It’s been more than a year-and-a-half in the making, and there’s still plenty of work to be done, but the long-awaited release of the feature film Mayberry Man is finally on the horizon.
The movie follows the fictional Chris Stone, a Hollywood A-list star who’s a brash, shallow, unfeeling character who goes through life believing rules and responsibilities don’t apply to him. When he’s caught speeding — doing better than 100 mph in a 45 mph zone, the young movie star shows as much disrespect for the court as he does for most everything else in his life.
That’s when a wise country judge decides neither a jail cell nor a fine will do much for Stone, so he sentences the hot shot actor to a week at Mayberry Fest, an annual gathering of The Andy Griffith Show fans patterned in large part after Mayberry Days. There, he learns a lot about himself, what’s important in life, and reconnects with his father, a fictional B-list actor who appeared in an episode or two of The Andy Griffith Show back in the day.
The movie grew from a visit brothers Cort and Stark Howell made to Mayberry Days in Mount Airy. The two are sons of Hoke Howell, a character actor known for portraying hillbilly Dud Wash on the original series.
Stark Howell, an independent filmmaker and Hollywood storyboard artist, is serving as the writer and director for the film, while his brother, Cort, is serving as executive producer and spokesperson for the project. Stark Howell said he was inspired to make the movie after attending his first Mayberry Days festival in Mount Airy a few years back.
“I’ve always been a fan of the show, but I was shocked to discover the spirit of Mayberry still exists today within the tight-knit Mayberry fan community,” Howell said in a 2019 interview announcing the movie. “It’s the perfect setting to tell a modern-day, family-friendly story that expresses the virtues of the fictitious town of Mayberry that we all fell in love with so many years ago.”
Since the two brothers, along with Ronnie Schell, and their friends — some of the show’s original cast members (Maggie Peterson Mancuso and Clint Howard among them) as well as children of the original cast members, (including Karen Knotts, Dixie Griffith and George Lindsay) — have been busy raising money, hiring a cast and crew and filming the movie in Mount Airy, Indiana, and Los Angeles, among other locations.
In January 2020 the group launched a Kickstarter fund drive to raise the initial capital for the project. While that went well, exceeding its goal, actual work on the project was slow to develop because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Filming which was planned for the Mayberry In The Midwest festival in Danville, Indiana, in the spring was eventually called off, although filming in Mount Airy during the 2020 Mayberry Days did go on as planned, albeit with COVID-19 precautions.
Over the past several months the Howells have been releasing video updates and sneak peaks on YouTube. The Mayberry Man channel is at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1YuKjDB1ROhDOB6-uYf9hg, where nearly two dozen video updates, interviews with cast members, behind the scenes shots, as well as the official trailer can be found.
Recently, Cort Howell said the movie will most likely be released via red carpet screenings for the movie’s backers and VIPs in September, a little later than he had originally hoped.
“After careful consideration, we’ve decided to schedule all of our VIP Red Carpet Screening Events for September of this year to allow more time for COVID restrictions to lift and for people to get vaccinated and feel comfortable gathering indoors. We’re putting together a very special event and we want everyone to be able to fully enjoy it,” he said.
The first of those screenings is slated for Sept. 4 in Danville, Indiana, with the second one set for mid-September in Los Angeles. The final of the screenings is going to be held during Mayberry Days this year, which takes place from Sept. 22 through Sept. 26.
“We know a lot of people travel in for Mayberry Days, so we’re trying to finalize that date just as soon as possible,” he said.
While the trailer is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja3cQxv9Fws Cort Howell says the movie is now in the post-production phase, where he and his colleagues are asking for the public’s help one more time for additional funding.
“We feel Mayberry Man has surpassed expectations and it really does need that extra polish that will separate it from being just another quirky low budget movie,” he said in a recently released video soliciting additional money for the project.
As with the case for the original Kickstarter campaign, there are different levels of support being sought, from $25 all the way up to $10,000. Those who offer financial support will earn perks, from an online screening of the movie in October for the lowest level to a whole host of goodies to those donating at the highest levels, including executive producer credits, passes to one of the red carpet screenings, t-shirts, caps, a voice mail greeting from Floyd the Barber, signed scripts and DVDs, along with a dinner with Ronnie Schell, who made a couple of appearances on “The Andy Griffith Show” before being a regular cast member on the spin-off series “Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.”
Anyone interested in contributing can go to https://www.supportmayberryman.com/rewards-lpz for details. Howell said the deadline is May 15.
As for public distribution, Cort Howell said that is still up in the air. He’s reticent to sell tickets for public screenings, because he said that can make it more difficult to secure a streaming or distribution deal. So, for now, he’s focusing primarily on wrapping up the post-production work, putting on the red carpet shindigs, and then hopefully finding a widespread distribution deal.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com