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Author returns home to scout film locations

Former Tumalo mans award-winning story has been adapted into an indie screenplay

By David Jasper / The Bulletin

Published: January 18. 2009 4:00AM PST

Award-winning author Benjamin Percy visited his native Central Oregon last weekend with filmmaker James Ponsoldt.

Their mission: to scope out shooting locations for Ponsoldt’s upcoming film adaptation of “Refresh, Refresh,” the title story from Percy’s 2007 short-story collection “Refresh, Refresh: Stories.”

Set to begin shooting in March, the film loosely follows Percy’s original tale of two teens coming of fighting age in the fictional Central Oregon town of Crow against the backdrop of the Iraq war.

In the story, Crow is depicted as “a high desert town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. In Crow we have fifteen hundred people, a Dairy Queen, a BP gas station, a Food-4-Less, a meatpacking plant, a bright-green football field irrigated by canal water, and your standard assortment of taverns and churches. Nothing distinguishes us from Bend or Redmond or La Pine or any of the other nowhere towns off Route 97, except for this: we are home to the 2nd Battalion, 34th Marines.”

When the battalion was activated, the town’s fathers “climbed onto the olive-green school buses and pressed their palms to the windows and gave us the bravest, most hopeful smiles you can imagine and vanished. Just like that.”

“Refresh, Refresh” originally ran in The Paris Review in the Fall/Winter 2005 issue (read it online at www.theparis review.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5585) and went on to win the journal’s 2007 Plimpton Prize, awarded to “the best work of fiction published in The Paris Review in a given year by an emerging or previously unpublished writer,” according to its Web site.

The story also won a Pushcart Prize and was included in the anthology “The Best American Short Stories 2006.” Percy has won a number of other awards, most notably a $50,000 Whiting Award in 2008.

The story’s title is derived from the fact that these sons click the refresh button in the hopes of receiving a new message from their faraway fathers.

In the script, however, one of the absent fathers is in prison. It’s one of many changes from the source material, says Percy.

“We wanted to make it more about boys without daddies, to put it simply — and make it more timeless — as opposed to grounding it completely in Iraq,” explains Percy, a graduate of Sunriver Preparatory School who now teaches creative writing at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.

According to director Ponsoldt, “As I adapted it to a script, I took it away from the Iraq War, or the psychic repercussions of the Iraq War … and more on boys needing their fathers, and also boys trying to imitate their fathers, act as surrogates for their fathers, through acts of violence.”

Ponsoldt, 30, attended Yale as an undergraduate and attended film school at Columbia. His first feature-length film, “Off the Black,” came out in 2006 and starred Nick Nolte and Timothy Hutton. His adapted screenplay for “Refresh, Refresh” was developed during the 2007 Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab and is a finalist for the 2008 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award.

Percy and Ponsoldt met each other five years ago at the Sewanee Writers Conference at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. He later spotted “Refresh, Refresh” in The Paris Review.

“I knew Ben, so I thought maybe I’d pick it up, I’d give it a quick read at the bookstore. I opened it up and started reading in the bookstore down the street. Half an hour later, I was on the floor just weeping, like somebody had punched me in the sternum, or told me that my dad was dead.

“It was really that profound an impact on me. I can’t remember being as affected by a short story,” Ponsoldt says. “Emotionally, I related to it. I related to the teenagers … they reminded me of myself and my friends” that he’d had growing up with outside of Athens, Ga., where his father was a professor at University of Georgia.

He sent Percy a congratulatory e-mail, telling him that the story would long outlast the two of them.

“The problem was after I read it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It really upset me. It kept me up, it made me cry, it made me angry, it made me angry at my friends, who I felt had gotten a raw deal in life and made choices based on external circumstances; that, really, they had to grow up too quickly.”

While in Central Oregon, the two visited a number of possible shooting locations, including Hole in the Ground, where they were briefly trapped “after essentially impaling our vehicle on a huge rock,” Percy says.

Ponsoldt chose Prineville as the city where most of the story will take place. According to Percy, Bend and Tumalo have changed to the point of no longer resembling his story. Prineville, on the other hand, “retains that rugged, working-class feel.”

Ponsoldt hopes to return in early March and spend time in Prineville getting to know the community and its people. He hints that there may be some recognizable names in the cast, but says it’s too early to go into specifics.

“Obviously, Nick Nolte was the star of my last movie, and I loved working with him. There’s a part in the film that would be great for him. He definitely has the script, and we would love for him to play it.”

There are other roles that will have recognizable stars, Ponsoldt hints. Other cast members will be “real discoveries that, hopefully, resemble teenage boys in Prineville, Oregon.”

“My real goal is that when we do wrap up production of the film and leave town to go edit it, we’ll have made a lot of friends in the community, and they’ll have been proud to have had us there,” Ponsoldt says.

The goal is to have the film ready in time to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2010.

“This is a low-budget indie film, so we need to maximize every dollar. People shouldn’t hear about this and think, ‘Cha-ching, Hollywood.’ We’re looking for help from those committed to bringing film to Oregon,” Percy says.

To that end, the filmmakers are seeking help in the form of food, catering, housing, hotels and transportation, as well as furniture for props and the production office. “It’ll all be welcomed — and we’d be grateful,” says Ponsoldt.

Those interested in helping may contact producer Nick Case at 323-791-0227 or nbcase@gmail.com.

David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or djasper@bendbulletin.com.

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