MC STUDENT IS "CLOSET" MOVIE PRODUCER
Release Date: December 19, 2001
 As
the holiday season approaches, memories of a frantic George Bailey – played by Jimmy Stewart
– running confused and frightened through a foreign Bedford Falls are fresh on many of our
minds. The classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” taught us many things, including the fact that we
can wake up from a bad dream and turn our lives around.
Keegan Lannon, a
Monmouth College senior from Bolingbrook who is double-majoring in English/communication and
theater arts, may or may not be a fan of the old Frank Capra film, but his “Pandora’s Closet,”
which had its world premiere Dec. 4, is full of similarities.
Lannon made the film
for his senior honors project and showed it to a gathering of students and faculty in the
Morgan Room in Poling Hall earlier this month. Students in the honors program are given the
freedom to choose their senior project as long as it correlates to their past four years of
college education and is approved by the head of the program, professor Craig Watson.
After the premiere,
Lannon, who said much of the film’s influence comes from philosophy, physics and English
classes he’s taken at Monmouth, explained the difficulties of producing the 25-minute work,
which he completed on the day before its opening.
“This is one of the
most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” he said. “The first problem I had was ignorance,
because I had never written, produced and directed anything of this magnitude.”
Lannon, who received
guidance from MC faculty members Chris Fasano, Bill Wallace and Chuck Feldman and former
Monmouth resident Chris Sorensen, knew a couple of basic film principles, and he learned
another very quickly.
“Every minute of the
film took two hours to shoot,” he said, adding that he also had problems finding willing
actors and available settings on campus.
Of the basic film
principles, Lannon shattered one and respected the other.
“I knew that you should
never work with children or animals, and for some reason, I used a child and an animal in my
first production,” he said.
The animal in question
was a cat, which was used to demonstrate the “cat in the box” question: If a cat is placed
inside a box, does it exist, or does it have to be observed to exist?
The main character in
the film, Professor Marlowe Gault – portrayed by assistant professor of music Perry White
– wrestles with that question after conducting the experiment on himself by stepping into a
closet. When he re-emerges, his world has turned black and white, and the professor, who with
great delight has taught his class that there can’t be possibly be a God (“Religion is a
crutch for the weak-minded”) begins to have other ideas.
“My universe has
changed,” he cries out. Later, as a student’s “air-tight” proof of God’s existence pushes him
closer to the brink of insanity, he pleads, “Whatever I did, I’m sorry … God, if you’re out
there, show me now.”
Lannon resists the urge
to have tragedy befall Gault in the end, adhering to the philosophy that “You can’t just kill
the character at the end. That’s the worst thing you can do as a writer.”
Instead, after a wild
night running frantically down the road (filmed on nearby Hwy. 164), Gault wakes up in a
church in a scene shot the day before the premiere.
“The only major
problems I had were with the church and the state,” joked Lannon of the movie’s final scenes.
“Getting officials to close the road for the running scene was a long process, and I wasn’t
able to secure a church. Most of them wanted no part in something like this.”
While the film’s ending
makes it unclear what the future holds for Gault, Lannon said the answer is simple when it
comes to Monmouth students.
“This school has the
ability for its students to produce a project of this magnitude,” he said.
Indeed, Tom Scott, a
senior communication and theater arts major from Burlington, Iowa, recently finished a film
production of junior Kyle Anderson’s “Johnney Was.”
Released
by the Office of College Communications
Barry McNamara, Associate Director of College Communications
Phone: 309-457-2117
Fax: 309-457-2330
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