Movie buffs and filmmakers make their way to the Myrtle Beach International Film Festival
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WBTW) – The Myrtle Beach International Film Festival is continuing its powerhouse run, with more than 50 short and feature-length titles on this year’s slate.
Among those set to premiere this week is “Love and Taxes,” a 1970s style romance starring Jake Reiner and Alexis Abrams and directed by Ken Feinberg.
Reiner, who’s visiting Myrtle Beach and its festival for the first time, said he’s excited to see how filmgoers react to his work.
“The thing that I’m really excited for is to see this movie in front of an audience and see how the audience reacts, because I know kind of where maybe the funny lines are or the funny moments are, things that I found interesting about it but I just really want to see how people react to it,” he said.
“Love and Taxes” was originally written by Lloyd Schwartz, whose other credits including working on The Brady Bunch. Imagined first as a play, all seven scenes were done in continuous takes over three days.
When Feinberg took over as director, he said Schwartz asked him if the script should be updated to modern times.
“They sort of talk about each other in a way that you don’t really talk anymore these days. He said, ‘do you want to update this? Make it in 2023 or 2024?’ I said, ‘no, gotta keep it in the 70s, because nobody has cell phones. They had to talk,'” he said.
Reiner, son of filmmaker Rob, explained what it was like to shoot a movie in such a short period of time.
“When we got to the set, it was like we ran it, like a couple of times because we didn’t have that much time, we were dealing with a really tiny budget too so time was of the essence, and you kind of had to memorize all the blocking, muscle memory and all of that while memorizing all the lines and then being present in the scene and acting too so it was an incredible feat that we were able to accomplish,” he said.
The Myrtle Beach International Film Festival, now in its 19th year, runs through Sunday at Stone Theatres Grand 14 in Market Common.
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Hannah Huffstickler is a multimedia journalist at News13. She joined the News13 team in January 2024 after graduating from Coastal Carolina University in December of 2023. Keep up with Hannah on Facebook and Instagram. You can also read more of her work here.
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