It took calling in favors, enlisting family members as investors and filming on a breakneck schedule, but after three years of work, Daniel Cummings’ first movie makes its public debut today (Tuesday).

The Powell native’s new comedy, Man Camp, was shot on what the industry considers to be a shoestring budget, but it features Hollywood-caliber talent and production.

Pete Gardner, best known for his work on the CW show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, has top billing in the film. Gardner liked the concept — and the opportunity to hike Colorado’s mountains — enough that he signed on to the project for a relative pittance.

“People were making less than, like, McDonald’s money,” said Cummings, who lives in the Denver area. “Everybody who worked on this movie, even our TV actors, they’re just doing it because they liked the script, and they thought it’d be fun to be in the mountains for a couple weeks. And so, it’s pretty incredible.”

Cummings originally wanted to shoot the film in Sunlight Basin. “To me, there’s nothing quite as breathtaking as ... that area up there,” he said, and his family owns cabins there.

However, the logistics of getting all the gear and cast members to a remote part of northwest Wyoming on a tight timeline proved too difficult and the film was largely shot in Nederland, Colorado, outside of Boulder.

Man Camp tells the story of three brothers who set out on an annual camping trip to honor their late father. However, chaos ensues when the brothers learn their mother has a new man in her life. The young men launch a series of increasingly preposterous schemes to scare off their mom’s suitor, who they know can’t possibly measure up to their father’s legacy.

“It’s a movie for everyone; it doesn’t have an agenda,” Cummings said. “I think everybody’s a little tired of everything having a take or some sort of political or social commentary. And this is just the story about the family.”

“It’s funny, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously,” he said. “But it does sort of get to the heart of some things that I think a lot of people go through and deal with.”

In addition to serving as an executive producer/producer and co-writer, Cummings also acts in the film, playing the role of the eldest brother, Adam. Cummings’ friend Scott Kruse, who also served as a co-writer and producer, plays the middle brother, while Erik Stocklin, seen in the Netflix original Haters Back Off, is the youngest.

And Powell residents may recognize Cummings’ fellow 2005 Powell High School graduate, Grant Langdon, who has a scene-stealing performance.

“We’ve had so many people be like, ‘Who is that guy?’” Cummings laughed.

Making the project a reality was not easy.

Finding funding

Back in 2017, Cummings launched a crowdfunding campaign to help raise funds for some initial costs and shot a sample scene to prove the concept. The IndieGoGo campaign raised more than $9,000 and Cummings and his collaborators put together pitch decks and sought out potential flim investors.

“We were ready to go,” he said, “but we couldn’t get a meeting.”

It’s a chicken and egg problem, where investors generally aren’t interested in funding projects from filmmakers without a proven track record.

That could have spelled the end of Man Camp, but Cummings got some encouragement and new direction at a workshop led by Denver area director Diane Bell. She explained that “you have the power to make your film happen,” Cummings recounted, with Bell submitting that he could find enough believers and backers among his personal connections to make the movie.

“That’s what ended up happening,” he said. Cummings’ in-laws, Dusty and Kristie Franklin of Powell, became major investors, he put some of his own money into the project and the budget was trimmed to match the funding in-hand.

“It’s pretty incredible what you can do when you have a very clear set of boundaries, even financially,” he said. “So once we realized … no cavalry is going to come in and hand us a sack full of money, we just decided, alright, we’re going to make it for what we have.”

Cummings originally figured it would take $30,000 or $40,000 to lure some top talent to the film, but “everybody that we offered that turned it down,” he said.

However, offering the Screen Actors Guild “ultra low budget” rate of $125 a day (which is applied to projects under $250,000) proved “almost more interesting,” Cummings said, “because we weren’t trying to buy them. We were just like, ‘Hey, if you like it, you like it.’”

That’s how they got Gardner — though, with the actor about to begin shooting the final season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, he was only available for 10 days in July 2018. Cummings and the rest of the crew had hoped to have at least 15 days of filming, but they managed to cram it all down to 11 days, “which is insane,” he said.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Cummings laughed. “And I consider it a little bit of a miracle that it all worked as well as it did, but it did.”

Man Camp made the rounds at film festivals last year and early reviews from outlets like Westword and The Nerdist have been positive. Cummings said his parents, Brad and Mary Lou of Powell, also enjoyed the film — though Brad was reportedly a little unnerved to see his face used on a fictional funeral program for the brothers’ father.

As for his expectations for the public release of Man Camp, “obviously, having a personal relationship with every single person that invested in the film, I would love for it to make its money back and show some kind of profit … that would be awesome,” Cummings said. “But really, I think what we were really hoping with this is that it would find an audience and that we could sort of introduce ourselves as filmmakers to a broader audience …”

He hopes Man Camp will serve as a kind of resume and prove there’s an audience for his group’s sense of humor and stories.

“Because,” Cummings said, “our hope is to be making films like this forever.”

If you watch ...

If you’re planning to watch Man Camp, the movie’s makers hope you’ll consider doing so soon.

Producer Daniel Cummings says it’s the most helpful if folks watch the film in the first few days after its release; that makes a “huge difference” as to how many people will find Man Camp as they peruse movies online, he indicated.

“The difference between getting sort of lost in the sea of streaming content and actually finding an audience really just depends on an initial group of people who are interested and willing to watch it and hopefully leave a review or some kind words or share it with a friend,” Cummings said.

The film is now available on services that rent or sell digital movies, like Apple TV and Amazon. DVD and BluRay versions are also available from online retailers, including Walmart.

Man Camp is unrated, but Cummings described it as PG-13; it includes a number of swear words and some adult humor, but no nudity.

When searching for the film, don’t confuse it with a completely different, low-budget 2013 film that shares the same title.

“Hopefully,” Cummings quipped, “we can usurp their position as the true Man Camp.”