A bit of Hollywood stardust will come to Tucson when a feature-length movie will premiere at a Downtown theater. “Death from an Empty Gun,” an Agatha Christie-style mystery, will be shown to the public for the first time at 6 p.m. Monday, June 17 at the Screening Room, 127 E. Congress Street.
The movie was produced and directed by Mark Headley, who has had a long career in Hollywood making movies and television shows, both in front of the camera and behind it. The film was written by Sean Marcus Headley. He said the story is about a murder that happens while actors are filming a scene from a western. The prop gun used in a shootout is loaded with real bullets instead of blanks, but no one knows who did it.
“This film is about gun safety,” Headley said.
Diane Donato, 75, plays the sleuth who solves the crime.
“My character is like a detective who is very matter of fact,” she said. “Very intuitive, notices things...”
“(She) moves it forward before the police get there,” Headley added.
This is not Donato’s first foray into filmmaking. She wrote and starred in “Single Minded,” a feature movie with a funny take on looking for love later in life.
“It’s never too late to try something new no matter how old you are,” she said. “I started acting at 69 and little did I know I would have so much fun.”
The antagonist is played by Michael Reue. Headley said everyone has a motive to kill him and that’s the mystery.
“He’s obnoxious and he makes so many enemies we don’t actually know who killed him,” Headley said.
It’s a lot of fun to play a character that everyone hates, Reue explained.
“My character is just an arrogant (jerk) who walks in and doesn’t want to deal with any of his subordinates or people below him,” he said. “I usually play one of the bad guys. It is fun (but) you know it’s not real… The hardest thing for me was a couple of the women had said something to me (in the movie) and interacted with me and I had to have a lewd or mean comeback.”
Despite evidence to the contrary on the big screen, Reue does not think himself as an actor.
“I consider myself a 62-year-old guy living his childhood dream playing cowboys,” he said. “That’s what I consider myself.”
If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because Headley took inspiration from the recent tragic shooting that happened on actor Alec Baldwin’s set for the movie, “Rust.”
As the leader on this set, Headley is very careful about firearms. Although the actors are shooting blanks, there is a strict protocol about using guns of any type. There is one armorer — that’s the person who gets the guns ready and hands them to the actors — and after every scene that involves shooting, the armorer collects them and reloads them with blanks. On Headley’s set, everyone takes gun safety seriously, and no one fools around. For this movie, Reue was the armorer.
“We had meetings and we went over the proper procedure of how a firearm should be used on a set,” Headley said. “I’ve never had an accident on the 80 films I’ve done. It’s safety first… Mike has (the guns) locked up and he is the only one who handles them. Before we shoot, he checks with the actor and makes sure the actor knows exactly what is in that gun. The gun is opened, we check it and then we do the scene.”
Even with the time spent on gun safety, the 75-minute movie (including credits) was shot in only one day at Harker’s Museum and Movie Set in South Tucson.
“We don’t mess around,” Headley said. “We go out and we do it.”
Filming the movie is a lot of work but what comes after takes a lot longer.
“(Post-production) is very complex,” Headley said. “A lot of people don't really understand the complexity of post-production, but everything comes together. Whatever you shot, post-production takes 10 to 20 times longer than the actual production process. You’ve got music, you’ve got sound, you’ve got color correction, and just creatively, making the story flow so it’s understandable and entertaining.“
“Movies are not shot in sequence of what’s happening in the movie,” Donato added. “It’s not like the editors get everything and they just go, ‘All I have to do is fill in here.’ It’s pretty tedious.”
For tickets to catch the premiere, reach out to Headley directly at Markheadley12@yahoo.com.
