ARC student preps his horrific feature film debut

Millions of people dream about making a movie. The tragic part is that most let it sit there and don’t do anything with their ideas. American River college student Andrew Scott Ramsey has completed a screenplay and cast the roles for his film, with verbal commitment from several Hollywood actors, for a horror movie “Make Believe Time.”
Ramsey, 34, started his first draft of the screenplay in February and completed writing it in about four days. “When you get inspired or creative you’ve just gotta get it out, and that’s exactly how I get it out. Just go,” says Ramsey.
The first draft of the screenplay had been left untouched and unformatted for about eight months. Ramsey went ahead and started casting the members before continuing on to finalize his screenplay with a better idea of how to write his final draft after casting all the roles.
The complete cast includes Lynn Lowry from “The Crazies,” Marilyn Ghigliotti from “Clerks,” and up and coming actors Phillip Frields, West Ramsey, Kelsey Zkowski, Sam Qualiana, Eliza Jayne, Marylin Monroach and Jeremiah Groves.
“When I sat down in February and wrote “Make-Believe Time”, I was angry. I had a nervous breakdown that day. Literally, I was in my room, blanket over my head, crying,” says Ramsey. “That night I sat down and started writing the damn screenplay and I got about 50 pages in [after] a couple hours.”
With 1,439 “likes” on Facebook and about 300 people talking about it on Facebook, Ramsey has already started quite a buzz online.
“I’ve pretty much built this name by myself. My experience right now, gliding into the movie industry, is very unlike anybody else. All the other filmmakers, whatever they do, I have no advice for them because I’m getting so lucky,” says Ramsey, a first time screenwriter and director.
With a “Hellraiser” tattoo on his forearm, it’s easy to see why Ramsey wrote a script for a horror film. He has always been a fan of movies and used to have a movie column on the American River Current a year ago.
“It’s a home invasion ‘horror’ film, and I say horror in quotes because I don’t want to sound pretentious, but there’s horror, like, something jumps, and it makes you jump,” says Ramsey,
Ramsey had originally just wanted to start small.
“I want a horror film that truly horrifies people,” says Ramsey.
He got another ARC student involved, Phillip Frields, and he plays the role of one of the psychopaths in the film. “He [Frields] was involved since day one,” says Ramsey. He would have liked to get other ARC actors involved, but the way things were going everything began to grow bigger.
“[Ramsey] apparently wrote the role for me,” says Frields. “He had a vision and he just let me know that he’s got this idea and that he thought I would be excellent for the part and I turned out loving it.”
Frields is not an actor. He has aspirations to become a stand up comedian. “I know that stand-up comedians do get their own TV show sometimes, but they definitely don’t do horror movies,” he said.
There are a lot of unique scenes in the movie.
“There’s a scene specifically where we take the family, we’re invading their house, we put them all into a certain room, and we start inducing them with drugs,” says Ramsey.
“I’m thinking about moving the production down to Los Angeles. I’ve looked at houses up here, and they’re comparable for renting houses but I need a very large house to rent for this film. The entire film takes place in one large house,” says Ramsey on the film’s spooky setting.
Ramsey says that there is a possibility that he gets large level investors involved, but his main source for budgeting so far has been crowd sourcing.
“It would be great to have, like, a $50 million dollar budget or some huge film. That’s the dream. That’s ultimately what I would love to do. I don’t think a lot of independent filmmakers aspire that big,” says Ramsey.
The film is scheduled to start shooting toward the end of March or beginning of April in 2013 for about two to three weeks. Ramsey hopes to have the film finished by late June or early July of 2013 and ideally be sent to various film festivals and will distribute copies to everyone that helped fund the film.