Somewhere Under the Rainbow
Childrenopolis is a fantasy dramedy movie/musical about a utopian community of children of many colors who live in harmony in the hollow of the earth, but know about the hatred, war, and pollution infecting the earth’s outer shell. A select few make a goodwill ambassador pilgrimage to detoxify the earth as we know it.
At one point in the story, one of those children, who’s in disguise as an eccentric, elderly theater director, is asked by a woman where he is from. She has been observing him direct a musical that her son was cast in, and she suspects that this unusual old man might not be from planet Earth.
The song Somewhere Under the Rainbow is his reply to her. I am still working on the words to this song, but this is what I have so far:
Somewhere under the rainbow,
Way down low,
There’s a land that I know of,
Where only children go.
When I finish the words I will record someone (maybe me) singing it, as a promo for the movie, but for now here is the solo piano version, to give you a flavor of the music, from Childrenopolis! A huge thanks to artist Anna McCoy for drawing a magically beautiful scene of Childrenopolis for the cover. Her work is amazing! See more here.
Anna used to study piano and singing with me, and is now a junior at Indiana University, studying Media Advertising, with minors in Marketing and Studio Art. She's also on the IU Women's Tennis team!
I am co-writing Childrenopolis with David Heavener. He's an actor, screenwriter, film director, producer, and distributor, and a songwriter. Follow this link to see his IMDb page. I did a filmmaking workshop with him in 2012 at the Galt House in Louisville, Kentucky. I found out about the workshop from Vin Morreale’s mailing list. Vin and his wife Susan were in the audience for a murder mystery at the French Lick Hotel, in which I played a sleazy lounge pianist named Tim Keys, who would often murder people with his dragonfly necklace. I did around 150 murder mysteries at that hotel, under the dynamic direction of Bob Trinkle. We had so much fun with these mysteries, as did the audiences, who quite often laughed so hard they cried, at our ridiculous improvisatory shenanigans.
Anyway, I met Vin and Susan after a performance, and found out they were both actors, and that Vin ran an entertainment company, Academy Arts Entertainment, so I got on Vin’s mailing list. Months later I saw a notice about David’s workshop, and decided to go.
On the day of the workshop, as I walked through the Galt House, I was surprised to see hundreds of people dressed up as various well known horror and sci-fi film figures. I didn’t realize that David was a featured artist at the Fright Night Film Fest, which that year brought in over 16,000 people, and he was doing the filmmaking workshop on the side.
So, because of a scheduling snafu, only 6 people showed up for the workshop, with film ideas in 6 different genres, and we all got lots of individual attention from David. I was amazed at how he was able to help each person develop their film idea, across a wide spectrum of genres. Even though David has made his name making films in the horror/thriller/action genres, he is well versed in most other film genres, as well!
A couple weeks later, David and I met again in Louisville, and he said that he was impressed with my film idea, and that he would mentor me on how to write a screenplay, and co-write it with me. I had always dreamed of getting into the film industry. So I said yes!
Since then we have met over 200 times, usually for 2 hours, sometimes in person, sometimes by phone. We started working on the film title, genre, poster, and short paragraph describing the film, and then moved into the step outline, which is a list of all the scenes in the film, with a short summary of each scene. We worked through many other types of exercises, until finally we had a 120 page screenplay! Then we started editing the entire script-improving dialogue, cutting down scenes, etc. It has been the most challenging and rewarding creative process of my entire life, and I am so grateful to David for his mentorship, collaboration, and friendship.
Until spring 2017, we were writing a film with a few songs, but when I saw La La Land in December 2016, and the the new Beauty and the Beast, in February 2017, I got inspired to turn our movie into a musical, and David agreed!
So now we have the first 60 pages of the screenplay locked, which means that it is basically done. And I have 10 songs very close to finished. We hope to finish the screenplay and the songs this spring, and then we will begin either raising the money to produce the movie, or try to get Disney or another big company to produce it. It is a big budget film, with 5 major roles, about 20 minor roles, and hundreds of even smaller roles, and many big group scenes with song and dance numbers.
I have released one other song from Childrenopolis so far: Love Makes the World Go Round. Follow this link to listen!
Please stay tuned, as I will be recording and releasing more Childrenopolis songs over the next few months!
Cheers,
Timothy Reed