High school legend inspires thriller film made in St. Charles

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A crew led by St. Charles resident Nick Smith works on the film "Munger Road" on St. Charles' Main Street Bridge last summer.

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Updated: November 30, 2011 12:39AM

ST. CHARLES — When he was attending St. Charles North High School, 26-year-old director-writer Nick Smith says, a midnight drive down Munger Road just east of this city in Bartlett and Wayne was “a rite of passage for every teenager when you got your first car.”

Young drivers would paint their bumpers with baby powder and park across the supposedly haunted railroad crossing between Stearns and Army Trail roads, where it is said that the ghosts of dead children will push your car off the track if you dared stop there in the spooky darkness.

Smith won’t reveal whether his first film includes any ghost children, but that Fox Valley legend inspired the script for the thriller/horror flick named “Munger Road” that was filmed in St. Charles and Bartlett last fall. The movie opens at the Charlestowne 18 Classic Cinemas at midnight Thursday, then expands to five more theaters on Oct. 7.

With videotape technology dropping the cost of making a film, creating a movie like this no longer is so unusual for a rookie director like Smith.

But it is unusual for a 26-year-old recent film school grad to be able to cast his freshman outing with such actors as Bruce Davison (1989 Oscar nominee for “Longtime Companion,” better known now as the dad in “Harry and the Hendersons” and the evil senator in the “X-Men” movies) and Randall Batinkoff (“As Good As It Gets,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”).

Davison plays St. Charles’ police chief and Batinkoff his deputy as they desperately try to find out what horrible thing happened to four teens who had visited that spooky railroad crossing.

“What I like most about making movies is the storytelling,” Smith said. “I got some inspiration for this story from John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ and Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jaws.’ ”

Parallel plots

What he got from “Jaws,” he said, is a key plot point.

In “Jaws,” a shark was attacking a tourist town. But the city leaders couldn’t just keep everybody out of the water because they don’t want to lose the Fourth of July tourist trade.

In “Munger Road,” the St. Charles police and the city fathers want to downplay what happened to the four kids because it’s the eve of St. Charles’ annual Scarecrow Festival, and they don’t want to scare people away from that.

Smith said he has been hoping to pursue a career in filmmaking since he graduated from St. Charles North in 2003. He said that after graduating from Columbia College with a film major, he has been splitting his time between Los Angeles and his parents’ home in the countryside west of St. Charles, although his actual living has been coming from jobs such as waiting on tables at Salerno’s on the Fox restaurant in St. Charles.

When he got the idea for “Munger Road” and wrote the script, his father, Jeffrey Smith, volunteered to take charge of the film’s finances in return for an “executive producer” credit. Nick Smith refuses to reveal how much of a budget was needed but said his father invested his own money and began asking people he knew to invest in the project, too.

Smith recruited most of the crew from other 20-somethings who had studied at Columbia with him.

Davison was the first actor who signed on, and here again the key was the writing, Smith said.

Ricki Maslar, an established L.A. casting director he knew, thought Davison would be perfect to play the police chief. She sent him the script. Smith said Davison called him, said it was the best-written movie he had been offered in a long time and said he would be glad to take the job.

With a respected star on board, it became much easier also to sign up such actors as Batinkoff, Trevor Morgan (“The Sixth Sense”), Lauren Storm (“The Roommate”) and Hallock Beals (“The Last Song With Miley Cyrus”).

Look-alikes

How competitive and hard to break into is the movie business? Smith said that when Maslar posted a casting call for “Munger Road,” she received responses from 4,000 actors in three hours.

Only later, Smith said, did he notice that Bruce Davison looks a lot like St. Charles’ real police chief and former Elgin police lieutenant, Jim Lamkin.

Smith & Co. shot the movie entirely at night over 16 nights. Three of those were shot along the real Munger Road, at the notorious Canadian National Railway crossing that attracts the teenagers both in the movie and in real life.

“It is a really creepy place,” Smith said. “Trevor Morgan, who grew up just 20 minutes from there, claimed he heard a baby crying in the woods while we were there, but I can’t vouch for that.”

Most of the shooting took place in downtown St. Charles.

“St. Charles is full of photogenic landmarks, and we were able to use a lot of them,” Smith said. “They even let us close the Main Street Bridge. We used the city hall, the Baker Hotel, the police station, Smitty’s restaurant and the Baker Memorial United Methodist Church.”

And that’s good news for the city, says St. Charles Economic Development Director Chris Aiston, who served as the city’s liaison with the production company.

“The big difference between ‘Munger Road’ and ‘Road to Perdition’ is that the city of St. Charles is definitely where the story takes place,” Aiston said.

She had been Geneva’s economic development director in 2001, when part of the Tom Hanks historical gangster thriller “Road to Perdition” was shot in downtown Geneva. But it was supposed to be a city in western Illinois, and only Fox Valley natives had any idea they were seeing Geneva.

“In this film, St. Charles plays itself. You can’t think it’s anywhere else.”

At real fest

City officials even let the filmmakers erect a mockup of Scarecrow Fest and its carnival midway in the city hall parking lot.

Aiston said the city will set up a promotional booth for “Munger Road” at city hall during the real Scarecrow Fest, coming up Oct. 7-9. A Jumbotron screen will show scenes from the movie; and cast members, plus Smith, will be there to sign autographs and talk about the filming experience.

Charlestowne 18 Classic Cinemas will start showing “Munger Road” at midnight Thursday. On Oct. 7, it will expand to the Marcus Elgin, the AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington, the Regal Cantera 30 in Winfield, the AMC Streets of Woodfield in Schaumburg and the AMC Yorktown in Lombard.

Correspondent Denise Linke contributed to this story.