“Wetware marks a departure for me,” says Marlboro film professor and director Jay Craven, referring to the most recent production of his Movies from Marlboro semester intensive. “My earlier films are all set in the past, working with Faulkner’s and T.S. Eliot’s ideas that ‘the past is always present.’ Now we’re looking to see, in our era of instant communication and a sometimes fading sense of history, whether the future is also present. Of course, it is.”
Marking the third Movies from Marlboro intensive, 24 professionals mentored and collaborated with 30 students from a dozen colleges to shoot Wetware last spring semester at three locations: Brattleboro and Burlington in Vermont, and Nantucket in Massachusetts. Now in postproduction, Wetware is scheduled for release this fall.
Based on the novel by Guggenheim Fellowship–winning writer Craig Nova, Wetware is set in a not-too-distant future where a cutting-edge genetic engineering firm alters clients to help them cope with the most reviled jobs. When a pair of experimental prototypes escape into a volatile and dangerous world, their creator scrambles to track them down and makes a provocative discovery that will change everything.
“We’re excited to be making this Vermont/Nantucket noir—our first production that splits locations between northern and southern New England,” says Jay. “The truth is that the place in this film is more fictional than any film I’ve made. This is one reason that our invented visual palette becomes so important. Yes, the uniqueness of Vermont towns and Nantucket streets and beaches will shine through, but our job here is to knit and blend and draw from natural assets that inform our own vision.”
The cast of Wetware includes a mix of Hollywood and Broadway veterans, emerging talent, and New England actors, starring Jerry O’Connell, Morgan Wolk, Cameron Scoggins, Bret Lada, Nicole Shalhoub, Garret Lee Hendricks, John Rothman, and Susan McGinnis. A professional crew worked with students from Wellesley College, University of California at Berkeley, Wesleyan University, Augsburg College, Mount Holyoke College, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Maine, Colby Sawyer College, Simmons College, Lyndon State College, Fitchburg State University, and of course Marlboro College.
Movies from Marlboro was established in 2012 and has produced two films to date, Northern Borders in 2012 and Peter and John in 2014. Inspired by pioneering Vermont educator John Dewey’s call for intensive learning that enlarges meaning “through shared experience and joint action,” the biennial program is unique in the nation. “Within the hyper-commercialized media industry, we work to combine transformative experiential learning, community engagement, and our best hope for sustainable place-based independent film production and regional release,” says Jay.
