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A new film starring and featuring the music of Storm Large will debut this week at the Portland Film Festival. Mad/Woman will have two screenings: one at 7:45 pm on Thursday, Oct. 13, and one at 9 pm on Sunday, Oct. 23, both at Lloyd Center (the mall, not the multiplex).
Filmed in Southwest Portland at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in summer 2020 with an all-female crew (although director Marc Acito is male), Mad/Woman is about a woman who is beaten unconscious by her husband and searches her mindscape for a path to freedom.
“It was insane,” Large stated in a press release. “I had hardly seen another human being for three months, and suddenly I’m crawling on tin foil toward a dude wearing nothing but a cock sock.”
“All of Storm’s repressed energy exploded on camera,” added producer Rick Sadle. “It was a master class in acting.”
Acito (a 2005 Oregon Book Award winner for his novel How I Paid for College) made the movie partly because he wanted to prove it was possible to make a low-budget musical.
“Roughly 70% of all new Broadway musicals lose their investors money,” he said (that includes his own musical Allegiance). “Broadway is the Olympics: There’s gold, silver, bronze, and everyone else goes home empty-handed. I figured there had to be a better way.”
“The $10 to $20 million capitalization of a new musical is a sunk cost requiring years of development before it ever recoups a penny,” said Floyd Sklaver, who now works as director of finance for Broadway shows like Hadestown (and is married to Acito). “For a fraction of that cost, dynamic, imaginative films can be made that can generate revenue from day one in the digital sphere.”
Tickets for Mad/Woman, which features five Storm Large songs (including “Beautiful” and “Ladylike”), can be purchased on the Portland Film Festival’s official website.