Evelyn Kite began acting professionally in February. “So I’m new at this,” she said, with the pensive air of a person contemplating a challenging career.
An onlooker might suggest that Evelyn Kite is new at everything, more or less: She is 8 years old.
Evelyn lives with her parents and five siblings in LaGrange, Georgia, but she is here this month as one of the lead performers in “Elijah Peel,” the fourth feature film in three years from Memphis-based Gravity Productions.
“Elijah Peel” tells the story of a drug-addicted British rock star whose onstage heart attack in Memphis leads to a protracted hospital stay and an unexpected friendship with an 8-year-old terminally ill cancer patient, Jessica, played by Evelyn.
The rock star’s antagonistic manager, named “Rock,” is played by Kevin Sorbo, who for six seasons lifted rocks — and battled monsters and toppled giants — as the star of the 1990s series, “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.”
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“I do a lot of stories that deal with redemption,” said Sorbo, 66, who in recent years has concentrated on movies aimed at what the entertainment-industry newspaper, Variety, has dubbed “the faith and values audience.”
“I like the stories that Hollywood used to do but don’t any more,” Sorbo said. “A time when audiences would walk out of a movie and think ‘That’s a story from life,’ and not a special-effects creation from James Cameron.”
‘It’ll break your heart and rip your guts out’
“This is definitely heavy, it’s very dramatic,” affirmed Miami-based “Elijah Peel” writer/producer Kevin Sepe, 62, who based his script on his own “mental and spiritual” struggles, and his eventual rejection of drugs for Jesus. “It’ll break your heart and rip your guts out.”
Emotional struggles are OK with Evelyn. Discussing a recently completed take, she said: “That scene was kind of sad and I’m good at sad parts, because I can cry.” On cue, that is — she can cry on cue, even if, off camera, she is more likely to break into a wide grin or adorable giggle.
She was especially smiley on one of her last days of shooting last week, when she passed out homemade gifts to each member of the cast and crew: small keychains, decorated with the letters “E” and “P” and a tiny guitar. (Sepe says the match of “Elijah Peel” to the initials of Elvis Presley is just coincidence.)
With Sorbo in the cast, “Elijah Peel” is the most ambitious film yet from Gravity Productions, a company that wants to help Memphis “progress to the next level, as a creative community,” in the words of producer Princeton James, a Gravity principal alongside producers Mark Williams and Jordan Danelz, filmfolk who through the years have worked many jobs on many movie sets (Danelz is also cinematographer on “Elijah Peel”).
Whatever its ambitions, “Elijah Peel” is being produced on what Williams called a “sub-half-million” budget (it probably would be fair to add a few more “sub-” prefixes to that characterization). “When they told me the budget, I went, ‘Ooooo,'” said Sorbo, producing a pained yet awed interjection. He said he nonetheless accepted the role because of the “powerful” script.
“Redemption, second chances it’s such a human story,” said “Elijah Peel” director Nathan Ross Murphy, 38, a Memphis moviemaking veteran with a long history with some of the Gravity principals. (Danelz was the gaffer on Murphy’s first film as a director, “Space Licorice,” which won the Hometowner Short award at the 2014 Indie Memphis Film Festival.)
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On set at a ‘hospital’ in Memphis
One way to cut costs is through smartly chosen sets. With experienced Memphis location manager Nicki Newburger scouting sites, “Elijah Peel” will have made use of the University of Memphis, the Masonic Temple and the Front Street home of executive producer Terry Harris (a longtime friend of Sepe) during its roughly two-week production, which began Nov. 12 and is set to wrap the day before Thanksgiving.
A key location is near the airport. On a sunny recent Wednesday, the cast and crew of “Elijah Peel” assembled on the third floor of an otherwise almost empty office complex on Airways Boulevard — a squared-off doughnut of a building with a maze of hallways circumnavigating a large open-air courtyard.
A production-design team led by Yanni Manousakis, 36, ingeniously had transformed several empty offices into hospital rooms, augmented with story-specific props — including Crayola drawings signed “Jessica” — to enhance the illusion. In one room, Yanni’s brother, prop artist Saki Manousakis, 37, tried out various handwriting styles as he addressed dozens of colored envelopes to “Elijah Peel,” for a scene in which the rock star is confronted at the hospital with bags of get-well-cards from fans. Few of the envelopes will be legible in the film, but “as far as the actors are concerned, we want to make it as real as possible,” Manousakis said.
While the 30-member crew consists almost entirely of Memphians, most of the lead actors are out-of-town professionals. Jessica’s mother is played by April Billingsley, whose credits include episodes of “The Walking Dead” and “The Mentalist,” while the title rocker is played by Robert Malcolm Cumming, a Los Angeles-based actor who hails from outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. As Elijah, Cumming has adopted a cockney accent, to match the character’s leopard-print scarf, leather boots and and glam eyeliner.
Cumming, 33, said the connection between Elijah — whose possible “death sentence” is “self-inflicted,” Sepe said — and the girl, Jessica — “who is dying through no fault of her own,” according to Sepe — is the backbone of the story. “Both characters are in a fight for their lives, and they’re experiencing that together,” Cumming said.
But if the action demanded by the script is intense, the personal interaction between the two actors is playful. “We’re both absolute hams,” Cumming said.
“He’s very funny,” said Evelyn. “Sometimes I can’t control my laughter because of him.”
“He’s just a big kid,” confirmed Evelyn’s mother, Valerie Kite, 47, who said Evelyn’s nascent career — the girl also has appeared in a national commercial for Walt Disney World’s “Bibbidi Bobbidi Bootique” — doesn’t interfere with her education because the Kite kids are home-schooled.
Cumming said he enjoys working in thriftily produced non-Hollywood films, such as “Elijah Peel.” “I think what’s thriving right now is independent film,” he said. “That’s where you find a lot of eager, hungry artists with mad creativity.”
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How ‘Elijah Peel’ landed in Memphis
Sepe said “Elijah Peel” developed from a more drug-fueled madness. A songwriter, music producer, ad agency copywriter and “content creator,” he said he wrote “Elijah Peel” close to seven years ago, after becoming a Christian and transcending the dangerous and licentious self-indulgence that defined his life when he created his first feature film, “Stonerville,” a comedy with Pauly Shore that was released in 2011.
Sepe said he turned down “seven-figure” offers for the “Elijah Peel” script, from both mainstream Hollywood players and “faith film” producers. “The Hollywood guys, they wanted me to take God out of it. ‘Do we have to say “Jesus” in this thing?’ But the other guys, the ones who finance Christian films, they wanted me to take the drinking out of it. They didn’t want to see his bad behavior. But if you water everything down, it’s like there’s no conversion.”
Sepe’s partnership with Gravity Productions is due to a serendipitous plane ride. Flying to Memphis to discuss the project with his pal Terry Harris, the movie’s chief financial backer, Sepe was seated, by coincidence, next to Sean Faust, a longtime Memphis film-sound professional and local-production advocate. They started talking, and Faust pushed Memphis as a location for “Elijah Peel.” After meeting the Gravity team, talking with Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commission representatives, and looking into Tennessee’s production incentives, Sepe became convinced the movie could be made in Memphis.
“This is an example of someone with a story looking for a place to film it,” said Williams, 47, whose Gravity roster of feature films also includes the thriller “Queen Rising” (available on Roku and as a rental); a prescription-abuse story, “For the Love of Christopher,” now seeking distribution; and the basketball drama “Hoop Street,” newly ready for release after being shot earlier this year.
“Elijah Peel” is likely to find a more eager audience than its predecessors, thanks in large part to the presence of Sorbo. The actor’s political pronouncements — in 2016, he said Jesus would vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton — have inspired some criticism (plus, a Twitter feud with his former co-star, Lucy “Xena” Lawless); but his Christian films — including “God’s Not Dead” (2014) and “Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist” (2023), which he directed — achieved wide theatrical distribution and earned millions.
Whatever the themes of the movies, Memphis film professionals are happy to be back on set, and are excited by the presence of an active production company. “I think this is important for Memphis right now, this core crew, working together from project to project,” said Yanni Manousakis. “It gives me hope for Memphis film.”
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