{"id":16249,"date":"2017-02-15T22:30:49","date_gmt":"2017-02-16T05:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=16249"},"modified":"2017-02-15T22:30:49","modified_gmt":"2017-02-16T05:30:49","slug":"montana-friends-hoping-to-make-their-mark-in-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/02\/montana-friends-hoping-to-make-their-mark-in-hollywood\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana friends hoping to make their mark in Hollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Movie\"<\/a>

A promotional shot for “What Separates Us” shows Bryan Ferriter as Danny and Shannon Mary Dixon as Parker.<\/p><\/div>\n

A couple of Montana boys who stumbled into the movie business while attending Carroll College appear to have struck a chord with their latest film.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Separates Us<\/a>,\u201d by director Bryan Ferriter, a native of Helena, and producer Isaac Marble, who grew up on the East Bench outside of Fox, near Roberts, won the best-picture award at the Machetanz Film Festival<\/a> in Palmer, Alaska, last summer.<\/p>\n

Late last month, Ferriter was named best male actor at the Flathead Lake International Cinemafest<\/a> in Polson. At the same festival, which featured more than 60 entries from the United States and six foreign countries, they also won two honorable mentions, for best feature movie and best director.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re both hooked on the business now.<\/p>\n

Ferriter, 29, is living in L.A., running his own film company, promoting \u201cWhat Separates Us,\u201d working on other, smaller projects and developing several ideas he hopes to turn into films.<\/p>\n

Marble, 27, has formed a production company that will focus on promoting and distributing not only movies but music made by Montanans. And though he\u2019s currently living in Yakima, Wash., Marble said, \u201cMontana is home to me. It\u2019s always going to be home.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two met nine years ago at Carroll College in Helena, where another student, Martin Rogers, a friend of Marble\u2019s from Joliet, had written a script he wanted to turn into a movie. He brought Marble in as a producer, since he was studying finance and marketing.<\/p>\n

Ferriter, who was on the college football team with Rogers, was asked to play the lead role in Rogers\u2019 film, a comedy called \u201cMy Favorite Movie<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>\u201cI was into making movies since I was 16, but they were just camcorder movies in my backyard,\u201d Ferriter said. He and Rogers fed each other\u2019s infatuation with film, he said, going to a coffee shop almost every day between classes and football practice to talk about movies and filmmaking.<\/p>\n

Marble was mostly in charge of raising funds for the movie, on which they ended up spending $100,000.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur excitement was only eclipsed by our naivet\u00e9,\u201d Marble said.<\/p>\n

Rogers ended up going to law school and now practices law in Missoula. Marble and Ferriter went on to work together on \u201cCrimson Winter<\/a>,\u201d a much more ambitious film that Ferriter wrote and directed, and which he described as an \u201cartsy, dark, Gothic vampire film.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BF\"<\/a>

Bryan Ferriter<\/p><\/div>\n

Ferriter said he enjoyed working on both those movies, but for his third full-length feature he wanted to \u201ccome back with a simple story and tell it well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Separates Us,\u201d which was filmed partly in Helena, is described in press materials as \u201ca coming-of-age drama following the complexities of the relationship between a small-town dishwasher with big aspirations and a beautiful art student new to Montana.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ferriter plays the dishwasher, Danny, who he said \u201cembodies both the beauty and conflicts of what it is like to grow up under the Big Sky.\u201d Another of Ferriter\u2019s football buddies, Brandon Day<\/a>, also from Helena, has a part in the new movie and was involved in the two previous films with Ferriter and Marble.<\/p>\n

Ferriter, Marble and Day all moved to L.A., Ferriter in 2012 and the other two a year later. Ferriter said he was mostly making contacts, trying to find acting roles and absorbing what he could about the movie business.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just waiting tables,\u201d he said, \u201cwhich I don\u2019t mind and have no shame about. It\u2019s what you have to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s back down there now, after having returned to Montana for a spell. He formed Interwoven Studios<\/a>, to promote the two movies he\u2019s made already and any future films he\u2019s involved in. He\u2019s there with his fianc\u00e9e, a Vegas native he met in Montana, and he plans to end up in Montana eventually.<\/p>\n

He said he misses Montana every day and talks about it to anybody who will listen. \u201cI\u2019m a pretty Montana-pride guy,\u201d he said, but for now, \u201cI\u2019m trying to bask in Hollywood while I\u2019m here and learn from people, learn from the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Marble moved to L.A., having earned degrees in finance, marketing and international business from Carroll, he spent two years working for Raleigh Studios, where he was a vice president of sales and acquisitions.<\/p>\n

\"IM\"<\/a>

Isaac Marble<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThat was the best exposure to distribution I could have asked for,\u201d he said. He also formed a company, Running Bear Media<\/a>, with Bill Piotrowski, a musician who wrote the score for \u201cCrimson Winter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Running Bear is geared toward buying and distributing independent films, but Marble said they want to focus as much as they can on promoting Montana filmmakers and musicians. As \u201cWhat Separates Us\u201d has shown, he said, there are a lot of interesting, talented people and a lot of untapped potential in small towns all over Montana.<\/p>\n

Marble and Ferriter both talked about how this is a good time to be involved in independent films.<\/p>\n

Even since they worked on their first movie, Marble said, advances in digital filming and editing have revolutionized the industry, and made it a lot cheaper to make a high-quality film. In the early 2000s, he said, about 500 films a year were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. By 2007 or 2008, that number was in excess of 4,000.<\/p>\n

Ferriter said there is another renaissance in independent movies right now, similar to what was see in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of content being made now, and the options are endless,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Separates Us\u201d has played to receptive audiences in Billings (at the Art House Cinema and Pub), Red Lodge and Helena, and the plan is to \u201cbuild up the awareness and just saturate the state,\u201d Marble said.<\/p>\n

It might go to DVD this spring, he said, which would get it exposure nationally and internationally, but if they are invited to more film festivals, they might postpone that.<\/p>\n

Marble is in Yakima at the moment, helping another good friend from Roberts, who is also a Carroll grad, establish his insurance and financial business. Marble plans to move back to Montana as soon as he can, and then work between here and L.A.<\/p>\n

After working on his first movie and getting by on two hours of a sleep a night, he said, he told himself \u201cI am never, ever going to do this again.\u201d What brought him back was the excitement of working with so many people with diverse, specific talents, all working toward the same creative goal.<\/p>\n

Ferriter, for his part, is going to keep trying to make it in L.A.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a tough road,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ve really got to have a mindset. \u2026 It\u2019s got to be your passion. And it is for me. This is what I hope to continue to do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of Montana boys who stumbled into the movie business while attending Carroll College appear to have struck a chord with their latest film. \u201cWhat Separates Us,\u201d by director Bryan Ferriter, a native of Helena, and producer Isaac Marble, who grew up on the East Bench outside of Fox, near Roberts, won the best-picture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[5529,5527,5526,5528,5530,5525],"class_list":["post-16249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-montana","tag-what-separates-us","tag-brandon-day","tag-bryan-ferriter","tag-carroll-college","tag-hollywood","tag-isaac-marble","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}