DOWNTOWN — Last year, I walked into the Billy Goat Tavern to find owner Sam Sianis and his rather stinky cloven-hoofed mascot, Billy Goat Jr., making a cameo appearance in an indie comedy being filmed in his subterranean pub.
The film’s young rookie director, Allie Loukas, appeared frazzled and hurried while tweaking camera angles and wrangling actors due to an acute paranoia triggered by chronic perfectionist tendencies — and compounded by the pressure of making a low-budget picture.
That is not a diagnosis. It’s just the truth.
“I was so delusional that I don’t remember what was going on from moment to moment,” said Loukas, who is also the film's writer, producer and star. “I just tried to keep the peace, keep things going and not freak out.”
While Loukas’s mom, Gloria Loukas, confessed that her daughter may have failed at not freaking out, the 29-year-old did manage to complete her “almost-no-budget” movie, “Kathryn Upside Down,” against formidable odds.
For 21 days, Loukas, of Lake Forest, filmed at locations all over Chicago, and in large part relied on the kindness of strangers — camera and lighting rental companies, family friends like Sianis and Parthenon owner Chris Liakouras, actors and crew members willing to work for free — and, of course, her mom.
Inspired by the work of Loukas’ hometown movie-making hero, the late John Hughes, “Kathryn Upside Down” is a comedic tale of a 20-something woman suffering an identity crisis brought on after she serendipitously meets her biological father, a plumber who shows up at her mother’s fancy garden party to fix a poop-clogged toilet.
“Making the movie, I felt as frazzled as Kathryn when it comes to the similarities between the crazy things she goes through and what it’s like to make a movie,” Loukas said. “It’s really relatable.”
While meticulously toiling through postproduction, Loukas wrote a blog that aimed to vent her frustrations and expose the ugly truth about the struggle of making a low-budget independent feature film with a skeleton crew.
“I may not have the money. I may not have the connections, and I may not be a man, but I have a few invaluable things. I have the talent, and I’m smarter than people think I am,” Loukas wrote in a post titled, “Sexism and Low-Budget Judgments, a Day in the Life.”
“This is a day of frustration, sick of having to justify why I have no money and sick of all the sexist bull----. … The reason I’m near completion on a zero budget film is because I am not weak and I have thick skin … also because I never f------ listened to anyone who … told me I couldn’t do what I set out to do.”
It was a struggle from the start.
Loukas’ inspiration for the film was born in a Los Angeles parking garage.
The aspiring actress and playwright moved to L.A. to chase her Hollywood dreams, but ended up walking dogs and baby-sitting toddlers for cash.
“I got the idea when I was lost in a parking garage, riding in a golf cart looking for my car. At one point the golf cart stalled and rolled backwards down the ramp,” she said. “I told my boyfriend that it would be funny if it happened in a movie with a father and daughter who just met each other.”
So, late at night when the kids she watched were sleeping, Loukas started writing the script.
As things turned out that was the easy part.
She spent a thousand hours, maybe more, laboring over technical details and tiny mistakes — buzzing microphones, missing audio and color correction, to name a few. She worked with an editor 16 hours a day on the weekends and late into the night during the week.
“As fun as people think it would be to make a movie, it’s not. It’s a lot of work. It’s problem after problem,” she said. “I didn’t have a personal life. When you’re one person trying to do the whole thing and you don’t know if you’re capable of finishing, it’s overwhelming.”
Even though the movie is finally complete, Loukas’ work — and her frustration — is far from finished.
Just ask her mom.
“My husband and myself, we’ve been there for the breakdowns and the tears the whole way,” Gloria Loukas said. “Even down to last night.”
The movie might not be “artsy” enough for film festivals. And without an agent, Allie Loukas says she fears finding a distributor won’t be easy.
“So, we’re trying to get people to watch it and hoping to get a review,” she said. “It’s a theatrical release kind of film, a John Hughes revival, not exactly a film fest movie. Ideally we’ll find the right distributor who will know how to handle this kind of movie.”
And even if she strikes out, Loukas still finds solace in the struggle.
“Even if you fail a ton of times, as I have, at least you can hold one steadfast truth: You’re following your heart,” Loukas wrote on her blog. “When you go for that, you can’t go wrong.”
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