Toaster (2001)

Filmed at College Tower Apartments and the riverside park in Kent, Ohio, "Toaster" is a dark comedy. Michael Callahan (Grant) doesn't know what he wants, but his talking toaster (Hodges) does. The appliance will stop at nothing to make sure his owner's whims are carried out, even if it gets messy. Between the bodies he ends up having to hide from his girlfriend (Savering) and the cop next door (Jones), Callahan simply won't have enough time to deal with his beautiful, stalker landlady (Elliott) or college ex-girlfriend (Winteringham) when they come a-calling. The script was originally a play written as a class project for my playwright class. It proved very popular, and we attempted to stage it as a student production. Not able to get the rehearsal space for enough time, we decided to simply shoot a film to screen during our allotted time. The film proved a longer endeavor, and we missed our original deadline by over a year. Blockbuster Video was having a contest for indie filmmakers at the time. At home production was still in its infancy, and the production values must have been short of expectation all around. Blockbuster never named a winner and pulled the plug on the subsidiary company it had created to host the competition. We like to look at it as the jury's still out deliberating. The film was premiered at the Kent Movie Theater, which is now the Kent Stage.