Canberra-born US-based actor and filmmaker Paul Ashton is directing his first feature, romantic comedy This Isn’t Funny, in Los Angeles.
There is a strong Aussie element as the cast includes Anthony LaPaglia, Gia Carides, Angie Milliken and Ashton.
Ashton wrote the screenplay with co-star Katie Page, loosely inspired by their own off-camera relationship, which poses the question: Can true love survive when you meet the right person at the wrong time?
The producers are Lije Sarki with Easy Open Productions' Ian Keiser and Leigh Jones. The executive producer is Metropolitan Entertainment’s Pierce Cravens.
Ashton plays Jamie, a perpetual traveller who brims with unfulfilled potential Page is Eliot, a stand-up comic with a severe anxiety disorder. They fall for each other, romance blossoms then fractures, forcing them to examine their preconceptions about family and identity.
LaPaglia plays a co-worker of Jamie’s character and Milliken is his mother. Carides plays a Chelsea Handler- type talk show host who gives Eliot her first break.
The cast also includes Mimi Rogers (Two and a Half Men), Danielle Panabaker (TV’s Bones, Necessary Roughness), Edi Gathegi (the Twilight franchise), David Pasquesi (HBO’s Veep), and Mark Harelik (The Big Bang Theory).
“If we're being totally honest, this is a semi-autobiographical story, layered with life/relationship challenges we actually face,” Ashton and Page state on the film’s Kickstarter page. “So when we shoot and perform it, we will be having some of those conversations kind of for real, thinly veiled as (yet still existing as) artistic fiction. Before we started, we wondered if it would be risky to undertake, but we started anyway and here we are, Capote-ing ourselves for entertainment.”
Cravens tells IF he met Ashton, who moved to Los Angeles in 2009, via a mutual friend. He says the film is financed by Easy Open Productions and Metropolitan Entertainment plus $US31,595 from crowd-funding site Kickstarter.
He says, “I began as a child actor, working on Broadway consistently between ages 5-18. After university, I began dipping my toe into producing Broadway theatre, but this is my company's first feature.”
Ashton directed the web series Don’t Try This at Home, in which he co-starred with Page, and three short films, In Loco Parentis, Dream Girl and Champion.
Shooting wraps this week. The producers have not yet appointed a sales agent.