As Earl Pickett flung his hard hat to the ground in anger, cheers erupted from the darkened Bijou Theater in Bridgeport last Thursday night.
The occasion was the opening of “Marblehead: The Series,” a New Haven area production based on executive producer D. Jeff Bell’s 2006 thriller of the same name, about a team of ex-Marines holding corporate power and corruption to account. The cheers were coming for Elm City native Clifton Bey, the actor playing Earl Pickett.
“Well, he nailed that scene,” said Bell, at the raucous after-party, explaining the impromptu roar. “But also all our pride and excitement at seeing this on the big screen after all this time and all this work.”
He said the first season of the series includes five episodes. The pilot, which was shown Thursday night, will be released on YouTube on Aug. 13.
If the economic injustice that arises from corporate greed was the theme, the setting in the first episode was all New Haven, from Kennies Earl Kreative House on Shelton Avenue, where Pickett absorbs the news that he’s lost his job; to the steps of the New Haven courthouse on Church Street; to the Palladium Building on Orange Street; to scenes at Madeline’s Empanaderia on Spring Street and Zeneli on Wooster Street; to a slow-speed car chase in the IKEA parking lot.
It went to Bell’s mission, from the time screenwriter Melo Ali El taped a handwritten sign to a fence for a casting call outside Kennies almost three years before: to channel the untapped theatrical talent in the New Haven area; to give locals production and acting experience, even as extras, without importing people from Hollywood or New York; and to film most of the scenes in New Haven.
“We said in 2023 we could grow it here and we did,” he said amid the revelry.
There was New Haven native Da’Mone McCollum, filling the big screen as Calvin Tubbs, otherwise known as “Preacher,” an ex-Marine and former district attorney. “He tried to beat the system from inside the wire,” the narrator intones. “Now he’s coming for the whole damn structure.”
“Melo knew I acted, told me about Marblehead, invited me to be part of it, and it was a wonderful experience,” McCollum said, referring to the “Marblehead” screenwriter.
Likewise, Rachel Rankins, who appeared among the stone-faced board members voting in favor of a motion to engineer massive layoffs. Rankins, a regional actor who runs Rachel’s Hair Unlimited in West Haven, said she applied for a role through backstage.com.
“It felt really good to see myself on the big screen,” she said, beaming, after the credits rolled.
Then there was Ken Barile playing James Greenberg, a corporate “rightsizer,” as he put it, who, in the eyes of Tubbs and his fellow ex-Marines, sees workers as mere names on a spreadsheet to fatten company stock and the salaries of CEOs.
“I’m brand-new to this,” said Barile at the after-party. Not long ago, he was bartending at Lenny’s in Branford when he served a woman at the bar who was editing a commercial on her computer. “You’d be great for them,” she told him. He was in a commercial for a dentist the next week, and then another. Then he heard about “Marblehead.” He auditioned for another role. “Jeff told me that part wasn’t for me, he said you’re the James Greenberg we’ve been looking for,” he recalled.
“I wish I had done this 30 years ago,” he said. “It was awesome.”
The youngest member of the cast, Marley Napier, 6, stood with his parents in view of the festivities. “Jeff saw him on West Haven Beach,” his mother Katelyn recalled. He asked if they thought he would be interested in acting. Then he asked Katelyn and Yannick, his father, to be part of the production as well. “An adventure,” Katelyn said. “We never dreamed of doing anything like this.”
To hear the screenwriter Melo Al El tell it, that was among the takeaways of the project. From his original screenplay, he estimated there were at least 12 rewrites. “As we were shooting, we kept finding new people with strengths we wanted to play on, and it changed the story,” he said. He also gained a newfound respect for the acting profession. “These guys travel everywhere just to get a break.”
For director Darrell Bellamy Jr., also known as B-Cees, the greatest test was patience, from the sheer logistics of generating scenes with a cast of over 100, to the multiple takes until the right one, to the laborious process of post-production. “All the parts have to be working together,” he said. “If the sound is off, if there’s a break in continuity, you lose the audience.”
“This is a dream come true,” said Bell, the executive producer. “I learned early on how little I knew” — his day job is as a financial analyst with the Air Force — “but I also learned to surround myself with people that did, and above all I was gifted with some extraordinarily talented actors and crew that believed in my vision.”
The underlying message of the work, written in 2006, holds two decades later. “There’s still corporate abuse against the workers that keep their companies running, but I hope this shows that those workers have more power than they think,” said Bell, who plans to submit the series to film festivals and shop it around Europe, Asia, and Latin America before marketing it here.
“I think people will see that these three guys that you never heard of from this small town have put something out that’s worthy for the world to see, something that’s also opened doors for a lot of people,” Ali El said.
