Past Featured Films

Ringo
(EXPERIMENTAL - Running Time: 5 minutes, 30 seconds)
Dave Monahan

In this experimental musical western starring John Wayne and Roy Rogers, Lorne (Roy Rogers) finds Ringo (John Wayne) clinging to life with a bullet in the back. He saves the wounded stranger’s life, but the new friendship is almost immediately tested when the embittered Ringo starts practicing his quick draw the moment he’s back on his feet. Ringo and Lorne part ways: Lorne becomes a lawman, Ringo becomes the gun-slinging scourge of the West. Inevitably Ringo’s crime spree intersects Lorne’s jurisdiction, and duty requires the two former amigos to face off in the ultimate show-down. But rather than kill the man who saved his life, Ringo allows himself to be bushwhacked by the pursuing posse. Heartbroken over his friend’s suicidal sacrifice and his own ill-deserved reputation as the man who stopped Ringo, Lorne turns his back on the law to pick up the murderous mayhem where Ringo left off.

Filmmaker Profile: DAVE MONAHAN

Dave Monahan teaches screenwriting and film production at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.  His previous movie, Monkey Junction was recently screened on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Visions. His student film Prime Time, won Columbia University’s New Line Cinema Award for Most Original Film. Angels Watching Over Me, his first film, was a New York region finalist for the Student Academy Award. He recently edited Andrew Lund’s short film Snapshot. Ringo is his first found footage film.

Local Angles:

• As a found footage film, none of the actual Old West footage seen in Ringo was shot in North Carolina; however, on two shots, a substitute "John Wayne" and one brief glimpse of a Roy Rogers' torso were captured by assistant director Brendon Murphy - using his dad as a stand-in for John Wayne and his own torso to impersonate Roy Rogers -all from his Wilmington, NC, dorm room.
  
• The remainder of Ringo was pure post-production, completed on David Monahan's UNC-Wilmington office computer and by co-editor Richard Wiebe on Brendon Murphy's laptop in his Wilmington dorm room and hometown of Four Oaks, NC.