Menu
Stars keep on aligning for Zach Spicer
Besides dancing all around the Covid crisis, Greencastle native Zach Spicer says his “biggest undertaking” — new movie “So Cold the River” — is a product of the stars aligning.
“We were really fortunate,” Spicer told the Banner Graphic as the Pigasus Pictures film was released Friday and is available on all on-demand and digital platforms. “I feel as though the stars really just aligned for this one in particular.”
“So Cold the River” was written Michael Koryta, an alumnus of Indiana University like the 39-year-old Spicer and his director/screenwriting pal Paul Shoulberg. Koryta had licensed the New York Times bestseller to a major Hollywood studio originally before Shoulberg approached him about the possibility of turning his beloved novel, set in West Baden, into the feature film it was always meant to be by filming in Indiana.
While big studios had been interested, “they didn’t believe hellacious hotels were even real in Indiana,” Spicer said. “They wanted to recreate the hotels on a soundstage in L.A.”
Shoulberg, however, held his ground that he wanted to film in Indiana, especially since the historic West Baden Springs Hotel is essentially a character in the movie.
Turns out Koryta had been talking about the book with Pete Yonkman, president of the Bloomington-based Cook Group that backed the reconstruction of the historic structure that used to bring elite customers like gangster Al Capone and heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis to the resort to relax.
Yonkman was “blown away,” Spicer said, by the notion of people making movies in Indiana and set about helping “So Cold the River” get shot in the hotel/casino.
As for the stars aligning, the 2002 Greencastle High School graduate Spicer calls it a huge collaborative effort that began with Shoulberg pitching Koryta on what the movie ought to be. Once he got the OK, Shoulberg started writing.
“This was in January 2020,” Spicer said, “before anyone had even heard of the pandemic.”
After the annual New Year’s Eve celebration at the hotel, it is typically a slower time for business, “so they closed the entire hotel down two weeks for us to film,” Spicer said. “That could only happen with that kind of collaboration.”
Shooting wrapped the first week of March 2020 with the wrap party coming only a couple days before Covid-19 shut everything down everywhere.
“When we finished ‘The Good Catholic’ (a 2017 movie starring Spicer alongside Danny Glover and John C. McGinley), I did some random interview and kind of shot from the hip with a remark we were going to make five movies in Indiana in five years,” Spicer recalled.
But that’s exactly what Spicer and his Pigasus group have done. The psychological thriller “So Cold the River” is the fourth of those.
“We did two others during the pandemic,” Spicer noted, explaining that small casts allowed for testing of everyone over 12 weeks of filming, and “not one single cast member tested positive.”
“The Duel” and “Runner” will come out next. Shot in Indianapolis and Michigan City, “The Duel” is it its final edits, while “Runner” was filmed in Bloomington and places south to Evansville with a backdrop of country roads and “a lot of Indiana that people don’t see.”
Meanwhile, Spicer says “So Cold” isn’t typical of the horror genre. It’s “a mood” piece that “gets under your skin, not in a gory way. It asks a lot of the viewer. There’s a bit of magic involved, it’s not all cut-and-dried.”
The plot follows a filmmaker, who when she’s hired to document a wealthy man’s hidden past, unleashes the buried secrets of a Midwestern town that was once America’s most luxurious resort.
Spicer remembers taking drives around Indiana with his late grandfather, Harold Spicer, and “we used to drive past the dilapidated dome.”
“It was kind of spooky, all the abandoned places,” he added, admitting he was “absolutely floored by the grandeur of the places going on down the Monon line.”
Asked if Capone or Louis were portrayed in the film, Spicer said there is a “looming figure in the background, but it’s not Capone.
Spicer also credits his grandparents, who helped raise him while mom Sylvia was at work, with exposing him to a “whole different appreciation of culture, film, literature and music. It’s so important to have those connections.
“And that’s what this movie is about, connection to place, connection to time,” he said.
“There’s an old quote attributed to David Lynch, I believe,” Spicer added, “that goes, ‘The world may be through with our past, but our past may not be through with us.’”
In the next year or so, Spicer has plans for several different films to be shot in Indiana. He’s buoyed by the recent passing of film tax incentives by the Indiana Legislature.
“We’ve been doing all these movies without tax incentives that last six years,” he noted.
While “So Cold the River” is available via streaming and other film platforms, Spicer said he hopes to work out an arrangement to screen the new film and maybe others he’s produced in Greencastle later this year.