Filmmaker Jamie Sutor lives in Los Angeles, the film capital of the world, but when it came time to make his next movie, he chose a much less glamorous setting: Scranton.
“Right off the bat, I always wanted to write about Scranton,” said Sutor, 30, a Scranton High School and Marywood University graduate. “Scranton is just the weirdest place in the world. For example, we have Talkback 16. It’s a town with a weird energy. I know ‘The Office’ and Joe Biden put it on the map, but I wanted to bring it back. I wanted to show the people I grew up with, with the NEPA accent. For me, it’s my ‘Fargo.'”
Sutor moved to LA two and a half years ago and has been working in the film industry to pay the bills while working on his own passion project, like the short film in question, “Hometown Boys.” It’s about a band of Scranton robbers who burgle a porn shop. Today he shared a “proof of concept” clip as part of a Seed + Spark fundraiser to generate money to produce the film.
You can watch the clip and read more about the campaign, including rewards for donors, here.
Sutor was drawn to filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson and Guy Ritchie at a young age; he thanks his mom for letting him watch the bloody Tarantino flicks when he was 10 and bought all the memorabilia from the “Reservoir Dogs” filmmaker’s movies at Suncoast Video at the Steamtown Mall. He likes Ritchie because “he creates these badass characters that you can hang out with.”
“I like to watch these sort of crime movies. I love how the characters interact with ordinary people.”
In “Hometown Boys,” Sutor is the ringleader, nicknamed “Wolf.” Wolf is hellbent on getting out of Scranton and resorts to crime to make his escape.
“Besides robbing a porn store, I think it’s a big reflection of who I am,” Sutor says. “Just trying to get out of the small town and see the world. I feel like everyone wants to do that. And it’s hard. This one person wants to do whatever he can to get out of that town.”
Sutor’s goal is to raise enough money to make “Hometown Boys” into a 15-minute film, which takes more money than most people would think. If he raises about $20,000, that wouldn’t even include fees to enter the project in film festivals.
“Costs for distribution and for festival releases, that is so expensive,” he says. “Not just Tribeca and Sundance, that’s the goal to get there but even the smaller ones, they’re up there. It’s a hidden cost that a lot of filmmakers don’t think of.”
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