Features - The Kings of Maine

By Eryk Salvaggio
New Media and Journalism, Ogunquit, Maine

Action!

The Waterville Opera House lobby was sweltering. It was a hot July evening and 450 people shared space and scents while the theater staff kept the stairs clear to the cinema doors. For a moment, it seemed like there was some movement, and the hope of getting into air-conditioned seats filled the crowd. Instead, we were pushed to the sides of the lobby to give the cast of ‘The Kings” a wide berth as they were ushered through.

“We felt like rock stars,” Travis Bourassa, a Waterville native who graduated from UMaine in May, said after the independent film’s premiere at the Maine International Film Festival.

For good reason: As one of the lead actors in “The Kings,” it was the capstone of a yearlong process of shooting and acting in his hometown.

The story centers on a group of kids known as The Kings: Four Waterville High School graduates who enjoy enormous popularity for their part in purging the town of bullies. But as years go by and a new generation of high-schoolers fills the halls to replace them, they’re challenged by The Spades: A group of socially awkward high school kids who went off to college and come home to brag about how awesome they are. Bourassa plays one of the jerks, and he does it with a convincing degree of authenticity.

“It kind of worries me that people think I’m good at it,” Bourassa admitted.

Spencer Theriault, a UMaine senior who stars as the go-to leader of The Kings, has less of a problem: Playing the charming, popular hero, his character goes through a tangible transformation by the movie’s end.

“He’s not really a hero,” Theriault said. “He tries to be a hero, but he fails at it. You see him progress from an immature kid who’s satisfied with a kind of shallow life, who grows up to see beyond having everything handed to him.”

Cast and Crew

The film was written and directed by Alec Helm, who graduated from Vassar in May with a film degree and paid for the entire operation out of his pocket. Helm took on the bulk of the work and the duo credits him for keeping the cast motivated.

Bourassa and Theriault are just two of the Waterville locals in the cast. All of them grew up together, and many of them attended the University of Maine: Masood Amini, Matt Johnson, Kyle Kernan, John Enkosky and Zach Dionne, who also co-produced the film, were all involved in the project, making their shared time back in Waterville a kind of goal-oriented, weekly high school reunion — a class reunion where you’re surrounded by people you already hang out with, and instead of not dancing to bad boy bands, you lug benches and camera equipment on and off of softball fields.

“Sometimes it was really hard to see that what we were doing was something special,” Theriault said.

Their workweek, from April into February, included some 19-hour days. Since the film had such a tight time constraint – the actors were working day jobs and were all full-time students – every second of daylight was precious. While most students who work and take classes take their solace in slapping the snooze button on Saturday mornings, the cast members were up at sunrise, and working some days by 6 a.m.

“I’m really surprised no one bailed,” admitted Bourassa. But he said the tight-knit friends couldn’t have done that to any other member of the group. “It’s a unique kind of camaraderie that you don’t usually see, because it’s like everyone is just pissed off at the same things.”

Even during the Wiffle Ball scenes – scenes that seem wrapped in a breezy, summer nostalgia in the film – the process sounds excruciating. Bourassa said he’d run a base, then be told to go back and run the base again. And again. For hours.

“Everyone lost a lot of weight over the course of making this movie,” Theriault chimed in.

But Bourassa said he couldn’t have imagined giving up. “Even during those Wiffle Ball scenes, I’m basically just hanging out watching my friends make jokes.”

“If a complete group of strangers got together to try to do the same thing, I think it would have failed miserably,” Theriault said.

But while the process of making a film had some massive barriers, knocking those barriers down had some great rewards. Since the actors essentially volunteered to serve as the crew, they had a hands-on experience that was hard to match.

“The first time I saw the dolly Alec had built, made of plywood and wheels from cheap Wal-Mart skateboards, I thought it was a joke,” Zach Dionne said in an e-mail interview. “The first time I watched a shot that utilized it, I could tell we were making a real film.”

That kind of inventiveness is what kept the cast going.

“The most challenging and rewarding days were when something wasn’t working and you really had to stop and figure it out,” Theriault said.

And if sheer willpower didn’t work, there was always sheer luck. While filming on top of a train car, someone assumed the group was up to no good – “They probably thought we were doing some ‘Jackass’ type of stunt,” said Bourassa – and called the cops.

“The cop who responded ended up being an amateur filmmaker,” Theriault said. “He actually lent us some of his equipment afterward.”

At the MIFF premiere, it was clear that all that hard work paid off. On screen in front of hundreds of people, to much of the cast’s astonishment, was a real film.

A Cinematic History of Waterville

Waterville, it should be noted, had a small cameo in the underground comedy “Wet Hot American Summer.” In that film, the town was portrayed as a beautiful slice of small-town America where campers would go and inexplicably find their way into weekends of criminal debauchery. In contrast to that, Alec Helm, the director and writer of “The Kings” has described his film as a “love letter to Maine,” a real attempt to capture something unique about growing up in Central Maine, in the middle ground between the urban chic of Portland and the rustic isolation of Aroostook County.

The entire community ended up rallying behind the film. During the premiere, you could hear audience members bursting into applause at the sight of certain landmarks.

“They’d break out and cheer when they saw the Hot Dog Guy,” Bourassa recalls.

Hot Dog Guy is an icon, as much as any bridge or antique train. And while “The Kings” is based on geography, it’s also about the culture towns where kids can never decide between staying or leaving. Like the experience of filming the movie, these towns can swing between tedium and excitement, nostalgia and rejection. But the pull of it – what makes a movie, or a community – is the quality of the cast and crew, the people whose creativity and humor and wild ideas make the dark days worth pulling through.

“Something about growing up in what feels like such a boring place and learning to love it is extremely powerful to me,” Dionne said. “Nostalgia is a double-edged sword — it’s safe and gives you some great times, but you can’t really learn about yourself and the world until you distance yourself from it. ‘The Kings’ paints that perfectly.”

Now, Helm is busy shopping the film around to various festivals. The cast members of the last film are eager to find a place in the next — whatever it may be.

“I’d work with Alec anytime,” Bourassa said. “I hope by next summer we’re doing another one.”

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