Newhallville Casting Call Seeks Movie Talent

The scene was a bare-bones space with concrete walls in an industrial building on Shelton Avenue. Jeff Bell was pleading with Carter Goodrich not to hurt him. 

“I have some money in my pocket and a watch worth five grand,” Bell told Goodrich, his voice quaking. ​“Just let me go. Please let me go.” 

Off in the distance, a door slammed shut. A siren wailed.

“That’s a wrap,” said director and producer Darrell Bellamy.

The occasion, at Kennies Earl Kreative House, was the third casting call for ​“Marblehead,” a screenplay based on Bell’s 2006 thriller of the same name, about a team of ex-Marines holding corporate power and greed to account.

While the story’s climactic ending explodes (quite literally) in the affluent beach town of Marblehead, Mass., the plan is for the film to be staged in and around New Haven.

“There’s so much untapped talent in this area,” said Bell, the executive producer. ​“We want to channel that. We want to give people a platform, acting experience, opportunities, even as extras.” 

“We’re not about importing people from Hollywood or extracting them from New York,” Bell said. ​“We can grow it here.”

Goodrich, a Newtown resident and recent graduate of University of Rhode Island in film and communications, was auditioning for the role of John Smith, one of the ex-Marines who have dubbed themselves RECON. 

Bell was James Greenberg, a corporate ​“right-sizer,” as he put it, who’s engineered the layoffs of over 300,000 workers for companies large and small. Greenberg’s crime, in the eyes of RECON: seeing people as mere names on a spreadsheet to fatten company stock and the salaries of CEOs. 

“Corporations lay people off even when there’s no financial problem,” said the New Haven-born and ‑raised Bell, an Air Force veteran who worked as a broker on Wall Street and now is a financial analyst with the Air Force. ​“They don’t care about people. The corporations say ​‘here’s a $1,000 check, go away.’” 

He said he ​“wrote Marblehead to open people’s eyes to that, and to show that people, regular people, have more power than they think,” he said. ​“Just look at the UAW strike. The workers stuck together and they got what they asked for.” 

“I wrote this book 17 years ago, and almost every person that read it said this is a movie,” he said. ​“But then life happened and the idea got shelved.”

At a family event back in June, he gave Bellamy, his nephew, a copy of the book.

“He has the talent and the eye for the camera, and one of the things I wanted was someone who could show what I was getting at,” he said of Bellamy, whose work ranges from photography to graphic design to music production.

Bellamy read the book. ​“Right away I saw this was something we could make into a film,” he said. 

He enlisted Melo Ali El, a writer and poet whom he’d met two years before while both were working out at Edgewood Park.

“We started talking,” El recalled. ​“He mentioned he was looking for a writer for an idea he had, and I said ​‘I write’ and then we said we’d meet up the next week at the same place.”

“I liked [Darrell’s] independent thinking, his ​‘do for oneself’ mentality,” El continued. ​“I don’t come across a lot of people like that, so when I do, that’s what motivated me. I’m like ​‘this dude is serious.’ Let’s do this.” 

The result was the 2022 ​“Get Ya Mind Right,” a six-part series based in New Haven that has scored almost 4,000 subscriptions on YouTube.

Regarding the opportunity to write the screenplay for ​“Marblehead,” ​“I read it and I was all in,” said El. 

“We didn’t know it then, but ​‘Get Ya Mind Right’ prepared us for this,” Bellamy said, adding that the team has plans for distribution across multiple platforms. 

Bell checked his watch. ​“We’ve got a few more,” he said, before opening the door to Hamden’s Piper Stepule.

Stepule, 26, was reading for the role of the struggling single mother Dianna, among the regular citizens recruited by RECON to act as jury for the depredations of the corporate overlords.

Stepule told them she’d heard about the audition on backstage.com. ​“I’m a theater enthusiast,” she said. ​“I’ve been acting since high school, and I love it, but it’s something I just do on the side.”

With that, she began her scene, with Bell acting as her son. ​“Damon, that is a real turkey,” she told him. ​“It’s just sliced up for us already so the hard part is already handled. I’m going to season it up, you won’t know the difference.”

“You’re real,” Bell told Stepule after they read through the scene twice. ​“Your inflection’s good.”

Dominique Durrette was next. 

The plan, Bell told Durrette, who was auditioning for the role of Amethyst, Greenberg’s escort, is to start production in early December. 

Durrette, a model, told the three that she was ​“brand-new” to acting. She’d heard about the casting call from her manager.

With that, she transformed into Amethyst. ​“You think money can buy everything, even love,” she tells the distraught Greenberg, her voice dripping with contempt, when he learns she’s turned on him. ​“Do something good for once in your life and help us.” 

Bellamy looked at El. ​“That’s it,” he said, pounding the table with excitement. ​“You’re a natural.” 

Those interested in becoming part of the production, including children aged 8 — 10, should visit backstage.com and search Marblehead.