In the Company of Men (1997): the landmark

Filmed June 1996 · premiered Sundance, January 1997

The city's one classic: Neil LaBute was a playwright teaching drama and film at IPFW — Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne — when he joined with Mark Archer, a Fort Wayne commercial and industrial producer, to film his play In the Company of Men, which had premiered at Brigham Young University in 1993. Archer's Atlantis Entertainment, working from East Coliseum Boulevard, raised the money and crewed the picture locally; Archer later recalled that the whole enterprise began at a meeting in the Acme Bar & Grill in the spring of 1996. The film shot in Fort Wayne in June 1996 with a mostly local crew. LaBute cast his principals in New York and Los Angeles — Aaron Eckhart, a Brigham Young classmate, as the smiling, cruel Chad; Matt Malloy as Howard; Stacy Edwards as Christine, the deaf secretary the two men agree to court and then abandon — and his supporting roles in Chicago.

The picture cost almost nothing, and the sources do not quite agree on how little: the figure carried everywhere since is $25,000, while Archer, looking back in 2002, remembered $20,000, an eleven-day shoot, and 35mm film; Filmmaker Magazine's production report, published while the film was being finished, gave three weeks in June. What is not in dispute is the return. In the Company of Men premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1997 and won the Filmmakers Trophy; it played Cannes, took the New York Film Critics Circle's award for best first film, was released by Sony Pictures Classics, and grossed roughly $2.9 million — more than a hundred times its cost. It made LaBute a major American director and Eckhart a star, and it remains, by a wide margin, the most consequential film ever made in Fort Wayne. Secondary writing sometimes calls Fort Wayne LaBute's hometown; the record is narrower and better — he was a Detroit-born playwright who lived and taught here, and who chose to make his first film in the city where he was working because a local producer could make it happen for almost no money.

Sources:

1. Filmmaker Magazine, Fall 1996, Production Update — LaBute in Fort Wayne, local commercial producer Mark Archer, three weeks' shooting in June with a mostly local crew, principals cast in New York and Los Angeles, supporting roles in Chicago; Atlantis Entertainment, 810 East Coliseum Boulevard, Fort Wayne.
2. Luke Ford, interview with Mark Archer, 1 March 2002 — the Acme Bar & Grill meeting of spring 1996; Archer's recollection of $20,000, 35mm, eleven days in June; the USAir jet and the airport obtained for nothing.
3. Biographical summaries of Neil LaBute (Wikipedia-derived, widely republished) — taught drama and film at IPFW in the early 1990s; the play's 1993 Brigham Young premiere; the Filmmakers Trophy at Sundance and the New York Film Critics Circle award; box-office compilations put the gross near $2.9 million.
4. Ray Pride, "Game Boys," Filmmaker Magazine interview with LaBute (linked from ACGSI).