Studio Presents It’s Your Fault Short Film
Actor Megan Ketch founded Studio in the fall of 2019 and co-taught an intimate Monday night scene study with writer/director and casting director, Jeremy O’Keefe. Through the uncertain days of 2020, Megan took full leadership of Studio curating a reading series of plays and screenplays over Zoom until the world re-opened. Now in its sixth year, Studio has served over 200 professional actors in the greater Los Angeles area in more than forty scene studies, intensives, artist retreats and two staged productions. Studio’s mission is to foster an artistic community that puts the actor at the center of their creative process.
In November of 2023, Studio actors signed up for a scene study based on the Western genre. The richness of that workshop combined with Studio’s affiliation with V6 Ranch (20,000 acres of working cattle ranch outside Paso Robles) inspired the idea for a short film. Six distinctive writers contributed a scene to our short film entitled It’s Your Fault that will feature thirteen Studio actors. While many of the actors in Studio primarily work in film and TV, the workshops Studio offers center on plays and acting for the stage. By teaching an on-camera acting workshop in early December 2024, Ketch opened the door to exploring the medium of film in Studio. It’s Your Fault is Ketch’s film directorial debut.
John and Barbara Varian, who built Parkfield Lodge and Café at the V6 Ranch have opened their doors to Studio since 2020 for yearly artist retreats. In late June and early July, they will host us for a four day film shoot. With great talent and a wildly cinematic location to film, It’s Your Fault is a pastiche, stitched together by subject, image, character and theme. From the playwrights we studied in the Western genre workshop (Sarah Ruhl, Tracy Letts, Keith Reddin and Sam Sheperd), a central tension emerged: mutuality and division. We are interdependent and we are divided. If human insistence keeps prevailing over human subsistence, we will lose everything. Parkfield, where we will film, resides on the San Andreas fault. There is potent, frictional energy in every corner.
As a nation, we are at an inflection point of cultural and political division. Our habitat is buckling under our metastasizing consumption yet nature remains an enduring – sometimes exacting - teacher. Just months ago, Southern California erupted in devastating wildfires displacing human and wildlife. In Los Angeles, we’re still in crisis management, the grief and absorption of this toll has only begun to unfold. The unimaginable became reality and reality became unimaginable. Art can put tragedy in conversation with continuance; it can bridge our howling fragility to our hope.
Forest fire makes the Sequoia drop its seed; destruction clears the old and the dead. John Varian’s wood-working shop burned down and the Parkfield Cafe and Lodge was built in its absence. This dance of burning and rising is a human phenomenon too and one that spurs hope for our country, our species and others. Bringing artists together in nature to tell a complex, quilted story is part of our resistance to delusion, to authoritarianism and to despair.
Your Support to Fund this Film Means:
Twenty-five Studio artists get to take a creative risk with shared stake.
A film gets made that is a love letter to the West that quakes and burns.
Land-marked, cinematic California acreage with deep significance to the Studio community gets featured and rendered on film.
A first-time female director gets to add her voice to a male-dominated Western genre.
Themes of individualism, division and mutuality get explored through six distinct writers.
Studio expands its resources and ingenuity to the medium of storytelling through film.
A film gets made with an inventive structure, with cathartic, organically-derived performances and a unity of purpose and intention, free of the marketplace over culture.
In the words of the actors, It’s Your Fault explores the following:
Connectivity
Ranging
Creative
Reinvention
Remorse
Breaking points
Inheritance
Fault-lines
Decay
Liminality
Dissatisfaction
Hope
Anonymity
Isolation
Ghosts
Risk
Loneliness
Individualism
Division
Blame
Please add your voice to the film by making a donation and help us realize this inclusive vision of the West and a version of storytelling in film where mutuality flourishes.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt. The time of the lone wolf is over.
– The Prophecy of the Hopi Elders, 2000
