Local artist Amy Waddell has been a writer-for-hire for a while.
“I’m primarily a fiction and screenwriter, but I had been writing animation in Paris,” she said. “I’d been writing on a show called ‘PJ Masks,’ which is a kids show.”
When she moved to Sedona several years ago, she met Dev Ross, another local artist with a background in screenwriting.
Ross invited her to get coffee, where they began talking about projects they’ve worked on and Ross mentioned she was working on a film about conflict resolution and bullying.
“She said, ‘You should direct it,’ and I said, ‘Sure,’” Waddell said. “It was very loose at that time, because they were pretty far fromactually making it happen.”
“High School Detention the Musical” follows a trio of “misguided teens,” according to the movie synopsis, going to detention, where they’re met with three singing divas who help them learn to better resolve conflicts.
At its core, the movie is an anti-bullying film with goals to keep conversations respectful, and spread it across the country’s classrooms.
The film was originally about 90 minutes, but, because the filmmakers’ goal is to get it into classrooms around the country, they cut it down to be the length of a short.
The 40-minute film will show at the Sedona Performing Arts Center on Saturday, Feb. 28, at 4 p.m. Tickets are available at sedonafilmfestival.com or by calling (928) 282-1177.
Producer and composer Shondra Jepperson said the soundtrack for the film will be available on Spotify, iMusic and other streaming channels on Tuesday, Feb. 24.
“We both became very concerned about the uncivil dialog taking place in our country, internationally, too, but we’ll say, especially in our country,” Ross said “Alienating people, alienating friends from friends, family from family and children from their parents, and students from one another.”
Many people, children and adults, Ross said do not spend any time at all trying to understand others’ viewpoints. Especially because she’s worked in schools and with a lot of children, she sees that happening a lot and not much being done about it.
“The arts are just a great way to bring that out in the open and talk about it in an unthreatening manner,” she said.
“I would say, is it is a serious piece,” Waddell said. “About kids who are bullied at home, who are abused, who bully themselves at school, they are bullies and so it’s got, like a heavier tone to it, and yet there’s kind of a silly level to the silly way that Dev wrote it.”
Ross has been a part of Sedona’s Artist in the Classroom program, as well as working throughout Los Angeles County, five separate American Indian nations and across the country. She also has written screenplays for Disney, among others, and won multiple awards for her screenwriting, including an Emmy for her work on ABC’s “New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.”
Ross and Jepperson met after Ross was cast in a play alongside Jepperson’s husband, Tom. They quickly became good friends.
“We started coaching kids together, and developed Sedona Youth Theatre and a whole bunch of other things,” Jepperson said. “Then later we started writing together.”
She said she and Ross ran Sedona Youth Theatre out of Community Library Sedona for 16 summers.
Ross said she researched statistics on bullying and interviewed kids on what they see in their schools.
SIFF Executive Director Patrick Schweiss said he saw the film doing a lot for a lot of communities, including Sedona and the Verde Valley.
“If we can even save one kid from either being bullied or being the bully through this film, it will have been a success,” he said. “I think this has the potential to help hundreds, thousands, if not more, students who are dealing with this on a daily basis.”
Jepperson said the goal is to get the film into schools around the country.
“We had to cut down a feature film to a short an hour-and-a half to 40 minutes,” Ross said. “We had to truncate things. It was so hard because there’s so much to talk about.”
The 40-minute limit for the shorts was better, she said, because students could conceivably watch it in a classroom setting without having to break it up across multiple class periods.
Schweiss said the first screening of the film will be for the Sedona Red Rock Junior High School students earlier in the week of its Saturday premiere.
“We’re doing a private screening for them, so they will literally be the first group of students in the world to be able to see this film,” he said. “Again, their goal is to get it into every junior high in the country. I hope that this becomes part of a curriculum.”
Jepperson said the target audience is tweens and early teens.
“And families,” she said, “because we want to create dialog, right? When we say this to adults, we tell them about the concept, they go, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of adults that can use this, too.’”
Several Mingus Union High School students worked on the project, because Jepperson said she is highly involved coaching many theater students on voice and acting.
“While I think kids, especially my age, since we’re seniors, will find it kind of cringe, because it’s a musical,” said MUHS senior Evelyn Bouse, one of the production assistants. “But I think, especially for those middle school audiences, I think it will be really effective. All of these characters just have this quality that just draws you in almost immediately.”
Earles said she’s already begun using some of the conflict resolution and conversation tactics in the film in her daily life.
“Making sure the person you’re talking to feels seen and heard in a positive manner, while still getting your point across in a healthy way,” she said.
