Actors (left to right) Brett Alexander, Camryn Warner, Arthur Clifford and Josh Moncure standing outside the Children’s Realm during “Rennie” filming at the KC Ren Fest in Bonner Springs in September 2023. Bryce Kuegler holds the slate. (photo by Betty Welch)
Late Night Theatre veterans spearhead a star-studded local cast and crew
Poignancy and ribaldry find a comfortable place to coexist in an indy movie conceived, financed and stuffed with hometown talent.
The movie is “Rennie,” a comic valentine to the organized chaos of a fictional renaissance festival. A hundred percent of the on-screen talent and behind-the-camera expertise is drawn from a formidable regional talent pool of professional actors, comedians, stunt performers, musicians and camera-and-sound technicians who make KC their anarchistic home.
“Rennie” is a low-budget “mockumentary” about a ren fest that gamely balances farce and poignancy in a way we rarely see. The creators hope to find a distributor and, eventually, a streaming service where even low-budget productions can find a big audience that didn’t exist not so long ago.
The movie was shot at various locations — including the Kansas City Renaissance Festival in Bonner Springs. Management gave the film crew permission to shoot during regular festival hours, allowing the performers to occasionally interact with festival goers.
The film is clearly a labor of love. Jen Frank Klenke and Jessica Dressler wrote, produced and directed the piece on a tight $200,000 budget and filled the enormous cast with professional actors and music-makers. Everyone got paid, Dressler said. It might not have been much money, but they got paid.
Dressler acknowledged without apology the influence of actor/director Christopher Guest. He didn’t invent the mockumentary, but he took it to a new level. “This is Spinal Tap,” the 1984 box-office hit directed by Carl Reiner, purported to record what might have been the final tour of a dysfunctional British rock band. Guest co-wrote it and appeared as one of the Spinal Tap guitarists. Guest kept playing with the formula as he co-wrote and directed a series of films in the same vein. My personal favorite: “Waiting for Guffman,” an account of a community theatre troupe creating a stage musical about the history of fictional Blaine, Missouri.
“Rennie” is in that spirit, unfolding less as a conventional narrative than a series of vignettes. The movie follows a local news crew (Chioma Anyanwu and Katie Gilchrist) filming a series of increasingly crazed reports about what could be the last year of a local renfest whose existence is threatened by the possible collapse of an upstream dike.
Here’s the official description found on www.filmrennie.com: “This voyeuristic look into a small town’s Renaissance Festival delves into the lives of a motley crew of characters and what brings them back to their comfortless corsets, ballsack hugging codpiece tights, and sweltering animal pelts year after year…. Our heroes and heroines use this time together to fulfill the most basic desire in life: to love, be loved, and belong as one’s true self. Our beloved Rennies reveal that in a place centered around pretending to be something you are not, everyone discovers who they are.”
“So Jessica had this idea in mind to write a fictional comedy about a renaissance festival,” Klenke said. “We were lucky to have a cast that had a lot of good chemistry.”
Klenke said there were dozens of versions of the script. “It was kind of like building an airplane in the air,” she said. “A lot it was sitting around trying to make each other laugh.”
Jessica Dressler was a big part of Late Night Theatre, which specialized in wild mashups of old movies and undiluted gay humor. For years, Late Night existed as an outlet for actor/writer Ron Megee’s unbridled creative imagination. And the film is chocked full of Late Night veterans.
Megee said he didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.
“It’s not really a Late Night show,” Megee said. “This is completely Jessica and Jen’s baby. I just got to be an actor and I liked it a lot.”
Dressler said every scene was shot three times. The first strictly followed the script as written. In the second and third takes, the actors were allowed to improvise.”
She added that 60 to 70 percent of the scripted dialogue made it into the film. The rest was improvised by the performers.
Amid all the crazed humor, the film offers an affecting emotional storyline about a performer played by Vanessa Davis as a leather worker costumed as a pirate. She longs for her dead wife and fears that her missing daughter may never return.
“Vanessa Davis is incredible,” Dressler said. “These actors dove into these characters. They gave 100 percent. Jen and I loved that aspect because they brought more to the characters than we could ever have written on the page.”
And if the film turns out to be a low-budget success story, could there be a sequel? Unlikely, although Dressler said they shot miles of film they didn’t use.
“We could probably cut three more movies based on the footage we got,” she said. “Our challenge in editing was that we just have too much good material.”
To learn more about “Rennie,” visit www.filmrennie.com.
