Directors Steven Lai and Leonardo Giovenazzo wrote and directed an 11-minute short entitled “Bark.” It will have its Southeast Premiere at the 56th Nashville Film Festival on Friday, September 19th at 9 p.m. in Regal Green Hills Theater #4. The film features veteran actor Eric Roberts as Albert, the father of Roger (Kiser Shelton). Roger invites his girlfriend Bella (Brianne Tju) home to dinner to meet his parents. Albert’s wife is played by Karen Culp.
As Bella is driving to her boyfriend’s house, she accidentally hits and kills a large Black Labrador Retriever that is in the middle of the road. She has to put the dog out of its misery using a large rock. By the time Bella arrives at Roger’s house, she is in no condition to enjoy the meal or the dancing afterwards that Albert (Eric Roberts) suggests. She is having flashbacks involving the dead animal.
ERIC ROBERTS
GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 07: Eric Roberts attends the 7th Annual HAPA Awards at Alex Theatre on October 07, 2023 in Glendale, California. (Photo by Olivia Wong/Getty Images)
On June 4, 1981, Eric Roberts was driving in Connecticut with then-girlfriend Sandy Dennis’s German Shepherd in the passenger seat when he crashed his jeep into a tree. While the dog escaped serious injury, Roberts spent 72 hours in a coma and was hospitalized for more than a month, forcing him to drop out of the Broadway show Mass Appeal. I wondered if the “Bark” plot involving a car crash and a dog spoke to the veteran actor and factored in his decision to take the small, but necessary, part. Roberts is known for having more IMDB credits than anyone, listed today as 882.
WEEKLY WILSON PODCAST: When I interviewed Eric and Eliza on my Weekly Wilson podcast (#6 on WeeklyWilson.com) during the pandemic, as he was appearing in the 2019 indie film “Lone Star Deception,” he had accumulated 569 IMDB credits. In the intervening six years, Eric Roberts has racked up 313 more credits, an average of 52 roles per year, or roughly one role a week. These are not necessarily leads, nor are they necessarily feature films. When I asked Roberts about leisure time during that interview, he said he hadn’t had any “leisure” time in 5 years. (He enjoyed horseback riding, but gave it up, he said.)
SELECTING ROLES
I asked Eric about his work ethic in deciding what roles to take (a schedule which his wife, Eliza, handles). He answered, “Once you’ve established yourself as someone who’s worth their salt, who’s good, you have to live up to it. So every time you’re offered something, you have to ask yourself, ‘Can I be my best?’ And if you can, you take it.”
OTHER CAST
In this 11-minute short, the photography by William Albu was good, the Production Design by Claire Huber was superior, and the music (“Meet Me Halfway” by the Black Eyed Peas) was more than adequate. I watched Kiser Shelton as Roger wolf down a dessert with great gusto from a beautiful piece of china and realized that this was my mother’s pattern, “Allure” (Japanese Noritake). The antique china is beautiful. It’s odd to see weird things that you personally identify with in a film, whether it’s Tony Soprano’s bedspread (I own it; it’s on my bed in Texas) or the silverware that was supposedly used by JonBenet Ramsey in 1996 the night she was murdered. (Rose Point, by Wallace Sterling, which was also my mother’s pattern.) I found the production design to be extremely well-done. Everything about the house and the dinner party, including the exterior views of the house and the lavish interiors, demonstrated a job well done. Kudos to Claire Huber!
THE BAD?
I have only one small criticism, which can be attributed to the fact that “Bark” is described as both comedy and horror. Three of the four actors played it straight. Kiser Shelton went for the comic aspect and came out looking and sounding over-the-top.
Since “Bark” is billed as a comedy/drama, the overacted, over-written proposal by Roger to Bella in the dining room (“You are the sunshine in my garden“) can be attributed to Kiser Shelton’s attempt to ham it up for comic purposes. For me, it would have been better to follow the lead of Eric Roberts, Brianne Tju and Karen Culp and play the part straight.
There is an interesting ending for “Bark” at the 65th Nashville Film Festival. The eleven-minute short was professionally done and enjoyable.
