Former UW, WSU students’ film screens at the Garland

Sage Bannick’s movie career got off to a blazing start.

Literally.

Several years ago, just two weeks before his graduation from the University of Washington, his apartment went up in flames.

“I came home, I looked up and everything was dark,” the 29-year-old Bannick says. “I ran up the stairs, it says, ‘Toxic hazard. Do not enter.’ I didn’t know what to do, but I took it as a sign.”

Movie careers have had stranger beginnings. Morgan Freeman starred on “The Electric Company.” Quentin Tarantino worked in a video store. Francois Truffaut was, of all things, a critic.

Bannick went to Los Angeles, worked hard, and the result of his efforts – an independent film titled “Just Hustle” – will screen at 8 p.m. on Monday at the Garland Theater.

Directed, photographed and edited by Bannick’s long-time friend, Washington State University graduate Ari Bernstein, “Just Hustle” tells the story of, Bannick says, “a private detective who gets set up to take a fall for a college gambling ring that’s paid a football player to throw the national championship.” Or something like that, anyway.

Bannick, who is from Winthrop, Wash., not only wrote the screenplay but plays the lead role. The female lead is Sam Doumit (“The Hot Chick”), while other cast members include Jake Muxworthy (“I Heart Huckabees”) and Jernard Burks (“Starsky & Hutch”). Even “Napoleon Dynamite” co-star Efrin Ramierez has a bit part.

Director Bernstein and Bannick go way back. They met while attending middle school in Hawaii and stayed in touch throughout college.

Both ended up as graduate students at USC’s prestigious film school, which is where they began making the contacts so important to filmmaker wannabes. One was Scott Spiegel, a friend of Sam Raimi (“Spider-Man”).

Spiegel, who wrote “Evil Dead 2” for Raimi and “The Rookie” for Clint Eastwood, liked a short film that Bannick and Bernstein had made. And while financing for the horror film that the three had planned to make fell through, Bannick and Bernstein were energized enough to begin a project on their own.

Boosted by a $15,000 investment provided by one of Bannick’s old friends, former Husky and now Tennessee Titans guard Benji Olson, Bannick and Bernstein started work on “Just Hustle.” Backed by less money than Julia Roberts’ catering bill, Bannick and Bernstein shaped their film by necessity.

“We looked toward the filmmakers of the French New Wave, like (Jean-Luc) Godard, who made ‘Breathless’ in 1961 as an homage to John Huston films,” Bannick says. “We said, ‘OK, that’s what we’ll do.’ We decided to homage Godard and make a movie along the lines of ‘Breathless’ and ‘Maltese Falcon.’ “

They used film that they’d refrigerated for three years. They shot on and around the USC campus. They worked with actors drawn from USC and an acting class that Bannick was teaching.

And they shot for 40 days only during what Bannick calls the “golden hour,” what others call the “magic hour” (the time at sunset in which, for about 30 minutes, the light is softened to a golden glow).

“About 4:30 every day I’d call my friends and we would meet at a diner, buy the actors food, go over our lines, then go out and block through each one of the scenes and shoot,” Bannick says.

That was during the summer of 2003. After running through their initial investment, raising $30,000 more, firing one sound designer and then getting the one they’d first wanted, they finished in time to do the film festival circuit.

But when people began expressing interest, Bannick and Bernstein decided to shop the film around.

One drawing card: Bannick and Bernstein were able to snare legendary songwriter Chuck E. Weiss to narrate the film and perform some of the songs.

It’ll play in Spokane and six other sites around Washington, then seven more in Seattle. Then they hope to sell it as a DVD to Amazon.com, make some money and go on to something else. Maybe even that horror film with Spiegel.

“Even if we were the biggest thing at the Seattle Film Festival,” Bannick explains, “it wouldn’t be as big a deal as having 10 screenings, talking to each of the newspapers in each town and doing the radio interviews.”

Whatever, looking back, Bannick recalls that fire of so many years ago with mixed feelings.

“It was a tragedy,” he says. “But I did get an insurance check.”

And a call to go south, young man.