Feature-length film inspired by a Far Side cartoon
By Jim Flint for Ashland.news
When a man strikes gold with a staggering $156 million lottery ticket win, only to meet an untimely demise, the spotlight shifts to those left behind.
A new film by Ashland’s Dan Brown, “Your Lucky Day,” tells the tale of a high-stakes robbery gone wrong. After a dispute over the winning lottery ticket turns into a deadly hostage situation, the witnesses must decide exactly how far they’ll go — and how much blood they’re willing to spill — for a cut of the $156 million.
A special one-time showing at the Varsity Theatre in Ashland is set for 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15. Brown will be in attendance and do a Q&A after the film. Proceeds benefit Film Southern Oregon, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote the region’s film and media community.
Tickets for the R-rated film are $10 for adults and $5 for active students with photo ID at internet-ticketing.com/book/comvar/book.html. They also will be available at the door if it doesn’t sell out with advance sales.
The film takes place just before Christmas. Six strangers have converged at a convenience store: the store owner, the lottery ticket winner, a pregnant couple, a criminal and a rookie cop. Together they witness the man discover he has the $156 million winning lottery ticket. At gunpoint, the criminal demands the ticket. The cop tries to stop the robbery. He shoots first, accidentally killing the lottery winner. In the ensuing confusion, the criminal takes out the cop.
The criminal persuades the group to join him in a pact: money for a cover-up. But they have failed to notice that the cop is still alive. And he wants the money too.
It is Brown’s debut feature film. The crime thriller was shot in Los Angeles and stars Angus Cloud, the breakout star of the TV show “Euphoria.” Cloud died last year while the film was in post-production.
Distributed by Well Go USA, it was released nationwide at the end of 2023 to very strong reviews, and sits at 86% on reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It’s available online at Amazon and Apple among others, and on Blu-ray at Walmart.
“The film was one of the five films included in a recent New York Times article, ‘Five Action Movies to Stream Now,’” said Gary Kout, founder and board present of Film Southern Oregon.
The seed for “Your Lucky Day” was planted from a one-panel cartoon on Brown’s Gary Larson “Far Side” calendar. The macabre humor of a coroner’s assistant holding a lottery ticket over a dead body and pronouncing, “Lucky stiff,” sparked an idea about what could have happened before.
The idea morphed into a short film that went viral on Vimeo in 2010, racking up more than a million views on the then-fledgling online video-sharing platform.
After the short’s success, interest for a feature-length version followed, but the last thing Brown had expected was to do more with the story.
“The short ended pretty definitively,” he said. “I had no desire to expand it, plus I was really busy with commercial work at the time. Strangely enough, a lot of it was for the lottery.”
He continued to work in advertising, directing commercials and music videos, but still nurtured the idea of being a filmmaker.
When a producer reached out years later, inquiring about the rights to the short, and after some discussion with his wife Dana, Brown realized that he wasn’t done with the story yet. And he didn’t want to sell it to someone.
He started working on an expanded story while continuing to work in advertising.
Out of left field, an opportunity to make an indie horror film came his way.
“I jumped at the chance to leave the security of my advertising job and go to Texas to shoot the film,” he said. “But the funding fell through.”
With a small window of time available before he would have to go back to advertising, he sent his script on a lark to casting director Jessica Sherman, who had been lined up to work on the horror film.
She liked it, and they were off and running.
Coincidentally, Brown’s wife Dana, six months earlier, had been binge-watching “Euphoria” with Angus Cloud. After watching Cloud at work, she told her husband she knew who should be the lead in his movie.
Then the impossible happened. When Sherman sent out the script, one of the first names to come back interested in the script was Cloud.
“Shock. Joy. Surprise. I showed the email to my wife and we just couldn’t believe it,” Brown said. “No matter what, we were going to make this movie.”
They did an initial release through Alamo Drafthouse Theaters before the video-on-demand release.
“There is no Alamo theater in the area, but I always wanted to watch the film in the area I live in,” he said. “We’ll be streaming on Netflix soon, and I wanted to show the film here before then.”
They reached out to Coming Attractions Theatres and sealed the deal to show it in Ashland.
What’s next for Brown? He has a few things in mind.
“One of the ones I’m most excited about is a horror film called ‘A-Frame,’ which is a fresh, mind-bending take on the ‘cabin-in-the-woods’ genre,” he said.
Film Southern Oregon President Kout is excited that the film will have an Ashland showing.
“Anytime a local filmmaker has a project that is seen outside the region with a high degree of visibility, it helps point back to the creative strengths we have right here,” he said. “It bolsters our ongoing 10-year accolade as one of the ‘Best Places to Live and Work as a Filmmaker’ by Moviemaker Magazine.”
He also appreciates that up-and-coming filmmakers in the region will have an opportunity to learn from someone like Brown and gain a better understanding on how to succeed in the industry.
Kout is high on Southern Oregon as a film location as well.
“You can’t point a camera anywhere around here and get a bad shot. It’s just so beautiful. And we have resources that belie our small size and remote location,” he said, citing the large pool of on-camera talent and the strong local theater community.
Reach writer Jim Flint at [email protected].
