JUNE & JULY

“June & July” tells the story of fraternal twins June and July Shauer, lifelong residents of a depressed town with its glory days well in the past. After their mother suddenly dies in a car accident, June decides that she must get out and do something with her life before it’s too late. July, on the other hand, is comfortable where he is and has no idea of June’s longing for something new. Adding to June’s stress is a struggle to deal with her unexplained supernatural physiology, of which only her brother knows. Or so she thinks.

Her “condition” causes an incident that threatens to keep her chained down to the town she desperately wants to leave. Between court dates, June enlists her brother to help shed some light on their family past. What they discover both comforts and confuses them while casting a greater air of mystery upon the genetic history of the Shauer family.

Director, writer – Brady Hall

83 minutes
currently unavailable
IMDB page

About The Production

After making two feature films with my pal Calvin Lee Reeder we started making stuff on our own and helping each other out accordingly. I helped produce some award winning shorts he wrote and directed and he acted in my feature film. June & July came to be after I wrote a paranormal mumblecore script and thought my friend Bernadette would make a good lead. Listen, mumblecore was all the rage in the early oughts, don’t come at me. Luckily, Bernadette knew a weird rich guy in Philadelphia who she felt would fund the film and he ended up doing just that to the tune of $150,000 which, in hindsight, was a blessing many years too early since I didn’t really know how make a real film. Sure, we’d made some ramshackle, guerilla things before but nothing with any kind of crew or money to get things done with.

Production began in 2005 with a small crew mostly consisting of local yokels I’d worked with before including Megan Griffiths as Assistant Director who went on to become an accomplished writer and director of big time film and TV, Lynn Shelton in an acting role who also went on to great movie success before her untimely death in 2020 and Sean Porter, a now Oscar nominated cinematographer. But we lucked out with an amazing east coast cinematographer, Bruce Cole, who I’d worked with on a short a couple years back and he brought a visual professionalism to the movie that elevated things nicely. We shot this on 35mm film in and around Seattle for a few weeks, renting locations we could, stealing shots when we couldn’t find places on the up and up and generally operating under the idea that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. One of the things I bought with the budget was a cargo van and we quickly learned that a cargo van, some hard hats and hi-vis vests will allow you to park anywhere you want and nobody will bat an eye. We even shot one doctor’s office scene in the only place we could find: the medical play room at a sex club.

When it was all finished we submitted to a ton of festivals and were rejected by all except Local Sightings, a small Seattle independent fest. We did win the top prize there, so there’s that! After than nothing happened with it so it just sat in the closet forever. Literally. Up until 2022 I had innumerable boxes of negatives clogging up my house.

The end result of it all was an OK movie that could have been a whole lot better if I had the skills I learned later, but that’s how it goes. I still think of what I could have done with $150,000 in 2015 instead of 2005.

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