The intriguing true-life etiology of ‘A Case of Blue’

One of the feature films being screened this year by the Fort Myers Film Festival is A Case of Blue. The film follows a recently-retired baby boomer as he experiences a journey of the soul after he encounters a woman who looks identical to a long lost love from his youth in a life drawing class in New York City. What ensues is a haunting tale of lost love, the impermanence of memories, and the enduring flame of passion through time.

Written and directed by Dana H. Glazer, the film has an intriguing etiology.

Glazer was attending NYU’s world-renowned Tisch School of the Arts and decided to take a life drawing class at the Student Arts League. The model in his class reminded him of a woman from his romantic youth. On the bus ride home that afternoon, Glazer jotted down the kernel of a story based on the disquieting encounter. He transferred his outline to a computer file, and that’s where it resided for the next fourteen years.

In 2017, Dana attended a family wedding in Boston. At the time, his dad was going through a rough patch. His long-time friend and law partner was having problems and dad was contemplating both retirement and downsizing.

By the time Dana returned home, he had crafted the skeleton of the larger story on which the film is based.

By the end of that July, Glazer had produced a working draft of the screenplay. Copy in hand, he began soliciting feedback from friends and colleagues in the film industry that he’d made as he’d produced prior projects, including the documentaries Jim and Sarah Brady: A Tribute (2015), Parents of the Revolution (2014) and The Evolution of Dad (2010) (as well as Intermezzo in 1998). As luck (or destiny) would have it, he was introduced to producer Scott Rosenfelt (Home Alone, Smoke Signals, Mystic Pizza, Teen Wolf, Extremities) in October. The two hit it off from the start and Rosenfelt fell in love with Dana’s concept. Together, they polished the plot and characters. Now they had a final script.

By July of 2018, they’d cast the film and with the help of a financier, Glazer raised enough to begin filming. But their budget was by no means lavish. They had to make concessions both on the locations and number of days (18) they could afford to film. As a result, most of the film was shot in Ridgewood, New Jersey (where Glazer and his wife live) and Greenwich Village, but that actually served to make the final product more personal and cinematic.

Glazer and his production team are circumspect when it comes to sharing details about the film’s plot or characters. Besides the tag lines included in the opening paragraph, all we know is that the baby boomer is a recently-retired accountant by the name of Richard Flicker and the muse in the life drawing class he takes is a free-spirited woman by the name of Amelia. Grappling with a troubled home front, Richard flirts with the temptation of this second chance at romance. But don’t be misled. The film is so much more than a May-December romance.

Richard is played by Stephen Schnetzer; Amelia is portrayed by Annapurna Sriram. Schnetzer is known for The Wire (2002) as well as his work in daytime television (As the World Turns, Another World, Days of Our Lives and Guiding Light). Annapurna Sriram had a break-out performance in the 2019 film Feral, for which she received an Outstanding Performance Award from the Bushwick Festival.

A Case of Blue screens in the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, May 14.

April 18, 2021.