Brick on film: 'Pranksters' features director's hometown Story based on tales from growing up in Brick during late 1980s BY COLLEEN LUTOLF Staff Writer PHOTOS COURTESY OF JOHN M. OGONOWSKI Director Michael Kelber talks over a scene with actor Jason Alexander who plays "Jim" in "Pranksters," Kelber's first feature film he shot in Brick last month. Life is full of choices.One of those choices for L.A. filmmaker Michael Kelber led the Brick native back to his hometown this summer to shoot his first feature film, "Pranksters," in the homes and on the tree-lined streets where he grew up. "No other location would do the film justice," Kelber said while discussing his film in the Maple Leaf apartment of a childhood friend last month. "I know if I shot this somewhere else, I'd only be saying, 'Wow, if only I were in Brick.' I don't want to go there with this story. Most everything in the story actually occurred in my life. A lot of the scenes and dialogue is my experience." The working-class tale focuses on two guys, Paul - a local landscaper, and Jim, fresh out of prison on an assault charge. The two old friends decide to relive their youth one night by playing a prank. Brick Officers Scott Reitemeyer (l) and Jay Lampiasi prepare for a scene outside Craig's. "It ends tragically," Kelber said. "The friendship is changed forever. Once it occurs there's nothing you can do to turn back. How they handle it - you see who they are and who they become because of this prank." Mike's mom, Pat Kelber-Morris, alone raised her five children after her husband walked on the family when Mike was 3 years old. Many in the Brick Memorial school community may be familiar with Mike's mom. She worked as the secretary to the school's child study team for special needs children for 25 years, retiring in 2004. As a child, Kelber excelled in soccer, but school was a different subject - he could get A's when he wanted, but he found school boring, so he got D's if he was lucky. He attended Brick Memorial High School but went on an unintended hiatus when his casual attitude toward life and school landed him in rehab when he was 16 years old. "Michael didn't care much for school," Kelber-Morris said. "It wasn't that he couldn't do the work - he was always bored. He was always late for school or just didn't show up for classes, so with the strict attendance policy he failed many classes. It was quite an ordeal at times, raising a son like Michael, for he was very independent and strong-willed." PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN M. OGONOWSKI Brick Police Officers George Collins (l) and Scott Reitemeyer arrest "Jim" for auto theft during a shot in Michael Kelber's film "Pranksters." Two weeks into college classes at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), Kelber quit to join the Navy. He was 19. While enlisted, Kelber worked as a night manager at a recreation center where he would watch rented videos to pass the time. Ironically, it wasn't a Bergman or Scorsese film that influenced Kelber to become a director. It was what Marisa Silver did with the 1988 film "Permanent Record" starring Keanu Reeves that sparked Kelber's interest. The film is about a high school senior who commits suicide and how his friends deal with his death. "I thought, that's a gift to take someone from where they are for a minute," Kelber said. "It was like a flash." Two years later Kelber enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and commuted there while living in Toms River. Soon he moved to a 22nd Street studio apartment on the West Side in an apartment building his mother later told him she thought should be condemned. Kelber landed roles in numerous plays and began writing for the screen. He made his directorial debut with "Dominoes" in 2003, a 16-minute short he shot guerrilla style in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section. "We didn't have a budget," he said. Now he does, along with a 57-member cast, 13 of them he flew out with him from Los Angeles where he now lives, and shooting in 49 Brick locations, including Craig's, the Arrowhead Inn, Pinewood Park, the VFW on Route 88, friends' houses and his mom's house in Toms River. Kelber's top-notch crew includes Will Fowler as director of photography. "I'm the one who sits behind the camera and gives the visuals - what it looks like," Fowler said. So how does it look? "It looks really good," he said. "Visually, it's wonderful. Showing this area, nobody's really shown this area the way it is." Fowler's résumé boasts "hundreds of movies," he said, including "Ghostbusters I & II," "Sneakers," "G.I. Jane," "Stigmata" and a host of television shows - "Airwolf," "The A-Team" - "and that's just the A's." Also included in the cast are some locals, including four Brick Township cops - Jay Halley, Scott Reitemeyer, Jay Lampiasi and George Collins - playing themselves outside Craig's on Princeton Avenue. The scene features Jim, the jailbird of the pair, getting arrested for stealing a car. "We did what we normally do," Reitemeyer said. "We were just basically checking the parking lot for stolen vehicles. It was real basic. I called in the registration and the plate, dispatch came back that it was a stolen vehicle. I said we were going to roll up on him and take him down. The only thing different was we had to put makeup on and do it over and over." Police worked from midnight to 6 a.m. to get the minute of screen time to show for their efforts. "It was pretty cool," Lampiasi said. "There was no script for us. We did it as close as we could have. Some things we had to improvise it as realistic as possible." Kelber cast his friend, Kevin McCauley, whose Maple Leaf apartment Kelber used as a kind of headquarters, as a local garbage man. "It was cool," he said. "I just did it like I was just being myself." McCauley said some of the film's scenes were his own memories made real again. "It's kind of like when we were growing up doing stuff we used to do," he said. "It kind of gave me the chills." Although Mike asked his mother to be an extra in his film, she denied the request. "I said I couldn't because I would be too nervous," she said. "I know what a perfectionist Michael is and a nervous mom would not be good." Kelber and his cast and crew began shooting at Morris-Kelber's home Sept. 4 and finished their 18-day shooting schedule Sept. 28. Now it's a five- to six-month post-production schedule of editing and then off to the film festivals where Kelber hopes to be picked up by a distributing company. Kelber hopes to have a West and East Coast premiere with the East Coast opening in Brick Township, he said.