Actors needed for feature film

If it was a want-ad, it might read like this: “Director seeking men, women and children to act in a film for three weeks in August. No experience required, but interesting personalities with interesting stories are preferred. Pay is nothing, except for perhaps an occasional free meal and the satisfaction of a job well done. Also, we need to someone to provide the occasional free meal.”

Such is the life of an independent filmmaker. Britni West, a 2005 Flathead High School graduate, returned from Minnesota to shoot a film in the Flathead this summer. She needs actors, particularly two women in their 40s to play the lead roles in the feature-length movie “Tired Moonlight.”

“The film is based on memories of people I once knew and the mountains that I love,” she said last week. “I need a little bit of every age group.”

The film tells the story of Dawn and Misty, two women who spent most of their lives living together in a small Montana town. Dawn is a custodian in a real estate office, and Misty scrounges through junk she purchases at storage auctions hoping someday to “hit the jackpot.”

Their lives take a turn when they start caring for the daughter of a new neighbor and as Paul, a man from Dawn’s past, “rolls in like a tumbleweed.”

Auditions will be held at the Teakettle Community Center, on Nucleus Avenue in Columbia Falls, on Saturday and Sunday, June 30 and July 1, from noon to 5 p.m. West said she wanted to tap into local talent in the North Valley because that’s where she’ll be shooting much of the movie.

West is writing, directing and producing the film on Super 16 mm film in an age where most indie filmmakers are going to video. Most of a $20,000 Jerome Grant Foundation’s Emerging Filmmaker Grant she recently received will go toward purchasing, developing and editing the film, she noted.

West has been shooting films for several years now. She produced the 2012 independent film “Marvin Seth and Stanley” with her boyfriend Stephen Gurewitz, who wrote, directed and acted in the film.

While it wasn’t widely distributed, the film received a rave review from Richard Brody of the New Yorker, who called it “extraordinarily touching and quite hilarious.”

Gurewitz will help on West’s film, as will Adam Ginsberg, a New York-based director of photography and film editor.

How shoestring is the budget? West says she’s living at her parents’ home while she works on the movie.

Reviews and a trailer for “Marvin Seth and Stanley” are available online at www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/05/marvin-seth-and-stanley-everywhere-and-nowhere.html

To learn more about West’s current project and more about her work, visit online at http://tiredmoonlight.weebly.com/index.html.