Wheaton woman finds niche in short films
Dawn Westlake began a long walk home with a length of rope that would soon become a noose and an 11-year-old boy with a gun in his waistband.
What followed would be entirely new chapters in her life and the boy's. Outside the plot, in real life, the final cut of "68째 & Clear" also marked the seventh short film Westlake wrote, produced, directed and starred in.
Now the film joins six others in a dossier of silver screen creations that's toured film festivals around the world along with their creator for the past seven years.
Through her work, Westlake has become a star of her own creation. She's done it by putting forth a one-man-band type of effort while other Hollywood hopefuls are still tooling around with scripts in their trunks that will never be made into a film.
"I'm sort of my own 800-pound gorilla," Westlake said of her career.
Westlake believes her career began as a member of the speech team at Wheaton Central High School. But if you ask her father, Don Westlake, her career began almost from birth.
Dawn Westlake developed into a talking, determined child early on in life. Don Westlake said it was clear she would be some sort of performer.
"When we had family get-togethers, she would be directing all of her cousins in plays and performing in them herself," he said.
"She was as easy to raise as possibly could be. I never had to tell her to do her homework. She always had great stick-to-itiveness."
That character trait would later play a role in a Westlake family drama, but first it applied to her career.
Dawn Westlake entered Northwestern University to pursue a dream of becoming a television news anchor. Television news stations were in a hiring drought at the time of her graduation, so she found herself taking classes at Second City. Soon she was doing national commercials and performing on live stage.
It was a short trip to San Francisco in 1990 from there. That's when the frustration of the search to make it big began to set in. While waiting for her break, Westlake tried to co-produce a film in Spain, but couldn't make the inroads necessary to complete it.
Then, in 1999, a friend encouraged her to do a short film in Portugal to show the Spaniards what she could do.
"While I was doing that I said to myself, 'Wait a minute. These shorts are great. I get to go all over the world. I don't have to deal with the whole machine of the industry.' And that's how I fell in love with the genre."
The nature of short films is typically low-budget, high work. That's proven true for Westlake as she's taken all seven of her short films from concept to reality. Some of it is a labor of love. Other aspects are just labor.
"I absolutely love to act," Westlake said. " It's like a vacation. You get to be somebody else. They feed you and make you coffee and pamper you.
"I write because I have to write," she continued. "Sometimes I just have a story that I have to tell.
"I absolutely hate producing," she concluded. "If somebody would like to produce for me, that would be great. There's a lot of babysitting involved. You have to make sure everyone shows up on time, meals are ordered, etc. It's horrible work, and it's thankless. Everybody is mad at you."
Westlake said she likes to direct because it puts her in control. But for one film, "A Life of Death," she found herself in the unusual position of having to control someone who traditionally had controlled her.
The film is based on a poem written by her father, Don Westlake. The theme behind the poem is the irony of using war and all its horrors to pave the way to peace. It explores the problem of how high the price for lasting peace can be.
Don Westlake said his daughter was fairly anxious about directing him.
"How do you tell your father what to do?" he said. "But as it turned out, it was as easy as pie. I just felt it. Both Dawn and Helen, my wife, told me over and over again that the poem was one of the best things I had ever written. I didn't feel that way about it. Now that it's been made as a film, I think it is the best thing I've ever written."
Dawn said, to this day, her dad is her favorite actor that she's ever worked with. And her father's poem fit right in with the way she sees the world.
"The world is ironic," she said. "There's no one book of one color. Everybody has their shades of gray or hypocrisy."
Such is the nature of her latest film, "68째 and Clear."
The title is based on the notion of the typical, perfect day in Los Angeles. The plot surrounds two main characters. There's a young boy who's just lost his brother to a war. His grandfather is now raising him. And there's a middle-aged woman who has all the material things in life, but just lost her husband to cancer and now can't pay her bills.
Their paths cross as the boy sets out with a gun to find money and the woman sets out to kill herself. The film also has an appearance from fellow Wheaton native John Neisler, who portrays a police officer.
The film will be one of those to appear at the Urban Films Series in Washington, D.C., this month. From there, it's on to festivals in Turkey, Rwanda and the United Kingdom.
Westlake said she's not fixated on becoming a Hollywood superstar.
"What's really important is to be happy and sleeping at night and appealing to your morals and your ethics and your values," she said. "I totally quit chasing fame."
Westlake plans to return to Wheaton this July to celebrate her father's 80th birthday.
Seven films
A list of Dawn Westlake's projects can be found on a compilation DVD available at: www.filmbaby.com/films/2412
• Mini Driver Project (2000)
• Dottie: The Little Girl With The Big Voice (2002)
• Thoroughly Modern Mili (2003)
• A Life of Death (2003)
• The Pawn (2004)
• God's Good Pleasure (2006)
• 68 & Clear (2007)
Source: www.dawnwestlake.com