When you ask some people in Hudson County who Peter LaVilla is, they may have a vague recollection that he once served as the mayor of Guttenberg. A more politically savvy person might even remember that LaVilla ran for county executive in the late 1990s. But only a handful of locals know of him as an independent filmmaker, whose 2006 film Oil & Water made something of a splash with Los Angeles film critics.
Using a technique called “guerilla filmmaking,” LaVilla recently concluded his latest romantic comedy using a cast derived from local actors, as well as local locations.
Called Pott Luck, the new film explores the social impact of online dating.
The film’s hero, Moe Pott – played by Jersey City resident Ron Leir, who is fairly well known for theatrical parts – is a kind of average, American, gullible male taken in by nearly every online money scheme in his search for romance. His close male friends, played by Bayonne resident and moviemaker Nick Taylor and by Peter LaVilla, get together to help rescue Pott from these schemes.
Yours truly also has a role – I play an ambitious and ruthless editor of a local daily newspaper who seeks to uncover the seedy truth behind Moe Pott’s online relationship by assigning my reporter, played by Bayonne resident Manny Medina, to get a picture of the underage girl Pott has allegedly taken up with.
The plot has several twists, including parallel love stories that consume the characters along the way. Filmed in locations throughout Hudson County, the story is supposed to take place in “small-town suburbia USA,” LaVilla said during a recent interview.
“This is a close-knit community. Everybody rallies around Moe,” LaVilla said. “Moe goes with the flow. Everyone knows someone like him, someone who is easygoing. While we’re trying to help him out with the pitfalls and perils of going online, it brings us closer in our own love relationships. I guess what the film says is that love can be found in your own backyard.”
Film came out of Internet life
LaVilla, who also wrote the script, said the inspiration for the film came as a result of his wandering into the Internet world of chat rooms.
As an independent day trader, LaVilla frequently uses the Internet for research.
“I fund my movies through my day trading,” he said. “I was sitting at home when I got a call from a buddy who said I got to go into the chat rooms. Since I’m dating someone, I really didn’t know much about the chat rooms. But my friend said it was a subculture and that I should check them out. When I did, I was in awe. I couldn’t believe the things people would say. You could tell they were lying through their teeth, and using crazy names.
Even I had three or four crazy screen names. It seemed like everybody lied. So I dabbled a little and grew more and more interested.”
Out of these experiences, LaVilla developed the idea for Pott Luck, and began to make dates online, delving through the world of rejection and acceptance, and eventually, meeting the people he had communicated with online.
“The people I met were not the same people they said they were online,” he said. “It was mind-boggling. Some women sent me their daughters’ pictures.”
LaVilla said out of these experiences, he created what he calls a comic-tragic film, full of laughter, yet also reliving the horror and reality of some of his off-the-wall experiences.
“Whatever or whoever you can imagine, you will see and meet online,” he said. “Not everything that I experienced was negative. I met some nice people and some of them have become friends with whom I still correspond.”
Filming disasters
Strange things continued to happen when LaVilla prepared to shoot the film.
The night before he was scheduled to begin, Leir was rushed to the hospital with a stomach virus.
“I had to change the shooting schedule around,” LaVilla said.
This meant that some of the new actors – like me – had to shoot a week before we were ready. I didn’t know all of my lines. LaVilla patiently worked to get the scenes shot.
But the disasters didn’t stop there.
Although Leir returned to work for the weekend shoot in a Hoboken nightclub, a nor’easter combined with high tides to flood many of the streets around the club, creating additional difficulties for the crew and actors.
“The cellar was flooded and the power was going out,” LaVilla said. “The owner said things didn’t look too good for our finishing the film.”
A fire at a nearby lumberyard closed some of the streets out of Hoboken after the shoot was over. And at some point on the same night, a wall on the Viaduct out of Hoboken collapsed, leaving some of the crew to wonder if they would get out of his film shoot alive.
Now in postproduction, the film had yet more challenges to overcome.
Because the shoot used a particular camera with an adapter for a 35-millimeter lens, the video was recorded sideways in relation to conventional video cameras. This required LaVilla to get adaptors for the editing process.
More of a problem was the fact that the boom pole holding the microphone was visible in most of the shots done in Hoboken. These will have to be edited out somehow – since, in this kind of filmmaking, you rarely get to go back and shoot it again.
The filming was conducted from “coast to coast” in Hudson County – Bayonne, Hoboken, Jersey City, Guttenberg and North Bergen. Some scenes were also shot in Teaneck.
Postproduction will take time, LaVilla said, although he has already released a five-minute trailer.
Hudson County is well represented
This is LaVilla’s fourth feature film. Along with Oil & Water, LaVilla also released Mr. Las Vegas. His first feature film, done in the mid-1980s, was never released. He said he intends to re-film it.
LaVilla started writing in the 1960s, creating short stories, poetry, and stage plays. He also worked as a reporter for the Hudson Dispatch in Union City, and later for the Jersey Journal. For 12 years, he published his own monthly magazine.
In some ways, Pott Luck is a reunion, since a number of the actors who appear in it also starred in LaVilla’s first play, performed at the Beat’n Path in Hoboken in the early 1980s.
“The film involves a lot of people from Hudson County,” he said.
The film’s music is by David Musial, a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken.
Manny Medina’s family – Gigget, Joy, and Luis Medina – also have parts. Nelson Page, owner of the Hudson Theater in Jersey City, played the role of mayor.
Others, including Georgio Barlaam of Guttenberg; Henry Marrero, a North Bergen police officer; Maz Gomez of North Bergen; and Joe Perconpino of Hoboken also had roles.
Bayonne was well represented in the film, with Daisy Carreras, Carol Redmond, Mellssett and Jaritzza Vera, Jennifer Castro, Kaitlyn Moore, Marisa Yerex, Joan Hajducsek Rosen, Samir Eldesouki, Rebecca Aiello, Marisa Gold, Angela Scalia, Angie Burti, and Nancy Almodovar. Other Hoboken residents involved in the project were Dolores Perkovic, Emad Ghay, and Billy Roz, a Hoboken fireman.
LaVilla is expected to meet with Gloria Morrison, president of Echelon Studios – the firm that distributed his last two films – at the Hoboken International Film Festival, where his trailer for Oil & Water will be shown.