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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Cheney’s Wild Bill’s Longbar doubles as Wyoming in romantic thriller “The Purple Rose”

Bright and early Wednesday morning, far outside of normal business hours, Wild Bill’s Longbar in Cheney was packed – not with its usual clientele of Eastern Washington University students, but by the cast and crew of “The Purple Rose,” a romantic thriller that’s being filmed there.

Filming took place from midnight to noon.

The movie is based on local author Christi Walsh’s book of the same name, the first in her Chroma series. Walsh’s daughter, Sydney Ortman, wrote the screenplay.

Ortman, who wrote screenplays in high school and college, initially wrote the script to use for YouTube videos she and her mother were hoping to create to spark interest in the book.

Ortman and Walsh contacted a few people they knew who worked in the film industry. Those contacts convinced them to go bigger and film a movie.

The screenplay took Ortman three months to write and another three to four months to edit. Working with her mother on the script proved tough at times only because it was difficult for Walsh to see aspects of the book cut from the screenplay.

Otherwise, Ortman said collaborating with Walsh was easy.

“We had the same idea of how we wanted the movie to turn out, so that part was really easy,” she said. “We were able to envision a lot.”

The movie follows a young woman named Kate who trades Portland for a small town in Wyoming after fleeing from a stalker. Kate is living the dream after rebuilding her life and finding love, but then her stalker re-enters the picture.

“The Purple Rose” stars Janel Parrish (“Pretty Little Liars”), Rob Estes (“90210”), Jonah Platt (Broadway’s “Wicked”), Michael Welch (“Twilight”) and Tom Kiesche (“Breaking Bad”). Many locals were used as extras in the movie.

Jodi Binstock, Marc Dahlstrom and Steve Graham are producing the film, and Binstock, who has directed episodes of the Spokane-shot horror/comedy series “Z Nation,” is directing.

Binstock said adapting books for the big screen has become more and more popular recently.

“This is sort of the flavor of the season now,” she said. “Studios and things want material that’s had a track record in print so it’s a very popular way to go.”

Locations in Cheney and Spokane, including Wild Bill’s and the Indian Canyon Golf Course, doubled as both Portland and Wyoming. Parts of “The Purple Rose” were also filmed in Los Angeles.

“That’s one of the great things about Spokane that we find both on ‘Z Nation’ and for this movie is that it can double for so much of Americana,” Binstock said.

Wild Bill’s co-owners Greg Hubbard and Charlie Witte were contacted about filming in the bar a month ago.

“I was shocked, because it doesn’t seem like the bar you would normally see in a movie,” Hubbard said. “But then it made sense when they talked about the script and where it was going to be in Wyoming … because it has that small-town vibe to it. We’re a dive bar and we’re proud of it.”

Wild Bill’s is normally open from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., so filming closed the bar two hours early each night. A minor inconvenience, but one neither Hubbard and Witte, nor their customers, minded.

“They’ve been seeing things going on, and so they’ve all been talking about it for probably the last two weeks, asking what’s going on,” Hubbard said. “Pretty much all of them have asked to be in it somehow.”

For Binstock, “The Purple Rose” was a chance to reunite with some of her “Z Nation” crew members before work on the show begins again next month. Working with a crew she considers family after three seasons of “Z Nation” made shooting a film in two weeks, rather than the typical 30 to 60 days, much easier for Binstock.

This movie is also an opportunity for Binstock to step back into the director’s chair, a position not often held by women.

“It’s atypical for a woman to direct,” she said. “I think 2 percent of television and film projects are directed by women, so it’s a nice thing to be able to do that. And this crew is incredibly supportive of me doing that so it’s pretty wonderful to have that opportunity.”

There is not yet an expected release date for “The Purple Rose,” though Ortman hopes to have a first look at the movie completed by September.

And though she hasn’t written a screenplay yet, Ortman and Walsh are hopeful about movies for the rest of the books in the Chroma series, “The Black Angel,” “Blue Waters” and the upcoming fourth novel, which has the working title of “White Balance.”

“We’ll see how this one goes, but there’s definitely hope to continue on the rest of the movies,” Ortman said.