Action. Comedy. Iconic characters. A one-eyed, mute, Brazilian assassin. A protagonist with severe brain damage beating up children. An antagonist with schizophrenia and homicidal tendencies. Real people being thrown through real glass. Oh, and a Playboy model having sex with a dwarf. All of these things and more can be found in CRIMSON: The Motion Picture.

Let’s back up the tracks a little bit. My name is Ken Cosentino. I am 21-years old. I was 19 when I was brought the idea for CRIMSON. I had no idea what I was in for, but I knew it was going to be big.

While shooting an Evil Dead-type short film (with horrible production quality, I might add), I was standing on the back porch of an old crack-house (which the owner lent to us for production) with my co-star Michael Shimmel. He brought up an idea he had for a short, starring a mentally handicapped superhero named “Captain Crimson”. He wanted me to direct it. I told him sure. Why not? What else was I really doing? One year prior, I had my first feature film play to a packed theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, and I signed a contract with a German film company. But, for the time being, I was just hanging around and doing what comes next. Well, I quickly realized the potential of this idea, and I told Mike to develop it into a serious feature (and drop the “mentally handicapped” part), and I would get it made. What followed was a comedy of errors that somehow formed into something beautiful.

Mike started on the script. He was to finish it by January of 2010. I found a producer and a small crew of trusted individuals, and we got to work. We didn’t have to worry about funding (or so we thought), because another producer came on board with the promise of $10,000, which was to come from an inheritance he was receiving. As of this writing, that inheritance has still not come through. So, after two months of assembling our key people, Mike decided to quit the production. He eventually admitted to me that he hadn’t yet written anything, at all. I threatened him with violence, and he turned out a 150-page script in just one month. I cut it down to 110 pages, and changed the entire second half, and now we had our story.

Concept art for CRIMSON.

The story centers around Walter Levitte, a washed up comic book artist. Twenty years prior, he’d had a big hit with a character named “The Screaming Bullet”, but following that success, every comic Walter has created was a flop. Living off royalties, his lifestyle dwindling, he has been working on a character named CRIMSON in a last-ditch effort to save his job. However, CRIMSON ends up being rejected, and Walter is fired; his fiancé, having had enough, leaves him; and Walter deals with all of this in the usual way: he heads to a nearby pub. After being thrown out of the bar and beaten badly by a group of men in the back alley, he awakens in a hospital with no recollection of who he is. His only memories are that of his comic character, CRIMSON; he escapes from the hospital and begins a vigilante tirade in his impoverished, crime-stricken town. The fact that his accident left him with major nerve damage leads him to believe he is invulnerable. Meanwhile, Walter’s sister is being harassed by a corrupt developer to sell her home. When she won’t, the developer (who also happens to be the head of the Irish mafia) uses scare tactics. Walter crosses paths with the Irish mafia, and becomes their number one enemy. The rest of the movie revolves around his vengeance toward the Irish mafia, and their attempt to end his life.

So there was our story. We had the crew (of which, I was the youngest person by far). Now we had to audition. We spent three days running auditions, and we chose our cast (which ballooned to over 65 people). But we had one problem… that inheritance wasn’t coming in. Our producer (not the one with the money, the main producer) wasn’t doing his job in finding investors, and was hurting us by butting heads with the production crew. Well, everyone aired their grievances to me, and I wound up firing said producer. So now we had no producer, nearly 100 people, and a project

James Ventry as villain Tommy Emerson.

with no financial backing. Well, thank God for James Ventry, the actor (and my best friend) who was playing the main antagonist, violent Irish gangster Tommy “Madd Mick” Emerson. James took matters into his own hands and registered a new production company, Little Sicily Productions (named after our studio, Little Sicily). He and I took the role of producers. Many people came through our company, and got fired. We had the actors run six months of rehearsals and fight choreography classes (while we scraped together five times our prospected budget). Getting the money was the hard part. I emptied my entire bank account. Many other people put money up. A lot of things were donated. I wound up losing my job due to a struggling economy, and so CRIMSON became my life. All of my money and time were invested in it.

At the end of pre-production, we hit on the deal of our lives. A legitimate investor wanted to put up $3 million for our movie. We needed to get all of our paper work in place and, through our connection with this person, we were able to get them on board. We hit a snag when this investor caught wind of a movie called Super (2010), with a main character named The Crimson Bolt. Our project then went into turnaround, before being picked up by another big time company.

We headed to NYC for a huge meeting, hoping to secure a $2.4 million budget. We sat in a large office on the 50th floor of the prestigious Helmsley Building in Manhattan. A very attractive secretary kept coming into the office and offering us coffee or water, which we kept declining. Finally, two producers and an investor came in. We all shook hands and got down to business.

Mike Leszczynski as CRIMSON.

These people wanted to destroy the integrity of our movie. They wanted to nix almost every actor we had and replace the main role with a more recognizable actor (Mike Leszczynski, who plays CRIMSON, was born for the role). They also wanted most of the rights to the movie, and to leave us with nothing. They wanted complete control over the project. We respectfully declined, and left NYC empty-handed and slightly broken-hearted. When we returned home, we were greeted with mixed reactions. Some praised us as folk heroes, others called us morons for turning down the deal. One idiot even went public, saying we made up the entire story for publicity! Still we pushed on and began production without giving up our rights, which turned out to have been the best decision we ever made: that company ended up filing for bankruptcy not long afterwards.

Production was awesome. We were finally doing it! Everything was coming to life! Production lasted about five or six months, and was easily the best part of the entire process. We had an amazing cast. These guys were portraying such iconic characters; CRIMSON, The Emerson Gang, Johnny Dragon, Chino, Jake The Snake, Saint Constantine, Special Agent Dominguez… the list goes on! We pulled off some really dangerous stunts. In one scenario, CRIMSON is thrown through a glass cabinet. A real glass cabinet. You see, when you’re making a movie with a budget under $500,000 (which is still considered micro-budget), you have to cut corners, be innovative, and improvise. We didn’t have stunt glass or sugar glass. We had very determined and dedicated (and trusting) actors. I couldn’t let Mike Leszczynski do it. I just couldn’t. He had already dislocated his shoulder during training.

So I did it.

Green screen? No. Green sheet? Yes.

The initial impact through the glass doors of the cabinet didn’t harm me. Neither did the heavy wooden cabinet being slammed on top of me. But, when the actor lifted the cabinet, and I crawled out from under it, he was supposed to break a very large, heavy vase over my back. He missed my back, in part because I did a sweet spin move (instinct, y’know?), and smashed the vase over my knee. Having broken my knee years prior, this was not good news for me. I fought through the scene and we completed the night, but it was rough. Twenty minutes later, I did a front flip into a chair, which then spun onto the floor. Also, the same night, James Ventry (as Madd Mick) had to sit shirtless without moving for hours -- I forgot to mention this was January, and it was way below freezing in the attic we were in.

Murphy’s Law comes into play with independent filmmaking. We had a multi-million dollar mansion donated to us to film our grand finale in. The owner of the mansion called one week prior to filming, and had to cancel due to a stand-still with her contractor. We had no choice but to alter the script, which wound up being yet another a blessing in disguise. My barber is an avid supporter of the movie. He loves comic books, and he loves the story. He let us turn the back of his barber shop into a “speakeasy”, a sort of underground casino, and it was there that we shot the biggest scene in the movie.

At this point, we were taking as many precautions as possible (earlier in production, in an abandoned warehouse we were allowed to use, our actor Marco Mendez, who plays Santiago De Jesus Diazinho, was smacked across the face with a baseball bat during filming). This scene involves explosives, real glass blowing up and breaking every which way, 30 actors, a dozen crew members, and the wrecking of tons of furniture. In fact, destroying furniture is the overall theme of the movie. Every piece of furniture that was donated to our production was destroyed on film in one way or another. This is the most destructive low budget movie ever! In this scene, CRIMSON breaks into the speakeasy and gets into it with the entire room. But in a believable way, not in a Bruce Lee “I can kill 50 men single-handedly” way. The biggest fights are between CRIMSON and Santiago, Tommy Emerson, Tiny, and newcomer Saint Constantine, who was played by our Executive Producer, A.J. Verel. A.J. is a professional stunt man and choreographer who has worked on films such as Unstoppable with Denzel Washington and J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek. The whole scene is insanity. It lasts nearly 20 minutes and is the most action packed twenty minutes of the movie. I don’t want to give too much away, but we wrecked the hell out of everything in sight. James was injured slightly by broken glass, which worried me because he is a professional boxer and I didn’t want to end his career prematurely. Especially since he’s quite accomplished, having fought big venues such as Madison Square Garden. That day, I arrived a little before 11 am, and I didn’t leave until 4 am.

Stunt fiming.

We fought our way through the rest of production. Nobody died. Then we began post production. At this point, we had gained a lot of publicity locally, and even nationally. I began getting mail and emails. Requests to direct people’s movies. But I had to concentrate on this movie. Post-production has been a nightmare. More money is constantly needed for different things. My advice to any aspiring filmmaker: set aside half of your budget for post-production. As of writing this, we are three weeks away from completion of the movie. I just watched the rough cut of the first half last week, and it was incredible. It exceeded my expectations. We are already in development for another movie, called MasterShriek Theatre, with a budget forty times that of CRIMSON’s. Our company, Little Sicily Productions, has really flourished. We shot a short movie right after CRIMSON, called Who Shot Fozzie?. It’s a short gangster comedy with a Muppet twist. As for CRIMSON, we are preparing to shop it around for distribution, and enter it into large festivals such as AFI and possibly Sundance. I don’t know exactly where it will take us, but it has been a very tiring, fun, and wild rollercoaster these past two years.

Soon, I’ll turn 22.

  -- Ken Consetino

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WHO SHOT FOZZIE?

FURTHER READING:

See Ken's Geek Speak bio
Visit the official website for n Picture
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