The winner of the first Memphis Film Prize was writer-director-actress McGhee Monteith for “He Could’ve Gone Pro,” a 13-minute drama shot the day before Easter in the Midtown home of co-star Cecelia Wingate.
Originally conceived for the stage, “He Could’ve Gone Pro” demonstrates the influence of two playwrights cited by Monteith as favorites, Edward Albee (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) and Tracy Letts (“August: Osage County”). Described by its creator as “a very Southern story,” the film chronicles a fraught Christmas lunch shared by an angry daughter (Monteith), the daughter’s new boyfriend (Stephen Garrett) and the daughter’s “bless her heart” mother (Wingate). The director of photography was the Memphis film scene’s MVP, Ryan Earl Parker.
Many Monteith family members still live in Memphis, but the actress is now based in Los Angeles. She soon will be seen as a regular on “American KoKo,” a series produced by Viola Davis for ABCd, the television network’s new digital platform.
A franchise, so to speak, of the five-year-old Louisiana Film Prize (which offers a $50,000 award), the Memphis Film Prize required participants hoping for the $10,000 prize to shoot a 5-to-15-minute narrative short film in Shelby County between Feb. 18 and June 14. Ten finalists were chosen from the 40-plus films entered in the contest, and those ten films were screened Friday and Saturday at the Malco Studio on the Square. Audience members helped pick the prize-winner by voting via private ballot after attending the screenings.
Shreveport’s Gregory Kallenberg, founder of the Louisiana and Memphis film prize events, said 670 tickets were sold to the film prize screenings here, and 539 ticket-buyers voted. “If we had that kind of participation in national elections, we would have a real democracy,” he said. Audience votes counted for 50 percent of the winning film’s score; the other half came from the votes of a six-person jury of film professionals.
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