College friends turn Sandpoint author’s short story into feature film

Sandpoint may not have the glitz and glam of Hollywood, but when it came time to film “Losing Julia Finch,” director and Sandpoint native Jeff Tedd Bock was eager to return home.

The movie, based on a short story of the same name from “The Best Seats in the House,” a collection by fellow Sandpoint native Keith Lee Morris, tells the story of summertime love and, as the title suggests, loss between Grover Dooley (Mark Kuntz) and Julia Finch (Kirsten Buch) as the pair travels from Los Angeles to Idaho.

The film premieres Saturday at the Panida Theater.

Bock became familiar with Morris’ work after Marianne Love, who in different years taught English to both Bock and Morris at Sandpoint High School, had Bock read Morris’ “The Greyhound God.”

Love eventually connected the two on Facebook, and the pair, plus Bock’s college friend Kuntz, began talking about turning one of Morris’ stories into a film.

Out of all of Morris’ stories, “Losing Julia Finch” was the one Bock and Kuntz connected with the most.

“This one spoke to us really as if we had written it ourselves,” Kuntz said. “The voice was so clear, and it was like every page was a thought that we had had, a similar experience to something we had done in our lives … It speaks to us on so many different levels.”

The pair, who went to film and theater school together at Montana State University in Bozeman, initially set out to shoot a few scenes of the short story for Kuntz’s acting reel after he moved to Los Angeles from Montana.

A few scenes grew into a short film, which grew into a feature film. At one point, Bock, 42, and Kuntz, 43, had a three-hour cut of the movie.

“We were pretty passionate about the material, it turns out, and we turned out to be even better collaborators now that we’ve both had some life lived,” Bock said.

When it came time to find their Julia Finch, chemistry was key. Bock and Kuntz spent three months screening actresses and eventually found Buch, who, like the fictional Finch, was looking to leave Los Angeles.

“She’d been down here for awhile and was like ‘This isn’t my thing. I’m going to go back to Vancouver, British Columbia, where I’m from, and I’m going to get into fashion design …’ ” Kuntz said. “It just so happened that she was Julia Finch, so we were able to make it happen.”

When writing the film, Bock and Kuntz stuck relatively close to the short story. They did flesh out a few minor characters and added their take on a few events that happened to Grover, but the plot is almost exactly the same, and the pair took sections of dialogue straight from the story.

“We put our own spin on it, but the spirit of the story is completely intact,” Kuntz said. “Keith also attests to that as well.”

Though a few scenes were filmed in Los Angeles, a majority of the movie was filmed around Sandpoint in 2014 and 2015.

To secure locations, Bock reached out to family friends, the local police department and the owners of the establishments in which he wanted to film. Bock said the city didn’t charge them to film.

“The universe opened every single door for us and that’s how we knew we were on the right track,” he said. “And it wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the community … Though there’s a certain conservative element to Sandpoint, there’s also a very artistic side and they saw what we were trying to do and wanted to help us succeed in that.”

After this screening and a showing at the Ellen Theatre in Bozeman on Tuesday, Bock and Kuntz hope to submit “Losing Julia Finch” into film festivals and bring the movie to Europe, where they think it will do well because of its nonlinear narrative.

But no matter where they show the film, the pair hopes viewers connect with its universal story of love and loss.

“We’ve all had that person in our lives that shines brighter than the sun that we could never quite reach,” Kuntz said. “I think that’s a universal story, and I think even though this is a love story at it’s heart, and there’s a lot of love stories out there that have been made over the years, I think this is a universal story that I haven’t seen done quite this way.”