American Reel (1999): Archer directs

Filmed November 1997 · released 1999 · DVD 4 November 2003

The follow-up: The success of In the Company of Men typecast Mark Archer as a producer; what he wanted was to direct. In the spring of 1997 financiers brought him a script called American Reel, written by Junior Burke and Scott Fivelson, with David Carradine and Ally Sheedy attached. The money — about $400,000 — came with a condition: shoot by a fixed date. Sheedy withdrew and was replaced by Mariel Hemingway; Archer directed in November 1997 with, by his own later account, too little preparation and a difficult star. Carradine plays James Lee Springer, an uncompromising country singer whose overnight success has taken twenty years, with Michael Maloney as his friend and manager and Hemingway as Disney Rifkin.

The film is set in Chicago but was photographed principally in Fort Wayne — the record also names Waterloo, Indiana, and Hicksville, Ohio — and Fort Wayne saw the production up close: the Associated Press photographed Hemingway on the set at the Worthington Manor Apartments for the Journal Gazette on 19 November 1997, and the local lists remember work at North Side High School, in the Lincoln Tower, at O'Sullivan's, and at the Knotty Pine Motel on Goshen Road. Archer's own verdict, given in 2002, was unsparing: an independent film with a mainstream story, "too mainstream for festivals and not mainstream enough for most distributors." It reached the public on DVD in 2003 and has been reissued since with its recording-project materials — Carradine, who sang his own songs in the picture, recorded the score with his brother Robert at RCA Studio B in Nashville.

Sources:

1. Luke Ford, interview with Mark Archer, 1 March 2002 — the $400,000 budget and its deadline condition; Ally Sheedy's withdrawal and replacement by Mariel Hemingway; the November 1997 shoot; Archer's assessment of the film's distribution problem.
2. Associated Press photograph, Todd Anderson for The Journal Gazette, 19 November 1997 — Mariel Hemingway on the American Reel set at the Worthington Manor Apartments, Fort Wayne, director Mark Archer at right.
3. AllMovie and the film's reference summaries — written by Junior Burke and Scott Fivelson; set in Chicago; primary filming locations Fort Wayne and Waterloo, Indiana, and Hicksville, Ohio; DVD release 4 November 2003 (MVD).
4. ACGSI, "Videos for Allen County, Indiana" — North Side High School, Lincoln Tower, O'Sullivan's, and the Knotty Pine Motel on Goshen Road among the locations.