| Utah
movie producer true to the 'go' name of his company
By Angeline Olschewski
April 17, 2008 | Adam Abel pulls
up in a gray Volvo with a vanity license plate that
says “Go Films,” the name of his 6-year-old production
company.
He wears conspicuous black rectangular
glasses, a thick two-tone wedding band, jeans that have
tucked into the heels of his black sneakers, and a light
pink plaid, short-sleeved dress shirt. Just ahead of
him, a man in a tan suit enters the building, and Abel
grins.
“That’s the great thing about
our industry,” he says, noting there’s no dress code
for the studio time.
The sound-editing studio is small,
but comfy. Opposite the screen, under a “Star Trek Insurrection”
poster and a statuette for sound editing called a “Golden
Reel,” a brown leather sofa sits against the back wall,
and on it sits Adam Abel, this film’s producer.
He is joined in studio by the sound
editor, Michael McDonough; the director and co-producer,
Ryan Little; the composer, Jay Bateman; and the editor,
Alan Williams. In an industry where ego has its own
trailer, these men are remarkably considerate of one
another’s artistic vision.
“You guys done yet? I’m bored,”
says Abel, smiling, knowing it’s only been 10 minutes
of a process that will still take several hours. He
and Little have been editing and re-editing the film,
frame by frame, and now need McDonough’s help to fill
in the sound gaps where they added frames, or take out
dialogue where they removed frames.
Abel relaxes back into the cushy
sofa and scrolls through screens on his Blackberry,
occasionally glancing up as the movie begins to roll.
Without referencing notes, he mentions each time a line
was cut or added, a scene was extended, or noise needs
to be added in the “surrounds.”
“There’s a presence feeling,”
explains Abel, attempting to justify to the sound editor,
McDonough, his vision of the restroom scene. Just then
onscreen the main character, played by Sean Faris, drops
a toilet scrubber brush into a bucket and there is no
resonance. “Bathrooms echo,” Abel says.
McDonough responds with a polite
chuckle, suggesting that Abel’s and Little’s vision
“would take $100,000 and weeks. We have to do it in
days.” There is a slight tension in the room, and Abel
dispels it quickly by saying, “Do what you can.”
As the frames pass rapidly, the score
abruptly stops, and then resumes. Knowing that several
frames were added there recently, Abel teases his composer,
Bateman, who is sitting next to him. “It’s kind of weird
our composer didn’t put music here,” he deadpans and
then smiles. Bateman slowly turns his head toward Abel,
feigning indignation, and then cracks a smile back.
It is hard to ignore Abel’s ease with the people and
the process.
“When it comes to [editing]
calls, it’s a gut thing, a visceral—‘nah, that’s not
right’ thing,” he says. He’s had this “gut thing” from
a young age.
His mother, Gwen Abel, remembers
riding with him in a car and watching him stare at the
moon hanging over the mountains at dusk. “He said, ‘I’m
always looking at things for movies.”
Abel started with a desire to be
in front of the camera. He and his younger sister, Emily,
had an agent and went on auditions. “I soon realized
I enjoyed behind the camera far more than in front,”
he says. “Although I enjoyed acting, putting it all
together was far more enjoyable.” Still, he didn’t plan
on making movies as a profession.
“He always had done film, but
he would say he wanted to be an accountant,” Amber,
his wife, laughs, recalling some of their early conversations
while courting. “His goal was to do accounting at BYU
and then go work for one of the Big Five. I don’t know
what quite happened because I remember looking at him
and going, ‘When did our career path change?’”
Abel earned his business degree at
Utah Valley State College but learned the business of
making movies with “on the job training.” He began his
career as a location manager, the one responsible for
finding sites to use in the movie. He worked on successful
Utah films such as “The Singles Ward,” “The RM,” and
“Brigham City.”
In 2002, he partnered with director
Ryan Little to form Go Films, and quickly produced the
award-winning film, “Saints and Soldiers.” The company’s
first production claimed nine “audience choice” awards
at 13 film festivals, including the Eclipse Film Festival
in St. George, Utah. Abel’s family joined him for the
event, where they gathered for dinner at a Mexican restaurant.
Abel paced the parking lot, talking
on his phone while his wife, Amber, his parents and
in-laws dined inside. Moments before, he was at the
same table, enjoying light-hearted conversation until
his phone rang. The Motion Picture Association of America
finally rated his film, and the news was shocking.
Amber wondered what was taking so
long, and joined him, at which point he whispered that
the film received an R rating. She was devastated.
“We could not believe it,”
she says. “They [Abel and Little] looked at all the
other PG-13 movies and there’s not really clear guidelines.
They said, ‘OK, this is the area we need to stay within
and we should be fine,’ and pulled it back even more
from that to kind of guarantee it. So we were just totally
shocked.”
Abel’s immediate thought was, “You
have to be joking. How could we have received a rating
we specifically tried not to get?”
At the table, Abel said nothing of
the news to his family. His mother remembers the sudden
shift in his mood. “He got the message in the middle
of the meal; he went totally solemn,” she says. His
father, Reese Abel, added, “It upset him for a long
time.”
At the time, the film received a
considerable amount of press. Abel commented on a news
broadcast that he had never even seen an R-rated film,
but apparently he had made one, and then he laughed,
remaining good-humored about the irony.
The MPAA listed its reason as violence.
When Abel argued that “Lord of the Rings” had much more
violence, he was told that it was computer-generated,
and his film killed real people with whom the audience
had connected. He feels they’ve got it mixed up, that
real-life consequences of violence shouldn’t be rated
higher than mass killing.
“They can chop some guy’s head
off,” Amber explains, “the blood is blue, they throw
it over the wall, it’s not really normal looking anyway,
so it doesn’t affect people in the same way. So I could
kind of see that.” But do the Abels agree with it?
“I don’t,” she says without
hesitating, “especially in the society that we live
in, where kids don’t really understand consequences
or ... they want to blame everyone else. I think it
should be portrayed that if you shoot somebody, they’re
going to die. They’re not coming back, and it’s a real
person, and it is sad.”
Abel says the experience taught him
something valuable. “I realized then that I would never
want to be an MPAA screener,” and “also realized that
their standards are, at times, much different than mine.”
After a few minor edits and a $1,500 re-rating fee,
the film received a final PG-13 rating and was a marked
success for Go Films.
Since then, he and his wife have
relaxed about seeing R-rated movies as long as they
have historical significance.
“You know, it was a shock for
us,” Amber says, “and we really became, I guess, more
independent. Here we blindly support the rating system,
and we think that it goes along with our standards.
And it’s a group that does not have the same standard
as we do. We see R-rated movies now, [and] some PG-13s,
some PGs that we won’t.
“I doubt this will be the last
time that we deal with this issue,” she added, “especially
on some of the stories that we would like to tell and
things we want to be involved with.”
Abel’s goal in the industry is “to
inspire, entertain and move people to action.” So far
he has picked projects based on real-life events. This
includes his newest film, “Forever Strong,” which is
still in post-production.
“Forever Strong” boasts a notable
cast, including Julie Warner of “Doc Hollywood”; Penn
Badgley of “Gossip Girl”; Sean Farris of “Never Back
Down”; and Sean Astin of “Rudy.” Abel’s come a long
way from his days on “The Singles Ward.” If you say
he’s made the “big time,” he’ll just grin, unwilling
to jinx what has so far been good fortune.
“I feel guilty getting a check
for it,” he confesses.
He considers himself one of the lucky
ones because he does what he loves for his work, and
he married his best friend. In fact, he says the best
thing he’s done to date has been “to marry Amber and
have the children we have had.”
They have five children to be exact,
and will have been married eight years this September.
His affection for his family is evidenced by the large,
beautifully framed family photo centered in the wall
opposite their front door. Outside his family, his proudest
creative moment is harder to pinpoint.
“On a creative level,” he says,
“anytime an audience reacts favorably to anything I
have been involved with, it is very rewarding. ‘Forever
Strong’ is another leap forward for Ryan and I. We are
very pleased to tell another compelling story.”
Go Films has pulled away from the
limits of the LDS-genre film, in hope of attracting
a wider audience. This film, unlike many others produced
by Utah-based companies, will premiere nationwide in
October. While he makes large strides in the entertainment
industry, he remains grounded in his standards, and
his wife is extremely proud.
“His impact as far as the art
goes is that there are stories that are worth telling,”
Amber says, “and we don’t need to stoop to the type
of stuff ... that is so prevalent right now in Hollywood.
It’s not just about making a profit. He’s definitely
out there to entertain and inspire. He definitely has
a purpose.”
Abel learned early on that he could
have an influence without sacrificing his standards.
“Life is not a competition
with others,” he says. “It is only about being the best
you can be and being satisfied with that. I will never
be Jerry Bruckheimer, but I will be Adam Abel, and I
am OK with that.”
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