Once upon a time a few decades ago, Kansas City was enjoying its starring role as a Hollywood movie making hotspot.
In the 1990s, academy-award winning actors, rising Hollywood stars, world-famous entertainers and legendary directors all found that filming their stories among the easy-to-please residents and story-defining locations of Kansas City was a great way to manage their smallish budgets.
There were a series of films shot in and around Kansas City then, including “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” “Article 99,” “Kansas City,” “Ride With the Devil,” among others. Ellen Burstyn, who won an academy award as best actress for her portrayal of a widow seeking a better life in the 1974 Martin Scorsese film “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” could be seen shopping at Whole Foods in Mission. Kristin Davis, the villain of the nighttime soap opera “Melrose Place” and soon to become a major television and film star as Charlotte York in the HBO romantic comedy series “Sex in the City,” stayed in a hotel downtown using a fake name because her fans were stalking her.
What the jaded west coast dreammakers didn’t expect was the available pool of minor part actors and experienced crew members who lived and worked here, all hungry for connecting with a Hollywood production, all digging in and doing their best version of Midwest work ethic.
Hollywood loved it. Word got out about the good help here, charging cheap day rates that low budget producers needed to make their films, in a city that gave them virtually everything they wanted – in one case shutting down I-670 and blocking off I-35 downtown to film a U2 music video in May, 1997.
Now, because of the reauthorization of an expired tax credit law in Missouri that expired in 2013, the city and surrounding areas have once again become a magnet for movie-making money men. First up: “Boris is Dead,” an independent dark comedy thriller that completed principal production in Kansas City in late November. It was shot mostly in an abandoned local Ethiopian restaurant.
The actors Dane Cook, best known as a stand-up comedian who has done some critically-acclaimed work in television and feature films over the last few years; and Hana Mae Lee, an actress, singer and model best known for “The Babysitter: Killer Queen” franchise.
“It’s an action-comedy-thriller piece that started out as more of a comedy,” the lead producer, Sasha Yelaun, says. “Now it feels very kind of Tarantino-esque. It revolves around a café. There’s a lot of violence and killing, but there’s all these nuances and things that happen that are also kind of funny at the same time. It feels like there could be a cult following behind this one.”
“The idea for the film initially started from a restaurant where my twin sister and I worked,” says Kerry Donelli, who co-wrote the screenplay with her sister Jacqueline. They are both producers. They play the same waitress character in the film, Gabby. “The lead character (Derek, played by Cook) was someone my character had dated. Then we added characters that we worked with in the restaurant industry, and made it larger than life.”
She said that once they came up with the story, they changed it a few times. “We did rewrites. It was a heist film at first, just different characters that did it. And then we added a mafia piece in at the 11th hour.”
Chris Mulkey, a veteran actor of over 100 films and dozens of TV series appearances, plays the owner of the restaurant, Ross. He picks up the story from there. “My character owes 300 large to the mob from betting,” he says. “When I finally get all the money together in my restaurant, the staff who found out that I was cheating them out of their money, want to steal all my money. So that’s the conflict. It’s basically ‘Fargo’ on steroids, a sort of crime comedy.”
The journey to the movie began for Cook when the director, James Cullen Bressack, reached out to him through a direct message in Instagram. “I caught his message, and it was really just very direct. But something stood out,” he says. “I wrote him back and said ‘I’d love to read it. I’m on a tour for the rest of the year (he is just wrapping up a 30-plus city tour). I don’t imagine I’d be able to participate, but could I read it?’ So I read it, met him for lunch, and told him, ‘Man, I really did love this. And it harkens back to some of the films that I loved growing up.’”
Cook is also an executive producer of the film under his company banner SuperFinger Ent.
Bressack said he had looked at Cook’s tour schedule and that they baked it in so that he could fly in and out of Kansas City for weekend dates. Then they’d shoot him for four or five days here – which would be an exhausting schedule for Cook. “I said as long as it works for the character, I am ready to be exhausted for you.”
What Cook liked about his character, Derek, a struggling waiter who gets involved in a violent heist gone wrong, was that his character’s angst reminded him of his entire 1990s, where he was not only struggling and lost but still trying to “find his metal.”
“Where is the fire burning inside of me?” Cook says. “And how can I make that meet all the prep with stand-up? Will I be able to meet a certain lean-in confidence that I still didn’t quite have? That’s where this character’s jumping off point is. Because through a curious set of circumstances that we lived through with the character, he finally figures out, with a little bit of lady luck as well, how to get through something.”
The movie is in the edit stage now through February, with a completed film expected by May. Yelaun says that they are aiming to premiere it at the Toronto Film Festival in September, 2025, where such notable films as “American Beauty,” “Black Swan,” and “The Fabelmans” have all premiered.
