Like most of Hollywood, what filmmaker Joe Crouch really wants to do is direct.
After years of shopping his screenplays around while toiling in the technical departments of TV shows like Lie to Me, NCIS and the rebooted 90210, no one was rolling out the director’s chair for him. “I’d written four scripts and tried to shop them around and I didn’t have any luck,” he says via phone from California, where he lives and works. “It’s hard to get something read even when you’re in the business.”
As a writer, the 43-year-old Crouch is interested in science fiction (what he calls “big budget stuff”), but as a producer and director looking to self-finance a first film he knew he would have to pare back his ambitions. “When I turned 40, I told the wife it was mid-life crisis time and I needed to either buy a Corvette, have an affair, or make a movie. … I spent exactly what I budgeted, which was pretty much everything I had,” he laughs.
The resulting film — a zany, water-bound comedy called Assisted Fishing about a synthetic bait salesman who bonds with some elderly pals while trying to win a fishing competition — plays the Gasparilla International Film Festival this Saturday at 1:45 p.m. at Muvico Centro Ybor, and the screening will be a homecoming for Crouch. Born in Indiana, he moved to Port Charlotte with his family as a young child and graduated from USF in 1990. Crouch set off for California in 1995 and nabbed a job with Roger Corman Studios, cutting his teeth on out-there TV movies like Martian Law and Alien Avengers.
“I started off doing lighting and moved up to doing what I do now,” he says. “There’s people who have moved up from lighting to gaffer to director. It’s all about who you know. Connections are the most important thing in Hollywood. The movie was my attempt to show them, ‘I can do this.’ And I had to write something I could afford to make.”
Crouch is a professional video playback technician by trade, creating interactive graphics that actors can manipulate within a scene. Fans of Lie to Me have seen his work (when Tim Roth checked his computer for info, that was Crouch’s creations on the screen), as has anyone who experienced Blades of Glory. Right now he’s applying his craft on the new Kiefer Sutherland show Touch, though he continues to work toward a future in the big chair.
Many of the cast and crew members on Assisted Fishing would rather be doing something other than their “real job.” Lead actor Derek Haugen, who plays the likable but dim Dewey Winfield, met Crouch while working in post-production on Lie to Me. Actor Gary Dion (he plays The General) was also a Lie to Me contact; he was the special effects director. And for the roles Crouch couldn’t fill with past or current co-workers, he used Craigslist.
In the beginning, Crouch just had the title Assisted Fishing, which helped dictate what the film would be about. “I thought it was cool and kind of catchy. From the title, I knew it had to be assisted living mixed with my Florida roots and seeing fishing as a kid.” Some characters are inspired by specific people. “I had a grandfather who had Alzheimer’s and he kicked everyone out of the house and called the cops once. That whole thing, ‘Get out of my house!’ I just changed it to ‘Get off my boat.’”
GIFF will be Crouch’s second trip to a film festival with Assisted Fishing, after hitting Georgia’s Macon Film Fest in February. “Macon was great, but Macon is a smaller town. I don’t think that there’s as many people into film as there are in Tampa,” Crouch tells me.
Plus, he’s got family and friends in town who will be in attendance for the GIFF premiere. And that’s got Crouch genuinely excited.
“It’s gratifying,” he says. “Making this movie was the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted to do. Just being able to share something like that with people is great.”
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2012.