The "All You Love Will Be Carried Away" team are to be commended for doing an excellent job producing a very fine film, and making film-making human, exciting, and alive in Cleveland.

After already arranging a "Dollar Babies" Stephen King Film Festival in Bangor, Maine, the producers, director and crew hosted a coming home event in their home town of Cleveland, and it was well executed and attended. The 7 PM show was sold out and the 8:30 show was full enough and enthusiastic.

I really enjoyed the film and story. The acting was great, the direction, filming, editing and production were strong, and the original music by local Mike Bratt was terrific.

<>It is now submitted to film festivals around the world and hopefully will get more play in that space and around town - it can not be distributed, as a condition of the copyrights from Stephen King... so if you missed this screening you may not have another chance to see the film in Cleveland.

There was an informative Q&A after the 7:00 PM and the 8:30 screening I attended and that was inspiring. One important announcement is this team seems to have secured rights to bring to film here a major literary work... for future promotion.

An important question asked was "how did you fund this production - make it happen" and the director James Renner and producers David Thomas
and Joseph Ruffner group-sighed... with lots of dedicated, creative people working as a team, "covering each others' backs", calling in and finding favors, and running up credit card bills... and kidnapping Harvey Pekar. Renner creditied having lots of friends in the industy, from having owrked on a number of larger commercial films, who helped this project for the art.

Renner pointed out he approached the star, Joe Bob Briggs, out of the blue by  email a few weeks before filming - and by the following day Briggs had agreed to the role - the power of being proactive, creative, and using the Internet!

I asked the Executive Producer David Thomas, after the film, how much help was the Cleveland Film Commission, and he said they were helpful. But it is clear if all these people ultimately made all this happen out of a labor of love, and paid for it out of their pockets, more can be done for independent film makers in the region. If this type of smart, heroic, creative, proactive effort doesn't deserve community support, what does?

Seems we'll have another chance to support these heroic creators, as this team is planning their next production, which will not be possible to make happen just with friends' love and Master Card.

But, for last night, 100s of locals celebrated a great accomplishment of some leaders of the real film industry in Cleveland... a work in progress.