KICKSTART PART 3 of the HENRY FOOL Trilogy

Only just learned about this today, and there's only one day left:

Hal Hartly is crowdfunding 'NED RIFLE' http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260302407/ned-rifle

The thrilling conclusion to a story it took 20 years to tell—HENRY FOOL, FAY GRIM, and now, shooting in spring 2014...

NED RIFLE

...is the third and final chapter of what has become my Henry Fool Trilogy, or my Grim Family Saga... some kind of parallel neighborhood where I work out how the world feels to me.

Thomas Jay Ryan as Henry and Parker Posey as Fay in HENRY FOOL (1997)
Thomas Jay Ryan as Henry and Parker Posey as Fay in HENRY FOOL (1997)
I wasn't expecting this when I made HENRY FOOL in 1997. But the cast and I loved these characters and regularly wondered out loud what would become of them. So in 2007 I made FAY GRIM, continuing to use this lovable wreck of an American family to reflect on contemporary events. Though just by deciding to do that I committed myself to a third and (probably) final chapter about Henry and Fay's son, Ned.

HENRY FOOL (1997) and FAY GRIM (2007) are available on Netflix if you want to check them out.

And so here it is. I have this nearly completed saga of the Grim family of Woodside Queens and their love-hate relationship with the man at the center of all their lives: the demonic, preposterous, and exasperating Henry Fool.

In this swiftly paced conclusion, Henry and Fay's son, Ned, played by Liam Aiken, turns 18 and leaves a witness protection program. ("Rifle" is his maternal grandmother's maiden name—he's incognito). His mom has spent the last four years in military custody for alleged terrorist activities (see Fay Grim, 2007) and is transferred to a federal penitentiary to serve a life sentence. Ned, who has absorbed the Christianity of the well adjusted and devout family he has been living with, nevertheless sets out to find and kill his dad, Henry Fool, for the mess the man has made of Fay's life. But his aims are frustrated by the brilliant, sexy, and troubled Susan, whose connection to Henry predates even the great man's arrival in the lives of the Grim family.

NED RIFLE is the most accessible and rollicking film I've ever written while concerning things I care about deeply. Oddly, I suspect I've written a hit. If I can just get it made. (I felt this way about Henry Fool too which did in fact turn out to be my most financially successful film.)

It's also an opportunity to pull off something that doesn't happen everyday: to make three films over the course of a generation with the same actors playing the same characters. Liam Aiken, who I cast as Parker Posey's son in HENRY FOOL, was seven years old in 1997. Now he's a young man with a stack of acting credits to his name and ready to play Ned again. (He doesn't even remember playing Ned in 1997.) Parker Posey is on board as is James Urbaniak who plays her peculiarly poetic garbage man brother. And, of course, none of this can happen without the participation of Thomas Jay Ryan as the unseen hand in everyone's life, Henry Fool.