COLD HARBOR is the story of four brothers who spend a winter weekend in a small seaside town coming to terms with the suicide of their estranged father. It is the story of four unique individuals dealing with loss in their

Director Brandau

own way. It's about sibling rivalry, lost opportunities and finally, communal closure as the four brothers bury the ghost of their dead father.

The idea for COLD HARBOR came directly from the experiences of writer/director Tom Brandau. In late December of 1981, Brandau's own father committed suicide by jumping off a rock jetty in Ocean City, Maryland. At the time, Brandau was a twenty-one-year-old college student studying fllmmaking in Baltimore. But even then, at the very moment he and his three brothers were making plans to go to the place where their father died, he knew that someday he would turn the incident into a film. It would be at least ten years before Brandau would make an attempt to write the screenplay.

By the time he did get around to writing the first draft of COLD HARBOR, he had worked for several years as a commercial writer/director; attended the American Film Institute in Los Angeles as a Directing fellow and established himself as an award winning filmmaker. In the summer of 1992, while working for a television station in Baltimore, Brandau decided to use his two weeks of vacation to write COLD HARBOR. He rented a cabin in the beautiful mountains of Western Maryland and took a liberal supply of yellow legal pads, an old Smith-Corona typewriter and a ream of typing paper. Two weeks later he came back and over the next two years worked on re-writing the first draft, had meetings with potential producers, worked on budgets and looked for investors.

A chance meeting with actor/producer/director Mark Redfield changed everything. While casting for a local television commercial, Brandau became reacquainted with Redfield, a respected actor who was also a successful producer/director of regional theater. The two men knew each other from their college days but it had been ten years since their last meeting. During the course of their conversation they discovered that each had been frying to get a feature film off the ground. Over the next six months the two met on numerous occasions, comparing notes on each other's projects and eventually deciding to combine forces on COLD HARBOR.

But before COLD HARBOR would go into production, Redfield was planning to produce a feature length version of Edgar Allan Poe's THE TELL-TALE HEART. At the same time, Brandau decided to leave his job at the television station and to take a much needed vacation. So, at the end of June, Brandau packed up his truck with camping supplies, bought a new road atlas and headed across the country, eventually ending up in Alaska It was on this long, solitary road trip that Brandau made the decision that COLD HARBOR should go into production as soon as possible. After a long distance conversation with Redfield from a phone booth somewhere in Coldfoot, Alaska (about seventy-five miles inside the Arctic Circle), it became clear to Brandau that COLD HARBOR could proceed without further delay, for as fate would have it, a certain amount of finance money had fallen through on TELL-TALE HEART, and Redfield was forced to delay its production. So, upon Brandau's return, he and Redfield set to work on the pre-production of COLD HARBOR.

Kathi Ash and onlookers

The two men worked on a final draft of the script, went location scouting on the eastern shores of Maryland and Delaware, assembled a production crew, worked on casting for the other three brothers (Redfield was slated to play the oldest brother) and looked for additional production money.

The first key production person to come on board was Kathi Ash. Ash, a producer/production manager who had been hired to work on TELL-TALE HEART, but now with HEART being postponed, quickly shifted gears to work on COLD HARBOR as Unit Production Manager. This would not be the first time Ash and Brandau had worked together. She had co-produced the nationally award winning short dramatic film SONNY AND CORNBLATT which Brandau wrote and directed.

With Ash on board the rest of the production team quickly fell into place. Bonnie Kinsley came along as Production Coordinator. Dwayne Dell, a superb sound man with several low budget features to his credit signed

Sound man Dwayne Dell

on. And cinematographer Peter Mullett was contracted to lens the film.

With the production team in place, Redfield and Brandau got down to the difficult task of casting. They both knew COLD HARBOR was an actor's film and therefore would sink or swim on the strength of the acting ensemble. It took several weeks of casting sessions; reading well over a hundred actors before a principal cast could be chosen. COLD HARBOR marks the motion picture debut for three of the principals; Richard Lopez, James Michael Caffery and Adam Raynen.

The next major step was securing COLD HARBOR'S locations. Brandau and Redfield had decided from the beginning that portions of the Delaware coastline would be perfect for the setting of the film; with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware standing in as a fictitious seaside town of Cold Harbor, Maryland. The most important, and as it turned out, most difficult location to find and secure was the father's house; the centerpiece of the film and the location of 70% of the story's action. After spending several weeks looking for the "right" house and having little luck, they decided to enlist the help of Bryce Lingo, co-owner of Lingo Realty, the largest realtor on the Delaware coast. One of the first homes Lingo showed Brandau and Redfield was an eighty-year-old Victorian style summer beach house. It was a cold, late afternoon in February. The sun had just set and the three men had to use flashlights because the electric had been turned off for the season, but even in the dim light Brandau and Redfield knew they had found the right location. After a series of middle-of-the-night negotiations (the owners lived in France) Redfleld managed to secure the house for the shoot. And having secured the other vital locations needed for shooting; all seemed ready for COLD HARBOR to go into production.

In April, in the middle of a freak snowstorm, the core of the production team, Ash, Kinsley, Redfield and Brandau moved into the COLD HARBOR production headquarters; a beach house four blocks down from the shoot house. A week later, with the daytime temperatures now in the sixties, the cast and crew of COLD HARBOR began filming. Over the course of the following three weeks they would face drenching rainstorms, bone chilling nights and sound problems from a variety of sources. But at the end of the eighteen-day shoot schedule, principal photography was completed, on schedule and on budget thanks in large part to the resourcefulness of producer Redfield and the production office team of Ash and Kinsley.