As the Cannes Film Festival draws the attention of the world press, Litchfield residents have the opportunity to attend a movie premiere in their hometown.
“Uprising,” the film adaptation of Acton Township author Dean Urdahl’s novel of the same name is set for a weeklong showing next week.
Cast and crew, which include a large number of Litchfield- and Hutchinson-area residents as “extras” or “people in the crowd,” will attend the movie’s first showings Saturday and Sunday at Litchfield Opera House. Then, public showings will take place at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, May 30-June 1, at Hollywood Theater.
“I have great anticipation (and) a little trepidation,” said Urdahl, who has yet to view the entire movie.
He’s aware that some parts of his book were changed for the movie, but believes the changes are minor and will not affect the overall storyline.
“I think the story in the book is being followed pretty closely,” Urdahl said. “I already know there are some changes from the book that had to be made because of time, money and who’s available factors. But what I know so far is, they were relatively minor changes that are easily adaptable to the story.”
Urdahl said he has only seen clips of the movie so far, but thinks “the filming looks great.”
A big reason he hasn’t seen the entire film yet is that it isn’t completed. Urdahl explained that director Christopher Forbes continues to do production work, including a dubbing session that Urdahl watched Monday night. The movie will be released to the distributor Wednesday, May 31, and it’s likely that changes will be made up to that point, he said. The movie likely will go straight to streaming services and/or DVD.
“I can’t tell you what is normal,” Urdahl said. “This is the first time I’ve ever done this, and I’m doing it with a small-budget film director — small-budget but he’s done over 40 films — and he knows what timelines are and what has to be done.”
Bringing “Uprising” to the big screen has been a goal of Urdahl’s almost since the self-published book, set in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 period, rolled off the press.
It presented tantalizing possibilities, with rumored interest from big name Hollywood figures, but that dream always remained just out of reach. And then Urdahl was streaming movies last December when he ran across “The American Confederate,” a film set in Civil War time. Given his interest in the time period, the former middle school social studies and history teacher couldn’t help but watch.
It was good enough that he stayed with it all the way to the credits, and that’s when he saw the director’s name. Soon, he was tracking down Forbes, who has directed a number of historic fiction films.
“So, Dean contacted me and he said, ‘I see you have a lot of history films … and I’ve got this book,’” Forbes said in an interview last year. “I get these requests a lot and don’t really pay any attention. But his was different (than) the vast majority of stuff people send to me. It was captivating. The characters — he has a knack for dialogue. It really is a good book. A sprawling book, 400-and-some pages.”
As they discussed the possibilities over the next several weeks, Urdahl told Forbes about the Forest City Stockade, in addition to his contacts. The pieces for a movie – and even a movie set — began falling in place.
“He sent me some photographs and you can look online, but you can’t really tell the scope, you can’t tell the detail,” Forbes said of his initial impressions of the Stockade. “It looks good, let’s see what we got. It’s beyond good. It’s as good as anything I’ve seen like this anywhere.”
Forbes plans to be in Litchfield for the premiere week. In fact, he arrived earlier this week, according to Urdahl, to complete production work, which includes dubbing some of the scenes with Minnesota actors.
Urdahl, who appears in the movie, said he looks forward to seeing and hearing the reactions of local residents — especially those who appeared in the movie. He feels part of the success of the movie will be the work of those actors.
“What I wanted to do, in our story, was raise the level of actors,” Urdahl said. “We are fortunate we can do that here because, for one thing, we have very good community theater. We did dip into the community theater pool quite a bit.”
Urdahl also leaned on Tim Nelson, a Litchfield resident with theater credits on the coasts who has directed Litchfield Community Theatre musicals the past two summers. Urdahl asked Nelson for help in casting, and through his contacts, Nelson brought in three professional actors to take roles of main characters in the film.
“He made us aware of those three that would be willing to come here for not a whole lot of money,” Urdahl said. “We paid a stipend to them, and they came in and did a fine job.”
For his part, Forbes has expressed satisfaction with what he had to work with, Urdahl said.
“He tells me he’s happy,” Urdahl said. “He thinks things are coming together very well. He’s quite happy with the level of acting we had.”
