21st Century Fox
Filmmaker shooting Memphis-made series for a new platform
Although he may be unfamiliar to most of Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox for almost two decades has been an influential and — yes, it’s true — beloved figure in the city’s scrappy, tightknit and generally underdog filmmaking community.
As a founder of the defunct Memphis Digital Arts Cooperative (MeDiA Co-op) at First Congregational Church, Fox was an enthusiastic young mentor to student filmmakers and other do-it-yourself artists. As a feature filmmaker, he has won awards at festivals and earned distribution from companies that specialize in gay-themed material.
Best known for such essentially homemade works as the tender coming-of-age story “Blue Citrus Hearts” (2003) and the documenta-
ry “This Is What Love in Action Looks Like” (2010), Fox has been directly inspired by his experiences as a sexually uncertain adolescent who discovered at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville that theater and film offered a more rewarding and soul-satisfying high than the drinks and drugs easily available on a hardpartying campus.
As minuscule in budget as they were intimate and personal, Fox’s movies struck a chord with some influential fans. As a result, the filmmaker has been recruited along with creators from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Berlin and Buenos Aires as an essential part of a new “global digital platform” that founder Derek Curl — a longtime player in the business of film distribution — says will be the Netflix of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) media content.
“My platform needs a voice like his, to tell original, contemporary Southern stories,” said Curl, 40, in a phone interview from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. “He not only makes the stories real, but he stays true to his vision. He can express visually what is the Southern experience of contemporary gay youth, and the world loves Southern stories. I compare Morgan to Horton Foote and Tennessee Williams, except Tennessee Williams was a drunk and Morgan’s not.”
A self- described “Atlanta redneck” from a well-to- do family, Curl became acquainted with Memphis when he dated native Memphian Spencer Schilly, now an editor for the Oxygen and Logo cable networks. Curl helped finance several of Fox’s earlier movies, and he also has produced a number of significant indie genre films, including Jim Mickle’s “Stake Land” and Ti West’s “The Innkeepers.”
But Curl is especially influential as principal owner of TLA Entertainment Group, a 33-year-old Philadelphia-based company that has become probably the world’s largest distributor of LGBT entertainment, with more than 1,000 titles in its catalog.
Over the past few years, Curl has consolidated the foreign territories that work with TLA worldwide by purchasing or partnering with Optimale in France, Tongariro in Poland, and so on. His plan is to create not a traditional cable network, but a new digital platform for televisions and other devices. Set to debut in January, the platform — Curl is keeping the name under wraps for now — would host classic and new content on a worldwide pay-per-view and subscription basis, much as Netflix now offers such new programs as “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black” and Amazon has Whit Stillman’s “The Cosmopolitans.”
Said Curl: “It is our answer to a very specific niche.” He said making the content available at the same time worldwide is a reaction to the influence of social media. “If you release a movie in the U. S., everyone wants to see it, but they can’t see it in the foreign territories, so what do they do? They go and steal it, digitally.”
The project Fox is now shooting for Curl is titled “Feral,” an eight-episode series about a group of friends in Midtown Memphis. The episodes last less than a half-hour each, and the series budget is about $50,000 — “tiny, but a huge leap for me,” Fox admits.
“Feral” represents Fox’s first work as a writer and director on his own fiction project in close to a decade. At 35, Fox still appears as playful as the bunny tattoo on his arm, but, for the past several years, his creative urges have been sublimated by the desire to make a living, pay bills and keep up the modest Midtown home he shares with his boyfriend of six years, Declan Deely.
Instead of pursuing his own projects, Fox has worked as an assistant to Memphis- based director Craig Brewer and as a second-unit director, associate producer and crew member on such locally shot independent productions as the punkrock comedy “Losers Take All” and the critically acclaimed “Memphis,” a new movie set to open here Friday.
Said Fox: “After I made a bunch of my own films, I learned how other people make films. It’s like I finally went to film school for the first time.”
Fox cites the HBO programs “Girls” and “Looking” as models, but says the middle-America Memphis vibe differentiates “Feral” from its predecessors.
“The characters are queer, yeah, but their sexuality isn’t the source of the conflict,” Fox said. “You won’t see the gay stereotypes you see in shows on the West or East Coast. They’re just doing what artists do in Memphis, waiting tables, or working at Black Lodge (video store) or in a coffee shop.”
They’re also learning to live on their own in a new and more hopeful era, when support for same-sex marriage and gay rights in general is no longer unusual.
The “Feral” cast of new and veteran and mostly local actors is headed by Seth Daniel Rabinowitz, 22, and Jordan Nichols, 29 (son of Playhouse on the Square executive producer Jackie Nichols), who plays Fox’s alter ego, a struggling would-be filmmaker. The episodes are largely improvised from Fox’s story notes, after extensive workshop-style sessions in which the actors learn to “intuitively embed” their characters. The director of photography is Ryan Earl Parker, and sound mixer is Brandon Robertson.
Fox started shooting Aug. 29 and hopes to finish by the end of next week. “I feel like this is stronger material than I’ve ever directed. There have been these moments almost every day when you say ‘cut’ after a take and you feel you’ve captured something really special.
“I’ve always felt like such an underdog. I almost feel like this is my first real opportunity to make a film project that can exist in the real world.”