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EXCLUSIVE: When the CW announced in 2022 that it was cancelling DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow after seven seasons, actor-writer Adam Tsekhman, who played Gary Green, and writer-director Andrew Kasch, who was attached as an editor and director, admit it was a blow.
But the pair, who had become friends over the course of their six years on the superhero show, did not rest idol for long as they came together to collaborate on a whacky short film called The Gummy Bear.
“In our depression, Andrew had the idea for the short and invited me over, and we did it for nothing,” says Canadian actor Tsekhman.
The actor stars in the psychedelic short as a man who is given an experimental gummy bear as a freebie with his regular cannabis delivery. One bite sends him on an unexpected mind-blowing trip. Kasch mixes live action with a kaleidoscope of different animation styles for the trip scenes.
“He got a bunch of his friends on board who did amazing work,” says Tsekhman, citing stop-motion animator Michael Granberry (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Wendell & Wild) as one of the collaborators. “Everyone was like let’s do this. It will be fun.”
A turning point for this personal project was an invite to the Eat My Shorts! selection of the annual Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal in 2023, where audience members asked whether a feature version was on the cards.
Eighteen months later, Kasch and Tsekhman are joining forces with Paris and L.A.-based sales and production company Other Angle Pictures on a psychedelic road trip movie The Gummy Bear, spinning off the short.
Citing the response of the Just For Laughs audience as the starting point, Kasch says the feature combines two of his favourite movie genres.
“I’ve grown up on with a deep love of road trip movies and night from hell movies, from flicks like After Hours to Harold and Kumar Go White Castle,” he says.
“I asked myself what would happen if we crossed Pee Wee’s Big Adventure with a crazy hallucination drug trip aspect, kind of like injecting Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into a cross-country road trip. That’s kind of how the genesis of the project started.”
The new movie will see Tsekhman play a neurotic agoraphobe who is sent on a life-changing trip after he bites into a substance-infused gummy bear at the same time as falling for the delivery woman, who is on route to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada.
Convinced that a bio-cannabis company is about to unleash tainted gummies on the festivalgoers at the event, he sets off into the desert to save her.
Along the way, his path crosses murderous Sheriff Cordell, Russian gangster and organ trafficker Olga, Izzy & Mabel, and an eccentric old couple who have created their own independent state in the desert [inspired by the real-life Republic of Molossia], while he is accompanied by Chris Evans, his trusty Jack Russell Terrier. All additional roles have yet to be cast.
Tsekhman suggests there is also a post-pandemic subtext to the story as the housebound hero is forced out of his comfort zone and into the world.
“There’s the idea that if you face the world, take a risk, maybe you can change things for the better,” he says.
Like the short, the drug trip sequences will mix different forms of animation including stop-motion, claymation, hand-drawn 2D, rotoscoping techniques used by Ralph Bakshi on his 1977 film Wizards, as well as CGI.
“I like playing with mixed media. And when you have a character who’s sort of flashing in and out of hallucinations all the time, that’s kind of a wide-open canvas to throw whatever you want at it,” says Kasch.
Other Angle will both produce and sell the movie. The company, which is at the AFM with a slate of sales titles including Jean Claude Van Damme-starrer The Gardener, will be also looking to connect with potential financiers on The Gummy Bear, for which there is a completed screenplay.
Husband and wife team Olivier Albou and Laurence Schonberg at Other Angle have built its reputation over two decades as the go-to sales company French comedies and feel-good dramas, with recent titles including the breakout hit A Little Something Extra.
They moved to L.A. from Paris four years ago in a bid to expand these activities into the U.S., with a focus on selling remake and ancillary rights to the films in their library as well as developing original productions.
As part of this drive, they also launched French Comedy Club event in L.A. in 2022 to showcase comedies and dramas from France.
Tsekhman first connected with Other Angle through Schonberg, who invited him to the French Comedy Club.
“He started to see what we’re doing and our comedies and so forth,” recounts Schonberg. “He then showed us the short film The Gummy Bear, which we fell in love with and, and that’s how we all came about. These are two very talented guys.”
