There Will Be Film: Russos Return to Boost the Local Film Industry

Photo by Jeff Downie

Joe and Anthony Russo won’t be coming back to Cleveland anytime soon to direct another blockbuster like Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Instead they are hunkered down in an editing bay to finish Captain America: Civil War one day; while the next day they are in a writers' room working out the details of the next two sequentially shot Avengers films.

The brothers who grew up on Cleveland’s East Side have, however, made time to come back and host a symposium on local filmmaking at the InterContinental Cleveland Hotel at noon Nov. 6.

Tickets start at $150 each and doors open at 11:30 a.m. The annual fundraiser for the Greater Cleveland Film Commission focuses on what film production means to our city.

A study by Cleveland State University indicates that since 2009, the film tax incentive has generated a $300 million economic impact on Northeast Ohio, and created 1,100 full-time equivalent jobs. The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier both took advantage of the credit and aesthetic locales from Public Square to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

For the Russo Brothers, it’s personal.

“It’s something very close to us and we want to do everything we can to encourage filmmaking in Cleveland, because we love shooting [here],” says Anthony. “It’s another step in the process of us trying to help develop and deepen and broaden the film potential in Cleveland.”

Like Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, they see a region of untapped potential. In Cleveland’s case, it’s a low cost of living and the richness of sites that look great on the silver screen.

During the luncheon, one of the major talking points will be how competitive the industry is. To remain competitive, Plainview erected oil wells. The Russos are only asking for a soundstage.

“We would love to see a permanent studio and production facility developed in Cleveland,” Anthony says. “Most people probably don’t realize how much of a movie is shot on a stage.”

If the region had one, Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man would have all been here last summer.

“We knew we could have taken Civil War to Cleveland if it had a studio,” Anthony says. “But it didn’t, so we had to go to Atlanta.”

At least we have the Nicolas Cage movie, Dog Eat Dog, shooting here until the end of November. WKYC caught up with one of the film’s producer’s, Mark Burman, fawned over the city.

"I'm telling you Cleveland is the next Louisiana," Burman told the news outlet. " People are wonderful here."

“To me it still feels like it’s moving in the right direction,” Anthony adds. “[The film commission] is building on the successes they’ve had and figuring out how to expand and move forward. That’s a great place to be.”

By John Hitch

Russo Brothers' Sister to Launch New Education Nonprofit

The Russo Brothers are coming back to Cleveland. Don’t worry, West Side commuters, it’s not to close down any streets. It’s to host a fundraiser for their youngest sister Angela Russo-Otstot’s new nonprofit preschool and support center, The New Foundation for Children, which uses a fresh curriculum based on the latest research in early childhood education.

Angela Russo-Otstot

“For all the great things about Cleveland ... one of our most challenging areas has always been education, especially urban education,” Anthony Russo says. “To find new and innovative ways to better our schooling experience, that’s a really noble way to spend your time and energy.”

On Nov. 22 at Michaelangelo's in Little Italy, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m., Russo-Otstot will present her vision and help raise money for to develop a preschool curriculum that requires parental involvement and can be open-sourced to classrooms across the region. New Foundation plans to open a support center for parents and teachers in spring 2015 and its first school in fall 2015. We asked Russo-Otstot to teach us what the nonprofit is all about.

Q. Why did you get involved?

A. Like many parents, I started out being concerned about where my son was developmentally. Is he going to be able to read by kindergarten? Soon, it became apparent the things I was truly concerned with were character-based. I wanted my son to be motivated, to develop a deeper understanding of other people’s feelings and to communicate his feelings better. An assistant to a teacher at my son’s Montessori school had this wonderful idea to start this new school and form a curriculum that focused on building up characteristics, such as perseverance, independence, understanding of others.

Q. How is this different from other high-quality preschools?

A. This type of early childhood education is very expensive to implement. We believe we have a more cost-effective, sustainable solution. And we will use all of our profits to basically gift this cost-effective curriculum to schools throughout Cleveland. We will give them the materials and train their teachers on our methodology and provide them with continued education. The more support centers we open, the more classrooms we can gift. We want to make this curriculum accessible to everyone.

Q. What does your curriculum aim to achieve?

A. Children develop 90 percent of their brain by the age of 5. This period is very critical for setting the stage for the rest of their life. We hope to equip them with the tools they need to face any sort of challenges that life throws at them, whether it’s economic or personal. A child who doesn’t have those tools mastered may not be able to thrive in certain situations. And we want to equip the parents with the tools to help their children throughout their life.

If you're interested in attending, call 216-30-CHILD for more info.

Geek Cred

When Joe and Anthony Russo were seeking an endorsement to become the directors of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, they asked Steven Soderbergh. The Oscar winner, who had produced their Hollywood directorial debut Welcome to Collinwood, had a simple question: “Tell me why you want to do this movie,” Soderbergh recalls.

He wanted to confirm the upstart indie directors he discovered at Slamdance Film Festival in 1997 weren’t just trying to advance their careers by taking on a high-profile property.

“You don’t understand,” they responded. “We have a comic collection worth [$60,000]. We’re obsessed with this stuff. That’s why we want to do it.”

Joe and Anthony Russo field fanboy questions at the 2013 San Diego Comic Con International

Soderbergh called Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and told him, “I think they’ll totally deliver for you.”

Marvel believes they have. The two sides have held negotiations for Captain America’s next adventure, too, says Anthony.

“You need to have some street cred in terms of your knowledge,” Soderbergh says. “The fans of that stuff really smell a dilettante.”

Joe’s knowledge has been building for 32 years.

“My uncle Ron gave me a box of 100 comics from his collection from when he was 10,” says Joe, who collected for about 20 years. “I read 'em all in a few days.”

And like with any good origin story, there was a dash of foreshadowing.

“One of the first was 'Marvel Team-Up' with Cap and Falcon, ” Joe remembers. “When we found out we were going to do this movie, it was very resonant for me. It felt like it had come full circle. You laugh because you think of all the money you spent on comic books as a kid actually came to fruition.”



Joe and his uncle would add to their collection a few times a month, digging for rare finds at comic conventions. Most memorably, he struck geek gold at a garage sale when he was 12.

“I bought The Incredible Hulk No. 181 for 25 cents at a garage sale,” Joe says. The issue features the first full appearance of Wolverine. One copy fetched $150,000 at a 2011 auction. “I felt guilty, because at the time it was worth a couple hundred bucks. So I asked her, ‘You know what this is worth?’ ”

“She said ‘I do. I just want to share my collection with kids, so take it.’ ”

Joe was blown away by the gesture, which stuck with him. “One day, I’m going to sell everything in my collection for a quarter at a garage sale to a bunch of kids.”

The Cleveland premiere of Captain America: The Winter Soldier is 6 p.m. tonight at the Cinemark at Valley View. Tickets are required for the event. More information can be found at clevelandfilm.com. The nationwide release is April 4.

Reintroduction to Community Affairs

So you're counting down the days until Captain America: The Winter Soldier premieres nationwide April 4. You've read our April feature story and know the trailers by heart (we're a little partial to the Super Bowl version), hunting for glimpses of the West Shoreway, Theater and Warehouse districts.

But if you need even more insight into what Cleveland natives Anthony and Joe Russo have done with their piece of Marvel's universe, it's time to sign up for Hulu Plus and binge on Community.

That's because, while the duo was in postproduction for the first blockbuster of 2014, Joe directed two episodes of the show they got off the ground.

And you don't need Superman's X-ray vision to see the big screen's influence on the quirky NBC cult-comedy.



“His directors’ eye is even keener,” says Yvette Nicole Brown, the Cleveland native who plays Shirley Bennett. In “Geothermal Escapism,” the Community students play a schoolwide game of hot lava (you remember that kids game, right? You must walk on chairs, tables or whatever to avoid the floor, which is deadly) to win Abed’s (Danny Pudi) prized $50,000 comic.

“We don’t have a huge budget on Community, but Joe made that episode look like a movie,” she says.

The action-packed episode was loaded with special effects, stunts, laughs and even LeVar Burton. It echoed the premise of the paintball saga the brothers directed to conclude season two, which put them on Marvel’s radar and got them their career-changing gig.

“He’s learned how to make it even bigger with even less,” Brown says.

“Geothermal” also marked the final episode for Donald Glover, who plays Troy Barnes. “Most of us were blubbering messes,” recalls Brown. But Joe kept the set light and loose, which allowed the actors to stay composed long enough to pull off the scene’s “heartstring moments.”

And for a look at how proudly geeky the brothers really are, queue up “Advanced Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.” Anthony read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy three times each by the end of high school and Joe collected comics for 20 years.

"I was a big fan of Marvel growing up, a big fan of X-Men, Wolverine and Spider-Man," Joe says. That should make it a fun summer of movies for the Russos. Besides their own Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Sony's Amazing Spider-Man 2 debuts May 2 and Fox's X-Men: Days of Future Past opens May 23.