a blood-soaked fairy tale about FINDING the power within.

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When I think of Little Gold Star, I first think of Allison Scagliotti and Evalena Marie, the two incredible actors at the center of this grim and magical story. When Josh Breslow (co-writer / producer) and I first approached them about the project, we were a bit apprehensive. There was no getting around it; the story was dark. Very dark. And the shoot itself would not be easy. Not only would these two have to plumb the extreme and frightening depths of their own emotional psychology, but maybe worse still, they’d have to plumb the extreme and frightening depths of an unfinished New England basement.

 To our great joy, they were both completely ready to dive in, setting a fierce and passionate tone that would carry through the entire production. We created a Kickstarter campaign and shot a no-budget teaser to go along with it, finding a junkyard in LA happy to let us smash some car windows. A few months later, we successfully hit our goal of $10,000 (and a little bit more) and were off and running.

Alongside the Kickstarter funds, we had some crucial donations from friends that made the shoot possible, the largest of which was the use of two beautiful houses for a week of shooting. The kicker? The houses were in Cape Cod, just minutes from the beach. We shot in both, combining the basement of one and the kitchen of another to create our fictional house of horror, completely removed from the beautiful beachtown weather surrounding us.

As Allison put it in one of our Kickstarter updates: “Cape Cod was a perfectly Lynchian backdrop to our little revenge poem. Outside, the idyllic pastel landscape of northeastern cottages along the shore. Inside, blood and filth. Magically representative of our subject matter.”

Actor Frank Monteleone: “The first day I arrived to set, pulling up to the house, it was a beautiful summer day; people were jogging, walking dogs in the neighborhood. When I stepped out of the car, there was the most giant blood-curdling scream coming from the house. It actually was terrifying and I thought wow this is going to be a roller coaster of a weekend.”

The cast and crew worked tirelessly, pushing themselves to make our demanding daily shooting schedules. We shot every second of every day we could, and we also stayed where we shot, with some taking bedrooms and about a dozen of us sharing the attic. Turns out $14K doesn’t get you very far with the niceties. Who knew?

Producer / Writer Josh Breslow: “The biggest threat to our shoot was that we had to push shooting any scenes we had scheduled in the basement nearly every day due to lack of time. This culminated in “basement day” wherein we shot all the basement scenes in a single day. It’s one of those days I never want to repeat, but I wouldn’t take back the experience for the world.”

We finished a very long week with an all-night “poor man’s process” driving shoot before immediately sending cast and crew to the airport and back to LA. Those who stayed behind simply collapsed. There’s nothing better than a post-shoot sleep, and Little Gold Star still holds the record for the longest, deepest, darkest post-shoot sleep I’ve ever had.