Rochester Filmmaker Keeps Projects Close to Home

When Nick DiBella sold his feature screenplay Chasing Bobby Jones to WarnerBros back in 1998, where it went into development with Chris O’Donnell attached, people in Rochester figured he’d be moving on to Hollywood pretty soon. After all, his earlier screenplays Runnin’ Home and Address Unknown had both already been turned into cable TV movies. He’d picked up an agent, and he was becoming a re-writer in demand, being offered jobs like updating the 1959 teen love story A Summer Place (also for WarnerBros). Then in 2002 when MGM released Kart Racer starring Randy Quaid, based on another of his scripts, well, everybody figured that was pretty much it; Rochester got ready to say good bye to Nick DiBella.

But something surprising happened - he didn’t go. “My wife and I would go out to LA a few times a year for me to take meetings and all, but I was never very comfortable there. Rochester is my home. I get that it probably held my career back in one sense, but I just didn’t want to live there, I wanted to be here. Besides, a paycheck goes a lot further in Rochester than LA.”

And from a career point of view, things haven’t turned out so bad for DiBella. He’s directed three features and numerous short films, and has another feature in pre-production scheduled to start this summer. His budgets are going up, his audience keeps growing, and distributors are bidding to get his pictures - all without leaving his hometown of Rochester.

DiBella got his start making short films for Eastman Kodak. “I was working for Kodak, but not in the motion picture division; I had a job in optical engineering designing and calibrating equipment that tested lenses and cameras. Kodak had a Camera Club where you could check out Super 8 cameras and make your own little movies for free. One of my shorts, Sweet Surrender, wound up getting aired on Showtime and the guys over in the motion picture department saw it and said, ‘hey, why don’t you start making films for us?’ They needed to try out the new film stocks, see how they look in real movie situations with actors and a story and different lighting conditions.” Kodak was offering an employee buyout at that time, so he left his engineering job and started as an independent writer-director, making narrative shorts for the Kodak technical team. And those shorts started winning awards.

In 1995 he put up his own money and made his first feature – Restless Heart. “It was a real learning experience, I’ll say that. And we accomplished a lot of what we set out to do.” The film didn’t do well financially, which was discouraging, but around that time his screenwriting career really started to take off. His rewrite on a script Address Unknown became the feature debut of director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel). Next, came Running Home in 1997, produced by Allegro Films and distributed by Brainstorm Media. Those were followed in turn by the WarnerBros deals and Kart Racer. “I was definitely getting writing jobs, and that was great, but what I wanted to do was actually make movies, not just write them. Plus, because a lot my projects that were getting bought were family films, stories about teenagers and such, I was becoming typecast as that kind of writer. I was writing darker scripts, too, but they weren’t selling, in part I think because people just didn’t think of me working in those genres. That’s when I decided to make Cherry Crush, to show I could do something more “noir.” And I decided to make it right here, in Rochester, where I’d have the most control.”

Cherry Crush is indeed a much darker film - “Body Heat for teenagers” DiBella calls it - built around a story of blackmail and murder. The budget was much bigger than his previous effort, and so was the cast, including Nikki Reed (Thirteen), Jonathan Tucker (Hannibal) and Frank Whaley (Pulp Fiction). “Having done all these movies for Kodak, I knew we had everything here I needed – the gear, the equipment, the trained crew. The Rochester technical crew had been working on these very high-quality Kodak movies for years, they really knew their craft.” Partnering with local post production house Post Central, they shot the film in 2005 and it has been distributed on DVD in countries around the world.

DiBella has both feet firmly planted in his hometown. “The stories just come to me here, I love our community; it’s an integral part of my creative energy. Plus there’s a sweet spot in Rochester for making movies from about $500,000 up to about $3 million; all the people and resources are here and you can get great deals on locations and all the support services you need. And, with the great New York State Film Production tax credits, there’s just no reason for me to go anywhere else. “

DiBella says the New York State tax credit was critical in helping him raise the money for his most recent movie, King’s Faith. “The tax credit was big for us, absolutely. It’s big when you can talk to your investors and tell them we’ve got a big head start on paying them back thanks to New York State. We couldn’t be doing these movies here in Rochester without the state tax credit, no question.”

King’s Faith opened another whole set of doors for DiBella: the Christian faith-based entertainment market. The film’s distributor, Provident Films (a division of Sony), is just one of a growing number of companies that seek to acquire and distribute films, books, music, and other media that speak to the Christian faith community. “We had interest from nine different companies,” DiBella says. “We can distribute directly to churches and faith groups all over the world. Plus there are additional revenue streams from ancillary materials, like the Bible study guides that use the film to illustrate various lessons in the Bible.” King’s Faith is clearly something of a hit in the faith community; within months of its release it aired on the UPtv network where over 1.9 million people viewed it during its premiere weekend. It is currently running on TVOne and was released theatrically in 36 U.S. cities. The DVD is being sold in 30 countries, and since October over 40,000 DVD units have been sold worldwide. Right now the Facebook page for King’s Faith has over 80,000 fans, and that is growing by about 2500 fans per week. And these fans are not just from the US, but from all over the world.

So what’s next for DiBella? He’s got another faith-based film, Wildflower, in prep for shooting this fall. His script Last Breath was optioned by a producer and is currently out for financing. His goal is to ramp up his production schedule to doing two movies a year - all to be shot, hopefully, in Upstate New York. And, he notes, there’s one other unique benefit Rochester has over LA, one many in the film business have overlooked. “Winters can be pretty long here,” he says. “It keeps me indoors so I get lots of writing done.”