Why local filmmakers like Tom Henrickson can’t give up their California dreamin’

By Jim Keogh

Tom Henrickson, a gas-leak technician/football coach from Worcester, looks about as much like a filmmaker as Steven Spielberg looks like a gas-leak technician/football coach from Worcester.

Appearances aren’t everything, of course, but they do help us slot people into life’s stations. And so it’s easy to picture the bony, bespectacled Spielberg going about his business of churning out Hollywood blockbusters, and the burly, buzz-cut Henrickson going about his business of wandering neighborhoods making sure nobody’s house is in danger of blowing up before heading over to St. Peter Marian High School to whip the offensive line into game shape.

At 45, Tom Henrickson was supposed to have his stations nailed down — husband, father, coach, backyard barbecuer, the regular guy from Falcon Street.

And he would have gladly settled for all that, except for the damn sickness that compelled him to write a screenplay using how-to books. The sickness that convinced him he could pull together enough funding to make a short movie from his script. That put thoughts in his brain that maybe his destiny lies 3,000 miles west. That spurred him to spend nine days in Los Angeles last month getting his film seen, meeting with studio executives, establishing a network among Hollywood players.

Tom Henrickson vows to return to L.A. 'I thanked [the Paramount executive], but I let him know he’s not done with me. I’ll be back.'

This is a dream in three parts.

The Backstory

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A guy sits on his couch watching a rental, grimaces, and declares, “I could write a better movie than that.”

Everybody says it, nobody does anything about it. Tom Henrickson issued the complaint so often that his older son, T.J., couldn’t stand it any more. One day, the father was talking to the son, then a junior at Holy Name High School, about setting life goals, when T.J. “threw it right back in my face.”

“He told me, ‘You always said you could write a movie and you never did it,’” Henrickson recalls. “That hit me hard. As a coach, I’ve always told my players they can do anything; that nothing should stop them.”

Henrickson hadn’t written much more than a to-do list since his undergrad days at Worcester State. Life as a jock had been fun then — his college football team went 44-4 in his four years there, and he finished second in the 100 meters at the only track meet he ran in, after taking his place at the starting line in a three-point stance.

His father died during his sophomore year, and school became less of a priority. To help out his mother and four siblings, he went to work, studying just enough to be able to remain on the football team though never earning a degree. He got married, had three kids, coached football at South, Shrewsbury and SPM among others, formed the St. Joseph’s basketball league. Checked for gas leaks.

With his son’s challenge ringing in his ears, Henrickson bought two books, titled, literally, How To Write a Screenplay and How Not To Write a Screenplay and began making notes.

His premise for Third Date showed promise: a man in his thirties is incapable of enjoying any kind of long-term romantic relationship because some cosmic mishap always prevents him from making it past a second date with any woman. He’s cursed, and has no clue how to break the hex.

Henrickson faced some daunting hurdles in crafting a screenplay from his comic notions. For one, he couldn’t really type, and two, he couldn’t really write, at least not with the polish and assurance needed to get his script read.

Henrickson then made the first of several major decisions that would cement his commitment to his dream.

With his notes and two books in tow, he flew to South Carolina to spend four days with his cousin, Carol Ryberg, a transplanted Worcesterite who not only knew her way around a keyboard, but who would give him the straight dope about which scenes sang and which ones choked.

“I spent four days dictating to her, and it was the most fun I had in thirty years,” Henrickson says. “We laughed, we acted out scenes. We spent 10 and 12 hours in a room turning this into a screenplay.” On his return home, he got ribbed for being so serious about this movie thing; “Tommy Scorsese” he was called.

Tom Henrickson is a talker. A social animal who, like a shark that needs to swim to survive, requires a steady flow of conversation to remain connected and engaged. And so, he started chatting up his movie. He found Worcester people who knew New York people who knew Hollywood people. He reached producer Nancy Tenenbaum, who told him it took her eight years to get Meet the Parents made and advised Henrickson if he really wanted to be in the game he’d have to be in it for the long haul.

He got professional help from screenwriter Jon Seamans who helped him pare down Third Date, connected with producers Kristen Lucas and Amy Devlin, and on May 4, 2007 staged a fundraising gala at Union Station that drew hundreds of family and friends (“I spent $5,000 to make $10,000,” he laughs, a little ruefully).

He got a director, recruited Boston actor Billy Smith (Showtime’s The Brotherhood), the towering Maurice Lavell, former bodyguard to Anna Nicole Smith, and a bunch of aspiring amateur actors. They cranked out a 28-minute short over the course of four days, shooting in Uxbridge, Foxboro and the Cape.

On a balmy Thursday night last September, Henrickson and company filled three debut screenings of Third Date at Showcase North, 1,200 people total. Tom knew all but a handful by name.

“I’d gotten so close to this thing that it stopped being funny to me,” he says. “But people laughed when they were supposed to laugh.”

They loved it; standing O’s, cheers. But this was a hometown crowd — serving up Third Date at Showcase was like sending David Ortiz up to bat at Fenway Park. You were expecting boos?

No, if Tom Henrickson were to get any honest assessment of his movie’s commercial chances, he needed to show it to an audience far from the embrace of his local fans.

The Pitch

Los Angeles is renowned for not giving a damn. Got a killer movie idea? Big deal, so does the pool boy. The late monologist Spalding Gray once conducted an experiment where he asked strangers on the L.A. streets how their screenplay was coming along, and almost to a man, and woman, the response was, “How did you know I’m writing a screenplay?”

Henrickson wasn’t sure what to expect when he left Massachusetts and flew to Los Angeles on August 14 to show Third Date at the L.A. International Shorts Film Festival. His goal was to try to sell the concept to a studio, or maybe interest them in another comedy he had knocking around in his head called Rotten Rodney, about the world’s worst behaved kid.

“After Worcester I knew I had something, a marketable concept,” he says. “But you’ve got to network yourself, get known.”

He was leaving his comfort zone in a big way.

“You can’t sit by the phone all day, and you can’t knock on doors because nobody will let you in. It was so lonely out there I was ready to call 1-800-Rent-A-Friend.”

Fortunately, he’d already begun establishing contacts out west, including Patrick Kopka, an Auburn native working as a screenwriter who attended the Shorts Festival.

“I drove up to the screening,” Kopka recalls. “I could see this big, strapping guy coming up the elevator in West Hollywood. He might as well have had an ‘I’m from Worcester’ sign on. Every guy out here looks like an extra from Gossip Girl. 

“But I really enjoyed Third Date and was happy to help him out in any way I could. My suggestion to him was to keep pushing Third Date, but to move on to his next thing. They asked Barry Levinson once what his best script was and he said ‘my next one.’ It’s a great line because you have to sort of divorce yourself from the project you’ve finished and move on.”

Henrickson said he was floored by the reception of Third Date at the festival, which he insists was even more enthusiastic than the Worcester screening. His tenacity landed him meetings with executives at Sony and Paramount, the latter telling him “hundreds of millions of people try to get on the Paramount lot, and most get led away in cuffs.”

Henrickson had been promised 20 minutes but got two hours of the guy’s time, much of it spent pitching Rotten Rodney. “I thanked him,” he says, “but I let him know he’s not done with me. I’ll be back.”

The Prognosis

Rick Eid, a Worcester native and former lawyer turned writer/executive producer on Law and Order, says success in films and TV is derived from a combination of talent, persistence and some luck.

“If a short [film] gets you noticed, that’s a good first step,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you’re Spielberg or Cruise or Scorsese; it just gets you another turn at bat. This isn’t the lottery where you get one try and hit it rich. If you want to be a writer, a producer, a director, you’ve got to pay your dues, learn the craft, make relationships. It takes time.”

Eid, who met with Henrickson in L.A., said he has the “right temperament and personality” to make a go at a movie career.

“You’ve got to keep banging at it,” he says. “It sounds like Tom’s short got him some attention, he met with a lot of people, and I’m sure the next question is what else have you got.”

Kopka agrees.

“In the end it’s all about the next script. If you write a great script, that really helps the cause. Now the more commercial it is, the better its chances are. The cream definitely rises to the top. But you also need some luck.

“Hollywood is a feast or famine business. I’ve had unbelievable years and I’ve had lean years. You just have to keep the faith and keep writing. Tom is a really nice guy, and he’s funny. And he’s certainly got a champion in me, though he’d be better off with Spielberg.”

Henrickson confided details about Rotten Rodney to Kopka, who cautioned him about publicly revealing too much, given the opportunity for intellectual theft. 

“I wouldn’t tell one of my ideas to the Pope,” Kopka says. “It’s best to keep those things to yourself. So as a favor to him, I wouldn’t write anything specific about his new idea. It’s also bad luck.”

Henrickson is back in Worcester, still plugging. He’s met with Jim Serpico of Apostle Pictures, the executive producer of the Denis Leary show Rescue Me, and he’s now seeking private investors to help fund a rewrite of Third Date as a feature, hire a line producer, and earn enough to periodically commute between coasts.

He continues to exhaust every angle. A high school friend is buddies with superagent Scott Boras. Maybe he can put in a good word. An acquaintance knows the mother of Rita Wilson, the wife of Tom Hanks and producer of the blockbuster romantic comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Maybe he can get a Third Date DVD into Wilson’s mother’s hands, and she’ll in turn pass it on to Rita.

Crazier things have happened.

“Unless you know somebody, the door won’t open,” Henrickson says. “All you’ve got to do is get one person — the right person — interested, then everybody’s interested.” o