“Going up to midnight last night, I still had questions: Did this get covered? Did that get covered?” the cheery, seemingly inexhaustible Australia-born executive said. “But today, as setup got started and things falling into place, there was a weird kind of creepy calm. I think a lot of people in a position like this would be freaking out, but luckily I have a super-awesome team. We’ve delegated these things out and we can reply on them.”
Tarrant, who spent the last three years as a Sunscreen board member (and a behind the scenes mover and shaker), oversees a minuscule staff and a small army of dedicated volunteers. Many on his crew have been with Sunscreen since it began 12 years ago.
He was more than ready to get bumped upstairs.
“They were looking for someone who loved St. Petersburg as much as they loved film, and they thought it was me,” he laughed. “I believed them, and here I am.”
Others were written by film students from the Ringling School of the Arts in Sarasota, which co-produced the series. Much of the crew — and the financing — came from Ringling. Sugar was shot in Sarasota over 18 days in 2016.
A loose narrative about a runaway teenage girl (yes, her name is Sugar) and the oddballs, transients and scary nutjobs she encounters on the streets, Sugar is told in concentrated bursts — the episodes range in length from two to seven minutes.
Only three were screened at Sunscreen, out of sequence. Although it was a tantalizing look at the series — which is still looking for an online distribution and date of debut — Sugar goes backward and forward in time, which made finding the narrative thread frustrating.
McDermott, who attended the screening with his production team and most of the cast, said he purposely chose this form of non-linear storytelling.
“As a writer, I try to come up with things differently, so I wanted to change the narrative,” he told CL on the red carpet, just after the Sugar premiere.
He and his team chose the internet to debut the short series, he said, “because that’s where the eyeballs are, worldwide. That’s where everybody is. You can’t compare it to television or the movies.”
Was he conceding that today’s audiences have freakishly short attention spans?
“Yes,” McDermott replied with a smile. “Especially on the Internet. And I think it’s important to reach those kids. Really, I made this for kids.”
Sugar, then, is meant to be a cautionary tale about the bleak future in store for teenage runaways.
The hunky McDermott, best known for his work on TV’s The Practice and American Horror Story, was raised by his father and a stepmother, Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler.
Her intense dedication to women’s rights and issues, McDermott explained, had a profound effect on him.
“I met Eve when I was 15 years old, and she really had a great influence on me,” he said. “She really schooled me on what it’s like for women in the world.
“She opened a safe house for women in Congo, for women who are abused and raped. She took me with her, and I was so blown away by it. I’ve been around the world with her, working on behalf of women who are abused.”
As the father of a young daughter, McDermott added, he hopes to use Sugar as a way to direct attention to the plight of girls who run away and meet … the wrong people.
That’s one reason he didn’t put himself in the cast.
“I didn’t want it to be about me,” he explained. “I didn’t want the attention. It was really about the subject matter … and about Ringling.”
As for the “alternative storytelling” of McDermott’s vision, she through it was a masterstroke.
“Sugar has a fragmented reality,” Lillian said. “Everything is hyper-fragmented for her, between flashbacks and present and future, what’s real and who’s there. So we have to kind of bring the audience along on the same ride.”
Actress Kirstie Alley came down from her Clearwater mansion to attend the Sugar screening, and afterwards pronounced it Absolutely Fabulous.
“I hope they can turn it into a 30-minute Netflix show,” the area’s most famous Scientologist said. “I think it’s something that all young people should see. I know that I get really upset in Los Angeles when I hear about teenage prostitutes — there is no such thing as a teenage prostitute, it’s sex trafficking. So I think it’s time we get unreasonable about that and stop arresting for vice crimes which are not them. They’re not the ones committing the sex crimes.”
Alley also alluded to an upcoming project of her own.
“I’m working on a TV series that I hope to shoot in Florida — close, within 30 minutes of my house.”
Peopled, for the most part, by ticket-buying VIPs posing for selfies, and self-styled internet “journalists,” the red carpet was a sort of three-ring circus of the flashy and bizarre. For every genuine celebrity arrival — including Sunscreen guests Joe Pantoliano (whose locally-filmed comedy Random Tropical Paradise arrives in June) and Robert Davi — there were a half-dozen people who looked important but probably weren’t, causing a brief collective crush from the phalanx of photographers.
Was Apple in one of the films being shown at Sunscreen, the question came, time and again.
No, the horse-girl would reply. There’s a movie about a big horse (Albion: The Enchanted Stallion, screening Sunday — the festival’s final day — at Sundial). Apple’s not in it. We’re just here to show our support.
After that, everybody (including a still-unruffled Ryan Tarrant, his staff — and the horse, apparently) went inside to watch Blind, the new Dylan McDermott movie.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 4, 2017.