OKC-Based Rockhouse Pictures Looks to the Future With Damnation Road

By Brian Brus

The recently formed Rockhouse Pictures production company in Oklahoma City is coming off the momentum from its award-winning feature film Sex Machine to start work on Damnation Road, company founders Kenny Phillips and Christopher Sharpe said.

“Your grandfather probably won’t like these movies,” Sharpe said. “We’re looking at the 18- to 35-year-old, technologically savvy, pop culture-oriented audience. … It’s definitely not Gone With the Wind with a lot of pensive looks and that sort of thing.”

Phillips and Sharpe met in 2004 through a mutual friend and cinematographer. Both men had grown up in Oklahoma City, but Phillips left after graduation because he didn’t see a lot of promise for a young artist in the metro area in the 1970s. He worked on the road for several years before settling down to create his own company back in his hometown.

Phillips said that now, however, “I feel there’s a lot in Oklahoma City to keep a young person here. The whole infrastructure, from entertainment to sports and educational opportunities, is a lot stronger.”

Sex Machine would seem to support that perspective. The movie, which Sharpe wrote, produced and directed, won the Best Film prize at the 2006 deadCENTER film festival in Oklahoma City and the Best Film and Best Special Effects prizes at the 2006 MicroCinema Fest in Chicago. Sex Machine, shot in and around Oklahoma City, tells a twisted story of a modern-day Frankenstein and is on its way to becoming a cult film classic, the men said.

Rockhouse features take from the genres of comic books, pulp adventure magazines and B-movies to create “a fresh remix,” appropriate to today’s high-tech media culture, Sharpe said.

Phillips has been in the sound production industry for about 30 years, working with bands including U2, Van Halen and Nirvana as well as performers such as Robin Williams. He also designed and built the lights, sound and set materials for the Broadway show Defending the Caveman and the U.S. tour of Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python.

Sharpe has worked on a series of short films and served as assistant director and editor of Cloud Symphony under Shogo Nakagawa. He said there’s money to be made in independent films, if a business recognizes the appropriate scale of operations.

“A lot of people going into independent films and financing them don’t really have a good sense of the market they’re going after or how to take advantage of new ways to distribute,” Sharpe said. “We have what I consider an aggressive and exciting business plan behind each one of the movies we’re producing, and it doesn’t depend on the fact that we have to go to film festivals and rely on companies like Miramax picking us up. … It doesn’t have to succeed at the level of The Dark Knight to make a healthy profit.”

As with Rockhouse’s other works, the business model for their next movie, Damnation Road, will be a separate, limited-liability company, stressing tight budgets and targeted product markets. Phillips said the men have developed a network of investors from their previous works.

In the next few weeks the company will begin casting in Oklahoma City, Dallas and Austin. Sharpe described the movie as an action- horror movie set in a near post-Apocalyptic future, featuring a punk rock band stranded in the middle of nowhere – “an old-school horror movie that will leave you feeling fun about the end of the world.”

Originally published by Brian Brus.

(c) 2008 Journal Record – Oklahoma City. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.