Dixon film progressing

Shooting could begin in September, depending on weather, financing

DIXON – Come September, the cast and crew of “Lowell Park” may be descending upon Dixon.

The September date hinges on whether the hiring of the crew, the casting and final financing can get done before the weather changes.

The project has been in the works for years, said Jim Townsend, president of production for Empire Film Group.

The movie is based on the novel “Lowell Park” by Mike Chapman, a former Dixon resident and past executive editor of the Telegraph.

The plot centers around a history graduate student who travels back in time and meets Abraham Lincoln while he was a captain in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War and Ronald Reagan when he was a lifeguard at Lowell Park.

The summer scenes at the park require just that – summer at the park.

“You can get away with a lot, but you can’t get away with pretending December is June, not in Illinois,” said screenplay writer and director Charles Robert Carner.

If that doesn’t work out, the plan is to shoot in May.

It will take about 30 shooting days. Most of the crew will be from Chicago, and the cast will be a mix of Chicago and Los Angeles residents.

Since Chapman and Carner were in Dixon in October, the script has been written, a budget itemized and a distribution company, Tayrona, found to cover 50 percent of the production costs in exchange for foreign distribution rights.

In October, Carner had thought they would have been able to start shooting in June, but financing slowed down the project.

The story line itself – a “whimsical time travel, romantic drama” – is popular right now, Carner said.

“That kind of story, there’s an appetite for it, there’s a hunger for it, because it puts the audience in a superior position,” he said. “Abraham Lincoln is a captain in the Illinois militia. He has no idea of the future that lies ahead of him, but we do.”

Scenes will be shot in familiar places around Dixon – “the school, the house, the neighborhood, the prairie country that’s been restored, all up and down the river, the theater” – and a little afield, including maybe Northern Illinois University.

The movie won’t stray too far from the book it’s based on.

“The primary difference between the book and the movie simply has to do with the difference between reading a novel and seeing a motion picture,” Carner said. “The structure is pretty much the same. The characters are largely the same.”

They wouldn’t say what was going to be different, though, about the characters.

“You’ve got to buy a ticket,” Carner said. “There’s a few surprises. A few things that were not in the book but were suggested by the book that we put in the movie.”

It hasn’t been decided whether it will be a small release of 250 theaters or a large release, which could be up to 3,000 theaters, Townsend said.