When Grace Cambell tries to revive the reputation of a forgotten astronomer, history threatens to repeat itself.
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STARS & STARDOM
STARGAZER tells the story of one night in the life of Grace Campbell, a grad student burning with fury about the fate of a forgotten astronomer. Cecilia Payne discovered the nature of the universe and saw her genius stolen by men.
For Grace, history threatens to repeat itself when she's forced to partner with a male journalist. Spike Randall books her an appearance on a new talk show with Annette Gordon-Reed. Grace is stunned. It's a dream come true. But Grace is afraid of public speaking, and Spike is obsessed not with Cecilia's brilliance, but with her victimhood. And they're due at the studio at 6 a.m.
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A dancer eavesdrops through the library shelves. Diana de la Palma is working on a story of her own, a mythic ballet about sex and power in ancient Greece. She leads Grace on a long night’s journey under the influence as Grace flashes back to Cecilia at Harvard in the 1920s and both women are transported by fantasies.
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Spike resents this choreographer. She's distracting. And hot. And he’s trying to sell the project to streamers, hoping for a multi-season series, along with the status he craves in a fading career. Grace will have to choose: She can partner with a man she's not sure she trusts, or kick Spike to the curb, go it alone, and stand up for Cecilia and herself.
PERSISTENCE
by Rob Ackerman, co-writer
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There were thirty of us. In a forest in the rain. Working, determined, shivering for hours. We had to get these shots, scenes we'd imagined and written and rehearsed. An older writer with a younger collaborator, a seasoned producer with a first-time director, a Broadway veteran with a gifted ensemble, department leaders with diverse student crews, and a work ethic that knew no bounds. This was what it took to tell an allegory about the greatest female scientist you've never heard of.
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Before it became a movie, Stargazer was a play. Six years ago, I'd fallen in love with a mistreated genius. Kate Ginna helped to create the student, journalist, and dancer who'd be drawn into Cecilia's orbit. It took research and rewrites and wrong turns, followed by Zoom readings and masked table readings and distanced backyard readings. We formed a pod to rehearse and argue and organize and shoot and edit a short film that had a chance to grow into a feature.
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But we needed a director. Out of the blue, I got a call from a friend of a friend of Matt Bogart, a cinematographer named Alan McIntyre, who said he loved the script and knew how to make the movie. Alan had experience on more than a hundred films and taught at three universities, including one that offered its campus as our shooting location.
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We knew the job would be brutal. It required a great producer, someone comfortable under extreme pressure. Someone like the former supervisor of three SNL Film Units, Justus Mclarty, the best I've ever witnessed. Justus and I had met unloading trucks. He'd cut his teeth planning river trips for Outward Bound. Now he was working on major motion pictures. Why would he say yes to this tiny micro-budget indie? It helped that his wife shamed him. She’d worked on countless passion projects as an actor and she wanted her husband to know what it was like to go into battle without an air-conditioned trailer, to shoot a movie on a shoestring.
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Challenges kept coming. The Screen Actors Guild required constant Covid testing, which seemed prohibitively expensive. Raising money during a lockdown looked impossible. Sudden construction at our main location meant a scheduling overhaul. Plus, we had a literal plague of locusts.
But what we also had, besides a great setting and sense of purpose, was a group of smart people to decorate a dorm room, dress a chem lab, create fantasy costumes, invent makeup designs, juggle lighting and lenses, mix sound and aim microphones, and play roles as security guards, students, and professors crossing the quad. We became an elite team, sleeping on campus, sharing cafeteria breakfasts, working crazy hours. Experts taught beginners, and everyone stayed cheerful, even through the seemingly endless phases of post-production.
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Now our movie is made. Many of our rookies are working on their third or fifth films. And we feel mighty good about that too.
