Stewart Raffill has made many films in different genres. He’s made action films (High Risk), sci-fi what-ifs (The Philadelphia Experiment), erotic thrillers (Survival Island) , monster movies (Croc) and more than his share of family films (including The Adventures of the Wilderness Family and the infamous Mac and Me). But now, with Standing Ovation, opening this week, the 70-year-old writer-director has tackled his first musical.
“One of the thrilling things I noticed was during the editing and filming with the actors that, after a while, the music plugs into another part of your mind,” says Raffill from his Los Angeles home. “I really enjoyed making it, it was lovely. The whole movie was new discoveries because the cast never acted before. At least 99.9 percent of them didn’t!”
The idea behind Standing Ovation, shot in and around Philadelphia and the South Jersey shore, was hatched by Diane Kirman, Raffill’s producer wife; Raffill scripted from there. A native of the area, Kirman studied singing under the guidance of Sal Dupree, a noted voice coach based in South Jersey. Featuring 20 original songs and classic oldies like Splish Splash, Standing Ovation’s plot centers on a group of junior high school students who form a singing group called The 5 Ovations. They vie for a top spot in a national contest and eventually face off against their arch rivals, a group called The Wiggies, comprised of rich and scheming sisters managed by their underhanded father (played by Dupree).
“It’s Junior High School Musical,”says Kirman, referring to the smash Disney series. “It’s geared to kids that age. They’ve been more apt to watch animated films and stuff for older kids like Glee, but this movie is just for them.”
According to Kirman, the movie took several years to put together. Along the way there were starts and work stoppages. With hubby Raffill aboard, however, Kirman enlisted James Brolin, an old pal of Raffill’s, to come aboard as a producer. As if the process of making a full blown musical independent of studio money, marketing and distribution in tough economic times wasn’t daunting enough, Kirman is also distributing Standing Ovation through Kenilworth Films, a company she recently formed.
Fashioning a successful family film is nothing new to Raffill. After all, the former animal handler, who worked extensively with Walt Disney Studios and producers of Tarzan films and TV series, made his mark directing Where the North Wind Blows and The Adventures Of The Wilderness Family, highly successful low-budget wildlife adventure sagas that were “four-walled” in theaters (rented out by their distributors and shown for weeks after media marketing blitzes).
While delving into the G and PG-rated well often in his career (with such other efforts as The Sea Gypsies and Grizzly Falls), Raffill has also delivered a wide array of films for different audiences.
High Risk, a dynamite heist movie, gave Raffill an opportunity to expand his repertoire from the G and PG well in which he has specialized. In the 1981 thriller, Brolin plays an American who leads a group of friends into Mexico to steal millions from druglord James Coburn. Brolin’s band of thieves finds their escape plan thwarted by a bandit group headed by Anthony Quinn.
“A producer came to me and said I like your movie (Wilderness Family),” recalls Raffill, who attended movies habitually while growing up in an industrial town in England. “He said, ‘I have the money to make a movie, but we have to get started in three weeks.’”
Amazingly, Raffill was able to corral Cleavon Little, Ernest Borgnine and Lindsay Wagner to join Brolin, Quinn and Coburn on the impressive roster in such a short period of time. Speaking of Coburn, Raffill labels the late Our Man Flint Star “one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. He was terribly beat up with arthritis at the time and had to be lifted onto a horse for the movie. But he was interested in all sorts of esoteric philosophies and things.”
After High Risk, which became a huge favorite on home video, Raffill made The Ice Pirates, a sci-fi comedy for MGM, starring Robert Urich, Ron Perlman and Angelica Huston.
“There were three producers on that,” relates Raffill about the film in which futuristic factions battle each other over ice on an arid planet Earth. “One was with MGM at the time. They had a bank deal for an $8 million budget and a script called The Water Planet. I said we should go with more of a comic idea and we did. But every producer had to pass on every script. They said, ‘You go see such and such and you go to see this person to rewrite it.’ The initial concept was original. But that’s what happens with studios.”
The Philadelphia Experiment, one of Raffill’s best-known films, came next. Based on a best-selling book, the movie told of a WWII-era government experiment to make a ship in the U.S. Naval Yard invisible to enemy radar. The experiment sends two sailors (played by Michael Pare and Bobby DiCicco) into the future. “We had intended to shoot some of that in Philadelphia, but the Navy was not cooperating with the production,” says the director, who ended up filming in Utah, Colorado, South Carolina and California.
Mac and Me, a kids’ sci-fi yarn, has been disdained –ridiculed? crucified?—by many since its 1988 release. The film is about an alien family taken to back to Earth after a NASA space probe. The E.T.-like baby of the family loses his folks and sets out on adventures—adventures that include befriending a disabled boy, sucking up Coke and visiting McDonald’s. Even Ronald McDonald makes an appearance in a dance scene.
In response to the comments about Mac and Me made over the years—including jabs by Paul Rudd when he appears on Conan O’Brien’s TV show—Raffill has this to say: “The producer had done a few other films and didn’t have a script although he had already hired a crew. It was bizarre. So he was in preproduction, and the concept was essentially an invalid child meets aliens. He was the first person to do a film with McDonald’s and gave part of the proceedings to McDonald’s charities. They told me they wanted this, this and this, and I locked myself into it. Audiences found that the creature looked too much like another creature that was popular. But I guess we were the first film to have a tie-in with a fast food company, which is common today.”
While Raffill has worked for studios over the years on several projects (he also wrote the original story for the action hit Passenger 57 with Wesley Snipes), the filmmaker has chosen to go the independent route in most cases. Although he admits this is a tough way to sustain a directing career, there’s an incredible feeling of achievement when everything comes together.
“There’s a serendipity to doing it,” admits Raffill. “But you don’t control your own destiny in this business (either going the studio or indie routes). You write a plethora of scripts—I have 20 or 30 of them here in the closet. There’s less risk of doing a family film in the indie world, though. With an adult film, you compete in an adult world, which is much tougher.”
Raffill and Kirman truly believe that Standing Ovation is that rare indie film with a chance to break through. Although the odds are tough, the film has a lot going for it—and has procured an impressive 1,100 American screens to open on in the middle of a busy summer.
“The script evolved as he met different characters,” says Kirman. “Parts were written after Stewart met the actresses, boy’s roles became girl’s roles. I think the kids will relate to the realness of the situation.”
“The model of High School Musical is out there, but Glee came out after we started,” says Raffill, who names Chicago his favorite all-time musical. “High School Musical had an influence and showed there was a market for children. But the kids in the High School Musical movies were in their 20s, and the audience they had in general were ‘tweens and young teens. We decided to go with younger kids, kids who have never been in movies before. And I thought they could be talented and sing.
“The imperfection makes it interesting. And in the process (of making the film) the performers became good and many learned how to dance. It was an evolution for the film and the kids at the same time.”