Production Notes

Sadly, since that festival’s schedule was a last-minute “tossed salad,” she was not
notified to be present at the second night of awards. Some stranger picked up the
trophy for her. The Vegas event topped the mayhem for the sketch show (“Orange is
the New Orange”) which then, of course, prompted the making of SCGO. So,
naturally, the Vegas fiasco spawned yet another iteration for the SCGO story to
continue with the facetious “3rd Annual Matricher Falls Internationel Film Festival”
(international is purposely misspelled). Along the festival circuit where Kerr and her
team ultimately earned 19 awards and 21 nominations for that 90-minute sendup.
MF, as it affectionally became called, ended with the main character, Kerr, playing
herself and walking off with a film “distributor” where we later learned he had lured
her into joining his distribution enterprise, “It’s the Gravy Unlimited” (Indie Film
Distribution company, (affectionately dubbed ITGU), thus the next sequel:
“It’s the Gravy.”

Together, SCGO and MF won 36 awards along the film festival circuit. Amazing,
considering that both those films were shot out in four days, respectively, and had sub-
budgets to get them done. Yet, both became available on multiple streaming platforms
including, Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV, Reveel, Cineverse, Tubi, Xumo,
Future Today, OTT, and many others.

So why not round out the story, Kerr thought. Give the franchise closure. And she did
with ITGU. Her script started with the main character, Cherie, getting conned into
putting all her eggs in the ITGU basket with two shady film dealmakers—well, first
because they led her to believe they wanted to take on her SCGO film, and secondly,
because two of the main characters—Mitch and Maynard—could not go
home—they were forced to stay in Matricher Falls, courtesy of the MF Correctional
Facility to serve 46 months for having stolen the Grand Jury Ladle Prize in the men’s
room after the closing night festivities at the MF film festival.

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After assembling the all-improvised MF footage, Kerr realized she had one more story
to tell: What happens after she walks off with Sheldon Stankey, the shady film
distributor, who, along with his partner Ken Kahn, lure her into dumping her net worth into
their sham company.

But, making ITGU was harder this time: Kerr handled the making of the film with
only a couple of production assistants and no one to bounce her scene choices off
except Saint Dan—her editor who served as her guardian angel—the two of them
sewing together a cinematic scattered ball of yarn to make the snappiest cuts of all
time. Editor, Dan Seigerman’s brilliant cuts coincided with Kerr’s vision. Great
match. Great fit. Happy Ending.
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Kerr invited many of the SCGO and MF’ers to return to the screen in this third and
final sequel, because as a group, they knew how to play off one another; each very
talented in his or her way. The main character and her counterparts may have been
able to make a success of the ITGU corporation, but they had no idea what they were
doing, and they fell into the trap of unscrupulous “influencers,” a bunch of
foul-mouthed kids who ran a phony lemonade stand to hide their illegal shipping
enterprise sending illicit gravy across state lines.
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Actually if you followed the series, it was Mobey , a bus boy in the MF film, who set
the stage for ITGU when in one scene, he chatted it up with the eager SCGO
filmmakers during the festival in MF, letting on to an unsuspecting winner when he let
him know that his great, great grandfather had come over on the Mayflower; set down
roots in Matricher Falls, where as he stated, “every resident has a pot of gravy…on
the stove.” Gravy, Mobey affirmed is what the Mayflower passengers ate—was all
they had—as they crossed the Atlantic. Fast forward: what was left of the group was a
gravy recipe and a resolve to set up camp to build their own city—a community that
soon became known for its 78 flavors of gravy. Everyone was in on the action. The
MF group was unsuspecting as they joined the influencers in helping them smuggle
gravy across state lines.

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There’s chaos. There’s some backstabbing. But, as the tagline goes…” In the end,
everyone takes their lumps.”

Of course, Kerr didn’t really have a real-life affair with gravy, though she does
mention it in MF based on the authentic experience of eating at a small restaurant
where gravy (never ordered) was poured on “thick” – atop her salad, Maynard’s
burrito, and Mitch’s sandwich. Focusing on the gravy was not only a creative decision
when writing the final sequel, it was a logical one. Yes, it’s all about the indie film

distribution world, but the gravy steals the show. The word “gravy” a connotation for
making lots of money, e.g., “A Promising ride on the gravy train.” Offering a third
iteration of the film was an ambitious ride on a fictional gravy train.

Since Kerr had never forgotten she was kicked out of the Brownies as a youngster,
which prevented her from attending the school’s May Day celebration due to her
chronic profanity on campus at All Saints Catholic elementary school, and thought
she tried, she never got over it. So, she relished the thought of casting children in
ITGU, ones who would swear like sailors! This helped her vindicate herself from the
childhood humiliation for all the times she was referred to Sister Severino’s office for
punishment. “What a relief,” she exclaimed. The minor actors playing a string of
cursers delighted in the idea along with Kerr because it served as some kind of outlet
and something they could never get away with had they not been “required”
to curse throughout each and every one of their scenes. If cast, the parents of these
young actors understood and approved Kerr’s request to let them swear, freely and
often. Kerr expects flack for this, but she states flatly, “I’m too old to care!”

There are lots of twists and turns in the film. A lot happens at the kid’s lemonade
stand LMA (Lemonade My Ass) the kids scam operation, Then there are the two
Saudi (pretend) princes who fake buy in ITGU, with counterfeit money, then get
sucked into the RICO thing. There are also two detectives who are on to
everyone—two dry Dragnet types who finally make the bust. Then there are moments
with the leftovers from the Mumble Gang (two of the four) who try to rap their way
through their job title interpretations. “I couldn’t do the sequel without them,” Kerr
said. “Those characters were a huge part of the MF prequel to the ITGU film,” Kerr
clarifies. “We thought it was perfectly appropriate to include them on the management
team.

One critical incident took place the day before Day One of the shoot. Some scenes
required a jail visitation set. Kerr had arranged to shoot this at a large Orange County
jail—a real one. Though she started to secure this location in September, it wasn’t
until December 1 that she was made to wait for a final okay. It didn’t come so when
Rich Flin and Matt Morrison showed up that Friday to rehearse the trios scenes Kerr
got a sudden brainstorm. She suggested they use her building’s floor to glass window
panels in the conference room to “construct this visitation room. Quickly, the three got
to work grabbing 6-foot, white banquet tables, and a few for sale signs stored in the
men’s dressing room at Kerr’s theater. In record time, they built the room, sequestered
it with the tables and sign—wrote some graffiti on one side of the signs; grabbed
telephone receivers off the office phones, and taped them to the shabby constructed
“walls.” The set, in the film, looked perfectly appropriate to a small-town jail. It
remains as the main characters’ finest accomplishment in the making of the film!

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Another of the most fun and memorable experiences in the making of the film, from
Kerr’s point of view, was the “accident” in the last scene of the film—the scene was
shot at the end of the four-day shoot. She and her co-conspirators, Mitch and
Maynard, were sentenced to five years of gravy packing in a warehouse
where Cherie begs to go home and become miserable again as a comedy director. Kerr
directed the camera to roll non-stop for 13 minutes to capture the angst of the three
clueless and pathetic characters. During that shot, the lights in the cramped storage
room, where they were filming, went out in the middle of the non-stop, lengthy scene.
The lights were on a time sensor and time was up, but despite the
unexpected debacle, the three continued on seamlessly improvising their dialogue,
without skipping a beat, as they built on the humorous error of the real outage.

What happens after that is another “full circle,” moment in the plot. Everyone gets off
except for the three out-of-towners. It turns out Mobey is actually the judge in town
(the only one) and he sentences the threesome mainly because they never left a tip at
Zov’s, the restaurant where Mobey works evenings as a busboy.

The kids continue their crime spree, the princes are excused…it’s freedom despite
their involvement in the crime. In fact, everyone else walks free, but the main
characters. Maynard wants to pay off his credit card, Mitch wants to go back to jail
where he was the “captain” of the book club. As mentioned, Cherie just wants to
return to her duties as a comedy director—where she exclaims is now her “happy
place.” And, yes, she plans to direct it to capitalize on her self-inflicted misery.

But, wait: Where the hell is that coveted Grand Jury Ladle Prize?

Audiences—fans who’ve taken in each work in the SCGO series are left to wonder:
Will Kerr change her mind, and carry on with yet another iteration of this bizarre
story? “No,” she says tacitly. “I think I’ll try a drama next time.”

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