Pittsburgh-area premiere set for Bethel Park resident’s first film
Filming for “Noxious” began on a dock in the St. Petersburg beachfront suburb of Redington Shores, Fla.
“We get out on the boat, and it’s night, because we have to shoot it in the dark,” Bethel Park resident Diana Riggs said. “We spend eight hours out there, until morning, shooting this.”
‘Noxious’ trailer
Or so the cast members involved thought. It turned out that a camera malfunction made the nocturnal session all for naught, and Riggs was afraid to call them to say they’d have to do it again.
“Every one of them said, ‘Sure!’, without hesitation,” she recalled. “In anther world, somebody would tell you, ‘Go take a hike.’ But not these people.”
Such a spirit of cooperation was indispensable for the writer, director, producer, special effects makeup artist and first-time moviemaker, whose three years of work on “Noxious” culminated in its February premiere in Florida. The film’s initial Pittsburgh-area showing is scheduled for 4:30 p.m, Saturday at the Hollywood Theater in Dormont.
Michael Milhoan, third baseman Buck Weaver in “Field of Dreams,” plays the bad guy in “Noxious.”
“I had a great number of wonderful people who followed me blindly,” she said about realizing her artistic ambitions. “I was like the Pied Piper. Basically, everybody just jumped in on the project.”
She certainly had that type of effect on actor Michael Milhoan – you might know him as third baseman Buck Weaver in Phil Alden Robinson’s “Field of Dreams” – when she arranged to meet with him about “Noxious.”
“I said, ‘Hi, I’m Diana. Will you be in my movie?’ And he said yes. But there was a tail end to that. He said, ‘You have to teach me how to flip houses,'” Riggs recalled, and she immediately agreed to share information on one of her other areas of expertise.
Portraying the evil corporate CEO in the Riggs-described mix of “thriller, horror, science fiction, love story and drama, laced with humor,” Milhoan provided for a professional presence amid a cast that includes relatively novice film performers.
Devon Hughes, D-Von Dudley from the Dudley Boyz, plays a police sergeant in “Noxious.”
Some, though, will be familiar to fans of professional wrestling, such as Devon Hughes, better known as D-Von Dudley from the Dudley Boyz.
As for Riggs, not to be confused with “Game of Thrones” actress Dame Diana Rigg, her previous screen experiences include makeup artistry for Sergio Myers’ self-explanatory “The Zombinator” and a host of jobs for Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “America: Imagine the World Without Her,” for which she was hired with her twin sister, fellow costumer designer, Donna.
“They kind of took a liking to us and really understood our work effort and our creativity,” Diana said. “We ended up doing a lot of work for them before they arrived. We did some casting. We arranged for cast services. I was hired as props and then it went over to set design, and I actually hired the contractors to build the sets.”
That included replicas of Christopher Columbus’ ships La Niña and Pinta, in great detail.
“Those two weeks were just magical for me, and I soaked up as much as I could,” Riggs said about the filmmaking experience. “And I thought, this would be fun.”
She told as much to her husband, Bernie Artman.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you make your own movie?’ And there it is.”
Riggs does have plenty of experience as a costume creator and designer – “I’ve never lost a Halloween costume contest, ever” – with some of her work licensed by wholesaler Forum Novelties of New York, including the popular and realistic-looking Spill Your Guts.
She also has experience in completing challenges successfully, having earned her doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh.
As for finishing “Noxious,” she said the challenge was well worth it, plus it was plenty of fun.
“My intent for this movie was never to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to make a lot of money,'” she explained. “It was to gather my friends, gather people, and have a creative project together.”
Tickets for the showing of “Noxious” at the Hollywood Theater are available at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3232845.
The negligence of offshore drilling company Deeptide Petroleum results in a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Soon after, in an explosion on one of the Deeptide oil rigs, Longshoreman, Joe Patterson (Lance Washburn) is lost to the tainted waters.
Simultaneously, Caufman Chemical CEO Gaylord Johnson (Michael Milhoan) orders an unscrupulous boat captain, Jack Raper (Charles H. Reed) to get rid of toxic chemicals from Caufman’s latest GMO experiment. Raper and his crew secretly troll the Gulf late at night and dump the noxious contents into the water.
The oil combines with the chemicals to create a fusion that soon surfaces, producing side effects that terrorize the residents of the quiet beach town of Redington Shores, Fla.
As residents continue to be reported missing, no-nonsense police Sgt. Ben Robertson (Devon Hughes) joins forces with quirky New York detective Brian Calloway (Brian Edward Kahrs) to investigate the disappearances.
Meanwhile, Alex and Beth Carter (Billy McKnight and Holly Hans) are vacationing with their daughters, Ally (Lily Cardone) and Lizzy (Paige Crawford), when an unusual substance is discovered on the beach. As Calloway questions the town’s residents, he meets Lizzy, who leads him to the substance as the investigation becomes more complex.