultural significance of 20th century African-American kitsch.

Stacy Keach plays a Korean War veteran who regularly escapes into the past and his wartime memories. June Squibb portrays his wife. Together, the two of them create an elderly couple who know each other so well they barely have to speak. In one scene, with the camera fixed on her face, Ms. Squibb applies lipstick and conveys a remarkable depth of feeling without saying a word.

Liza Weil is a wealthy, obnoxious, and lonely socialite who came up from a hardscrabble life and now longs for the time when her children were young and her husband lived with her instead of working for the Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi. She doesn’t quite get redeemed before the credits roll, but there are hints that she may be on that path.

In a surprising performance, precocious Benjamin Steinhauser portrays a kid obsessed with the presidency of William McKinley. He hopes to use the antiques show to authenticate a letter that may have been written by the 25th president himself. His story arc has much to do with the importance of being your authentic self, regardless of what people think of you.

And in last 10 minutes of the film, Dayton native Martin Sheen appears as an expert in antique glass and is able to make one of the other character’s dreams come true.

Fundamentally, this movie is about time, about how we humans exist simultaneously in the past, the present, and the future — at least, in our imaginations. It’s a charming pic, one that works hard at being charming. And the stellar cast Ms. Guterman and Mr. Gerchak assembled is all in on their characters — and make their stories believable and resonant.