Tom Noonan’s Wang Dang is the real-time story of a washed-up director (played by Noonan) who’s come to an unnamed film school to speak on the travails of his career and ends up entertaining two nubile grad students in his seedy off-campus motel room. "In their eyes he’s a big deal, and he uses his status to get it on with them," says Noonan.

As with What Happened Was... and The Wife, his first two features, Noonan mounted a workshop production of Wang Dang on stage at the East Village theater he owns in order to prepare for the shoot. "Some people have a misconception that I’m a playwright who makes movies, but I’m not," he says. "[Staging the screenplays] is how I find out what the scripts are about, where the laughs are, and what works and what doesn’t, since as a writer I’m just intuiting. That’s what the Marx Brothers did when they took their material on the road."

As an actor, Noonan has appeared in more than 20 films, including Manhunter, Mystery Train, Heat and The Last Action Hero. He graduated from Yale in 1973 and founded the Paradise Theatre in 1982; by the late ‘80s he was writing cable features like Red Wind, a thriller. He made What Happened Was... in 1993 after workshopping it at the Paradise, and the film won the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance in 1994. His follow-up film, The Wife, also premiered at Sundance and was financed by the now-defunct French production entity CIBY 2000.

Noonan developed Wang Dang with help from a 1998 New York Foundation for the Arts playwriting fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship in filmmaking. The film was financed through Elevator Pictures, a production outfit whose principal, Steve Apicella, met Noonan as first asistant director on What Happened Was… and most recently produced Rocky Collins’ Pants on Fire (due out this fall from Shadow). Wang Dang’s producers are Eddie Collyns, who line produced Pants and co-produced ‘99 LAIFF selection Cherry, and Victoria Robinson, a five-year vet of New York indie shoots who produced Jamie Babbit’s Sundance ‘98 short Sleeping Beauties.

Wang Dang’s four-week shoot rolled March 8 in Liberty, New York, near Noonan’s Catskills home. The film is being shot on PAL digital video which will be blown up to 35mm. Noonan will edit himself and the film should be done by Labor Day. All rights are available.

Cast: Tom Noonan, LeAnna Croom, Megan Edwards. Crew: Writer/director, Tom Noonan; Producers, Victoria Robinson, Eddie Collyns; Associate Producer, Matthew Langdon; Executive Producer, Stephen X. Apicella; Cinematographer, Rufus Standefer; Production Design, Zeljka Pavlinovic; Sound, Noah Timan; Contact: Wang Dang LLC, 1133 Broadway, Suite 1429, New York, NY 10010. Tel: (212) 645-0722, Fax: (212) 645-0788.

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