The fires incinerating Hollywood along the West Coast and the bitter blast dumping snow along the East Coast mean Phil Blattenberger will have to sit out his third film’s movie premiere tonight.
“I can’t go to Atlanta because it’s getting four inches of snow, and I’m not about to drive down I-85,” Blattenberger told me over a video call on the eve of the premiere while on his North Carolina porch. “Then, Los Angeles is burning, so I’m not going to the premiere there, either. Of course, [the travel disruption] is minuscule in comparison to what the folks out in L.A. are dealing with. But it’s kind of emblematic of the struggle right now.”
Select theaters in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Minneapolis and Chicago — along with streaming services — are now showing Laws of Man, the director/writer/producer’s 98-minute Cold War-era feature about two U.S. Marshals pursuing a murderer in the deserts of Nevada.
But it was the suburbs of Cincinnati — more accurately, Fairfield — where Blattenberger first picked up a camera and hit “record.”
“I wrote my first screenplay in Cincinnati as a homeschooled kid with nothing to do,” Blattenberger said. “I decided to watch The Karate Kid for the first time, and it blew my mind. I was doing Taekwondo classes, so I wrote a movie called The Taekwondo Detectives, which had a Hardy Boys spin to it.”
It was the late ’90s or early 2000s, and the movie was as “independent” as “independent” could get.
“It’s about what you’d expect at age 12 — or whatever I was — with a Sony camcorder,” Blattenberger said, laughing. “Hey, it kind of has come full circle [now talking with CityBeat.]”
As he grew up and grew away from Cincinnati, Blattenberger began an academic journey as an aspiring anthropologist in Vietnam where he conducted field research on historical representation and public memory of the Vietnam War. While bartending full-time and working on his thesis, he started writing a screenplay called Point Man about the Vietnam War as a creative outlet.
Point Man unexpectedly gained investor support and transformed from a small summer project into a full-fledged feature film. Shot in Cambodia, the film garnered international attention and a crucial Sony distribution deal. The film was not only screened in select theaters across the U.S. but also picked up by Delta Airlines for in-flight entertainment.
Then, his sophomore film, Condor’s Nest, took a major creative turn, featuring a Nazi-hunting plot set in post-World War II South America. He called it “the most American thing you can think of” and said it was a huge undertaking.
“I spent about two years sleeping in a mule barn in eastern North Carolina and a hammock, freezing my ass off in the winters, sweating in the summers, building a full-scale B-17 bomber from scratch,” Blattenberger said.
Second only to a distribution deal might be name recognition. Condor’s Nest attracted well-known character actors — including Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy) and Jorge Garcia (Lost).
Which leads us to this weekend’s release. Laws of Man — having already picked up nominations and awards at prestigious film festivals — has allowed Blattenberger to collaborate with other accomplished actors like Harvey Keitel (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction), Keith Carradine (Nashville, Dexter) and Graham Greene (The Green Mile, Dances with Wolves).
So, what’s the meaning of Blattenberger’s films? What is Laws of Man trying to say? Unlike some directors who pack in numerous layers of symbolism, he said he doesn’t get too caught up with that.
“I’ve shifted away from wanting audiences to take messages out of things,” he said. “I think this is an hour and a half of entertainment. Anybody who loves that Western visual style [or] the action element will like this. I mean, it’s got shootouts and Richard Brake (Game of Thrones) on meth. I think it’s an opportunity to grab a bucket of popcorn, kick back, be snowed in and have fun.”
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t wonder what audiences think.
“There’s kind of a controversial ending,” he said, while puffing on a cigar against a whiteboard of fresh film ideas behind him. “I’m actually very curious how people are gonna react, and we’ll start finding out [today].”
Laws of Man is available today in select theaters nationwide. It’s also streaming on Apple TV, Amazon, Spectrum and more services.
This article appears in Dec 11-24, 2024.