Recruiting Range Runners to the Region

Range Runners now on Amazon Prime shot in Southern Illinois' Shawnee Hills

With Range Runners, the last movie shot almost entirely in Southern Illinois, now available for streaming on Amazon Prime it's time to talk about how this project came to be. Few, if any, spoilers will be spilled, I promise, at least no more than what's in the trailer above.

Directed by Chicago filmmaker Philip S. Plowden and written by his producing partner Devon Colwell, the film stars Celeste M. Cooper as Mel, a trail runner on the Appalachian Trail who has a run-in with two drug dealers trying to lay low and hiding from their supplier.

Location scouting above Bork Falls for Dig Two Graves in 2013

I first met Phil in January 2013 during the filming of Dig Two Graves which had set up a temporary production office in Marion, Illinois. After helping point the producers to a couple of sites they picked as locations they signed me up on the crew as a office PA (production assistant). When Phil, who was an associate producer and location manager learned I was also a writer, he asked me to join his department - a promotion in responsibilities, but an elimination in pay as this was a low budget film and he didn't have any more funds in his budget line. No problem. I looked at it as film school without tuition, jumped at the opportunity, and ended up as a location coordinator for the main shoot and then location manager for the summer shoot of one week that June.

After that film I kept in touch with Phil whose main job these past few years has been working locations for the NBC series Chicago Fire. His father is a famed photographer in Chicago and Phil's a film school graduate. Filmmaking is his passion. He met Devon on the set of Chicago Fire and the pair joined together to create their production company Fatal Funnel Films with a definite project in mind. That project is big and would require significant funding so they decided to shoot a short, Cellar Door, which became a prequel of sorts to what they hope to eventually produce. Meanwhile they continued to seek out funding for their eventual project. By late 2016 or early 2017 Phil realized they didn't have enough funds to shoot their big movie so he asked Devon to come up with something else, something they could produce on a limited budget while the television series were on hiatus in the spring. That's when the idea for Range Runners began.

My role in the project came about in the summer of 2017. I reached out asking about any updates. Phil told me about the project and that they were looking at Starved Rock State Park above the Illinois River near Utica. I agreed that it had some neat areas, but didn't think there was enough there for a trail-based movie, especially one set in mountains not surrounded by corn and soybean fields. I suggested the Shawnee Hills. Dig Two Graves had filmed in Ferne Clyffe State Park and Phil and I had scouted the trails in Giant City State Park for some scenes. He was open to the idea but had one catch, the film needed a four-sided Adirondack cabin with three sides enclosed and the fourth one open. Not only would this location be a key one in the film, it's also very typical of the ones used on the Appalachian Trail. Having hiked the trail in Maryland in Boy Scouts I knew exactly what he meant. Now, I just needed to find one.

Camp Ondessonk, the Catholic youth camp at Ozark, has a number of these cabins but they're all connected to each other in clusters. They're really neat to use, but they're not what Phil needed. Vaguely I thought I knew there was another one in the area. Whether I came across it when serving as a tourism director or even earlier on the board of the River to River Trail Society I was sure, or at least, pretty sure we had one. After multiple phone calls I found it on the southeast edge of SIU Touch of Nature on the west side of Little Grassy Lake. Apparently I had hiked by it when in Boy Scouts.

That snagged Phil's interest. The weekend after Labor Day he came down to scout the cabin and other various sites I had found. He had one more request. He needed a model or actress who can be a stand-in for Mel who obviously had not been cast yet. I told him I had the perfect one, Reighbeau Love, who had tremendously impressed me earlier in the year at an audition. I passed along her contact information and she agreed to meet us for a photo shoot out in the woods.

While we only had Reignbeau for Saturday Phil and I managed to hike more trails that weekend then I think I hiked a whole year in scouts as a kid - Giant City, Ferne Clyffe, Garden of the Gods, plus a few others as well. That weekend sold Phil on the possibility of Southern Illinois, but he still had work to do in securing his funding.

He eventually shot Range Runners on about half the budget of Dig Two Graves but to make that work he had to be smart. It's a rule in filmmaking that a properly-formatted script page equals one minute of screen time, thus a 120-page script should result in a two-hour movie. Dig Two Graves shot around 120 pages, but ended up cutting a lot of scenes to focus the story more on its main character Jake (Samantha Isler) making the final theatrical cut only 85 minutes. While the cuts probably made for a better movie Phil couldn't afford to do a third less pages on half the budget. He had to look at other production costs as well. The first version of the script I read had a page count just under 90 and only eight characters total. By the time they filmed the following summer they were down to seven characters, turns out they really didn't need a motel clerk character.

Dig Two Graves filmed at locations all over Southern Illinois, some of which were an hour away from the cast and crew's lodging. Once Phil learned that Touch of Nature had motel-like accommodations on site that became base camp and the remaining locations would be no more than a half-hour away, which meant nothing east of Ferne Clyffe and Illinois Route 37. The following April he brought Devon, his production designer and the 1st Assistant Director down to scout the sites we had picked. That visit would be the precursor for the full tech scout a week or two later with the other producers and the remaining department heads. Every location would be visited, camera angles debated, safety protocols determined over those two weekend visits. Production began the end of the month with two days in suburban Chicago before everything moved down to the region.

My favorite BTS photo as it shows just how many crew it takes for just one simply shot of Mel washing her hands. It doesn't even begin to show the other 10-15 people on the other side of the creek watching.

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