Local Filmmakers Make Indie Thriller with Tony Award-Winning Actor
For Lexington filmmakers Marc Weinberg and Victoria Fraser, Outrage is a passion project that tackles urgent questions about the limits of free speech in the U.S. today and the damage done by inflammatory rhetoric.
“We felt so strongly about the story that we took a considerable risk to finance the film,” said Weinberg. Scripted and executive-produced by Weinberg and Fraser, and directed by Robin Rose Singer, Outrage is in the final stages of post-production, being polished for its launch at film festivals this winter.
EYES WIDE OPEN
Outrage is their first feature film, but Weinberg and Fraser are movie industry veterans. Over coffee and pumpkin cake in their Lexington home, they recalled meeting in Los Angeles in 1992 when they worked for the same company as story analysts screening piles of scripts for their creative and commercial potential.
A UCLA graduate in screenwriting, Weinberg later worked for studios and production companies including 20th Century Fox and MGM. Fraser worked at the Disney Channel in original programming, overseeing family movie series and mini-series. After a decade working on other people’s projects, “I realized that I wanted to write my own scripts,” she said.
The pair have collaborated on many projects and sold scripts and story ideas to production companies including Paramount Pictures, Citadel Entertainment, and Dick Clark Productions, and scripted episodes for the Discovery Channel. “Aspiring filmmakers better be ready for rejection,” said Fraser. “You’ve got to be very thick-skinned, and we’ve certainly written a lot of scripts that did not get produced,” she said.
The uncertainty of the movie business and the birth of their first child in 2001 prompted a shift in their career directions and in 2006, a move to Somerville, Mass. Weinberg taught college courses on screenwriting, production, film history and genre. Now in his late sixties, he still teaches as an adjunct at Brandeis, Boston University, and Emerson. Fraser took on marketing work and writing projects for the Discovery Channel.
ORIGINS OF OUTRAGE
From 2019 onwards Weinberg and Fraser were shocked by the rise of inflammatory rhetoric on air and online and frustrated by the apparent impunity of conspiracy theorists and provocative talk-show hosts.
For years conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed falsely that no children died in the 2012 school shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and that the families were actors in a hoax aimed at increasing gun control. His August 2022 trial to assess damages for defamation highlighted the real-world impact of his false claims. As Neil Heslin, whose six-year-old son was killed in the shooting testified, Jones’s rhetoric unleashed a “living hell” of online abuse, anonymous phone calls, and physical harassment.
“When you say all these inflammatory things,” said Weinberg, “it’s going to incite people.” In the pre-internet days, “if you said something that wasn’t true in, say, an opinion column, you could be held responsible,” he said. “Now, you can say whatever, and there’s a percentage of the population that will believe it or circulate it.”
By summer 2022, Weinberg and Fraser were mulling ideas for a film-script exploring these themes. They knew from the start that they would likely have to finance it independently. “So we said, OK, one actor, one room, how much could it cost?” said Weinberg. The answer turned out to be $150,000, a “micro-budget” in film terms.
The challenge was to write a compelling story that could be told convincingly within these limits. One reference point for a gripping movie shot in a confined space was the 2010 thriller Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds plays an American truck driver working in Iraq, who after blacking out during a terrorist attack wakes to find himself being held for ransom buried in a coffin. “Buried was one of the reasons we felt we could pull this film off,” said Weinberg.
The central character of Jake Gadling evolved as a mash-up of traits Weinberg and Fraser saw in prominent conservative talk-show hosts including Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. “These guys have a lot of power – they’re charismatic and they really know how to engage the audience,” said Weinberg. And Gadling has the same assurance: “he carries himself like a statesman, he’s been around the block, he knew Cronkite,” as Weinberg characterizes him.
Married for thirty years, Weinberg and Fraser know how they work best together. “Our first script, we tried to sit side by side,” said Fraser. “Impossible!” Now, they sketch an outline together, Weinberg writes a first draft, then they refine it, constantly bouncing ideas off each other. “The best part of the creative collaboration is sparking ideas,” said Fraser, acknowledging that Weinberg does most of the “drudgery of writing script.”
ONLY CONNECT
By early 2024, Weinberg and Fraser had a screenplay they judged ready to show potential collaborators. As the duo know well, the journey from screenplay to final cut takes luck, money, persistence, time and a village-worth of creative talent.
Luck showed up in the form of award-winning writer and director Dmitry Milkin, a former student of Weinberg’s at Emerson College who has worked for Warner Bros., Comedy Central, CBS and Disney. The two stayed in touch, and when Weinberg described their project, Milkin suggested his good friend Robin Rose Singer, a writer, director, and producer with over a decade’s experience in the New York City film world, as a possible director. “She would be perfect for this,” he told Weinberg.
With several successful short films to her credit, including Home Street Home, a film about a homeless immigrant in Manhattan that won Best Short Documentary at the Harlem International Film Festival in 2018, Singer was looking for a potential first feature-length film to direct. “We’re a very referral-based industry,” she said, speaking recently by phone from her home in Montclair, New Jersey. After Milkin’s introduction, in April 2024 she read Weinberg and Fraser’s script and found it “very timely and relevant,” with plenty of suspense and a satirical edge that hooked her interest.
“We never saw ourselves as the directors of this film,” said Fraser, “and in film, you have to work collaboratively.” In fine-tuning the sceenplay with Singer, some earlier ideas were discarded, and her suggestions incorporated into the final shooting script. “[Marc and Victoria] were wonderful about letting me give input and working with them on it,” said Singer.
“Robin had connections in the New York area with people who basically bop between indie films and major studio and network projects, so she had a really talented pool to draw from,” said Fraser. Starting with her friend and frequent collaborator on commercials, Katie Maguire and Ellyn Vander Wyden as co-producers, Singer quickly assembled a locally-based cast and crew prepared to work on a small-scale but ambitious project that they believed in. “I feel very fortunate to have collected so many amazing people in my life!” she said.
A notable coup was Singer’s success in persuading her one-time acting teacher, Tony-Award winning stage and film actor Reed Birney, to take the central role of Jake Gadling. “He’s an amazing actor,” she said, with a reputation for relishing “very challenging roles.” Birney has won numerous awards for plays on and off Broadway, and is well known for his performance as Vice President Donald Blythe in House of Cards and roles in Succession and The Handmaid’s Tale. His recent films include Mass and The Menu with Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes.
“I knew when we were casting this that we needed someone who could basically hold audience attention for ninety minutes,” said Singer. “Mostly, it’s just him on camera,” she said, and “I was just blown away by the dedication he brought.” The subject matter attracted him, said Weinberg, “and he was really gracious, and wanted to do it.”
Once shooting started, “it was a pretty fast and furious project,” said Singer. Over the last two weeks in August 2024, the shoot took part mostly on a set in a Chelsea studio, representing the grungy basement where Gadling is held captive, with some exterior scenes filmed in Brooklyn and Queens. “With films of this size,” said Singer, “you just have to go with the momentum of it all and embrace the challenges that come up.”
“We’re not purchasing our tickets to Cannes yet,” said Fraser, referring to the prestigious Cannes International Film Festival. Joking aside, she and Weinberg expect that given its small budget and controversial subject matter the film will likely stream without a theatrical release, but they hope a courageous distributor will take a chance and bring it to an audience.
At the time of writing, Singer confirmed that the production team is finishing up the sound mix, and that within the month “we’ll be done and looking for our premiere to share the film with the world.”