Indianapolis inmate plays role in film but misses premiere. He's still in prison.

Will Higgins | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption Celebrities flock to theTribeca film festival Common and Sarah Jessica Parker are among the A-listers premiering projects at the New York festival.

The red carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival is one swanky surface. On it you see people like Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore and Ethan Hawke and Saoirse Ronan.

At this year's festival, you'd have also seen Talishia Collier.

Collier, who works braiding hair out of her house on Indianapolis' east side, walked the gantlet of photographers and autograph seekers with a friend who's a self-employed auto mechanic.

"People thought we were famous, but we wasn't," Collier said. "We just came to see the movie."

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The movie was "O.G.," thought to be among a very few movies filmed inside a working prison ("On the Yard" was filmed in 1978 at prison in Pennsylvania). The actors were mostly actual inmates and guards. The prison was the Pendleton Correctional Facility, in Pendleton, Ind., and the star inmate, in the role of prison newbie "Beecher," was a 36-year-old felon named Theothus Carter.

Carter and Collier had a child together and have known each other since they were teenagers, which is why filmmakers paid for her two-night stay in New York for the April premiere of "O.G."

Carter could not attend because he's in prison until June 19, 2051, for attempted murder among other crimes. He could not be interviewed and photographed for this story because he's in solitary confinement for a serious violation of prison rules. (Carter is allowed to receive and respond to email, but he did not respond to the IndyStar's emailed query.)

Only a few select audiences have seen "O.G." The film is still months away from being released publicly. It has not been reviewed. Collier said it's about "an older man getting out of prison and deciding to take responsibility for another prisoner's life, a young man, to try to keep him on the right path while he does his time."

The older prisoner is played by Jeffrey Wright ("Westworld," "Boardwalk Empire," "Angels in America"). Doug Garrison, who as the Indiana Department of Correction's communications director played a key role in green-lighting the project at Pendleton and who attended the New York premiere, said Wright's performance as "Louis," the O.G., was Oscar-worthy. (The initials O.G. stands for original gangster, a term for a person of a certain age who has been around the block.)

He was Opie but this wasn't Mayberry

Carter, who'd had no acting experience, was surprisingly good as "Beecher," said those who saw the film. He "amazed the filmmakers with his aptitude and devotion," wrote Nick Paumgarten in a story for The New Yorker. Wright observed that while he had worked with "the likes of Christopher Walken, Al Pacino, and Anthony Hopkins, he had never worked with an actor as intense as Theothus Carter," Paumgarten reported.

"Opie did a good job," said Collier.

Theothus Carter since childhood has been known to his friends as Opie, the name borrowed from Ron Howard's character in the 1960s sitcom "Andy of Mayberry."

But Carter's upbringing on the streets of Indianapolis' hard-scrabble Haughville neighborhood was nothing like gentle Mayberry. Mayberry Opie's father didn't carry a gun even though he was a lawman. Instead, Sheriff Andy Taylor worked things out using goodwill and sound logic.

Haughville Opie's father was murdered. "Man ran up and shot him in the chest, and Opie was standing right there," said Jackie Proctor, Collier's mother. "I don't think Opie was there," said Collier, "but his dad did get shot when Opie was a little boy."

"O.G." was filmed at Pendleton in the summer of 2016. The director was Madeleine Sackler, who'd directed the documentaries "The Lottery" in 2010, about charter schools, and in 2013 "Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus," about life in a dictatorship.

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"O.G." is not expected to be released until next year, and a spokesman for Sackler said she would not be available for an interview until then.

This is a difficult time for the director's family, one of the richest in America, said by Forbes to be worth $13 billion. The Sackler's company, Purdue Pharma, is under intense scrutiny for its role in the opioid crisis, described by President Trump as a public health emergency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 100 Americans die from an opioid overdose each day.

Purdue Pharma in 1996 gave the world OxyContin (2017 sales: $1.7 billion) and marketed the painkiller as safer and less addictive than other opioids. But OxyContin was highly addictive, and Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers have come in for harsh criticism.

In 2014 Madeleine Sackler contacted officials at more than a dozen prison systems throughout the country, requesting that they allow her to film a movie inside one of their prisons. The only prison official who called her back was Doug Garrison, the Indiana Department of Correction spokesman.

Garrison, a former FBI agent who for several years led the investigative news team for Indianapolis TV station WISH, said he "could tell how serious she was about doing something important." He advocated for Sackler to higher-ups in the state bureaucracy, and he succeeded.

Filming began in June 2016 and lasted for six weeks, following numerous delays necessitated by the schedule of a maximum security prison. "Count" is something that happens two or three times every day. "All movement comes to a stop and you have to count all the offenders," Garrison explained. Then there's the occasional temporary lockdown, often brought on by a fight among prisoners, "where nobody can go anywhere."

Early in the filming Collier visited the prison with her and Carter's son, Theothus Carter Jr., 16, whom she called Man-Man. He died a few weeks after the filming concluded, from a fatal gunshot wound. Collier recalls meeting Jeffrey Wright who was fresh from the set of the hit TV show "Westworld." "He said hello," she recalls, somewhat star-struck, "and he was nice and said Opie was doing a good job."

When Talishia met Opie

In 1997 Theothus "Opie" Carter was 16 and was riding a bicycle in the vicinity of 10th Street and Arnolda Avenue on Indianapolis' westside when Talishia Collier saw him for the first time. She was 15, a freshman at Ben Davis High School. "I was wearing a silver coat," she recalled, "and he's like, 'Where's your man?' 'And that's how I met him. He'd run away from juvie."

Collier said Carter is "very smart, very confident, very kind-hearted" and "a sweet person who makes you laugh." She was 16 when she became pregnant by him. He was 17. He went to prison at 18 for cocaine possession and again at age 20, also for cocaine possession, and again at age 21, for resisting law enforcement.

He was released in 2010 and tried to make it as a rapper. "He did a show at the something Monkey downtown," Collier said, referring likely to the since-shuttered Ugly Monkey, 373 S. Illinois St.

Soon after, in May 2010, "Carter and three other people broke into a home in Hancock County in order to take money they believed was there," a court document said, and Carter shot and wounded one of the residents.

He was convicted of burglary, attempted robbery with serious bodily injury and attempted murder. He was judged to be a habitual offender, too, and was returned to prison. He will be an old man when he gets out.

Collier saw Wright in New York at the "O.G." premiere and was pleased that the Emmy-winning actor remembered her. "He was nice, he was down to earth," she said. "He asked me about my son's case."

She is surrounded by murder

Still unsolved, she told him, referring to the murder of Theothus "Man-Man" Carter Jr., Aug. 13, 2016.

"Shortly after 10 p.m. Saturday," the Indianapolis Star reported Aug. 14, 2016, "officers from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department were called to Conoco Gas Station in the 4100 block of East 16th Street on a report of a person shot.

"Upon arrival, officers found 16-year-old Theothus Carter lying on the ground and suffering from at least one gunshot wound.

"He was pronounced dead at the scene.

"Anyone with information about the shooting is urged to call the IMPD Homicide Office at 317-327-3475 or Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana at 317-262-8477."

Violent death has long been part of Collier's life. She was 5 years old when her father, Ernest Collier, went to prison for the murder of Frederick McGuire. Ernest Collier was recently released from prison, on June 7.

In 2014 Collier got a tattoo on her upper right arm that says: "No weapon formed against us shall prosper." But the very next year two people close to her were shot and killed: her friend Tiara Turner, 32, in a house in the 3100 block of North Harding Street; and her cousin Terry Proctor, 27, outside the Magnolia Bar and Grill on East 21st Street.

"I need to check on the bears," Collier said the other day. She drove a few blocks to a telephone pole at the 4100 block of East 16th Street, where an assemblage of teddy bears and other stuffed animals had been affixed using cords and staples. It was a shrine to her son. The stuffed animals looked in surprisingly good condition given that they'd been outside in all kinds of weather for nearly two years. That's because Collier occasionally runs them through her washer and dryer.

The telephone pole is next to the Conoco gas station. Collier strolled over to the pumps and examined the spot where Man-Man died. "Pump 6, passenger side," she said.

She knows the details. She said she'd watched the surveillance video of the murder "two, three-thousand times." She said she had the video on her phone. "Sometimes," she said, "I just sit in my room and watch it."

Contact Star writer Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.