by Jim Lundstrom, Staff Writer, Appleton Post-Crescent

April 19, 2004

This is a story about friendship, obsession and hockey.

It starts with Erik Moe and Peter Rudy, two 30-something guys who work in advertising in California and who just wanted to see the Wisconsin high school hockey tournament.

“It really, sadly, is an obsession with us,” Rudy said. “Erik and I played high school hockey in Madison. We played in college together at Lawrence (University). When we moved to California, we held on to this obsession with small-town Wisconsin hockey programs.”

The childhood friends wanted to return to Wisconsin in February 1999 for the high school hockey tourney.

“But for some reason,” Rudy said, “our wives didn’t think that was a very good vacation, and, so, we came up with this idea of ‘What if we had an excuse to go back to Wisconsin?’”

The result of that Escape to Wisconsin idea is the award-winning comedy “No Sleep ’Til Madison,” which comes out on DVD Tuesday.

At first the pair thought of creating a documentary, with the high school hockey tournament and the people who follow it as the subject matter.

They always had wanted to make a movie together. Moe and another lifelong friend, Ivo Knezevic, got the bug as youngsters when they filmed a “Rocky” parody called “Stony,” which aired on the national TV show for children called “Kids World.”

“We always knew we were going to work together, we just didn’t know how,” Knezevic said.

Rudy and Moe turned their thoughts to a movie that would feature the Wisconsin high school hockey tournament as a backdrop. For the starring role they came up with the consummate anti-hero, Owen Fenby, a 30-year-old emotionally stunted character who overorganizes an annual hockey tourney trip with some of his old high school buddies, all of whom are well adjusted compared to Owen.

Rudy and Moe, both of whom majored in English when they attended Lawrence in the mid-1980s, wrote the script in two months over the summer of 1999 in an office Moe had on the Universal Studios lot while he had a TV sitcom development deal.

“Our thought was to sell it and have someone else make it,” Moe said. “But we both talked for a long time about doing a movie and we realized if ever we were going to make one, this was the one to make because only we would really understand it.”

Once the story started coming along, the pair contacted Knezevic, who produces commercials for a Chicago ad agency and served as producer for “No Sleep.”

Once they decided to shoot the film themselves, they formed a limited partnership and sold shares for $10,000 apiece.

“Remember, this was the glorious ’90s when the dot.coms were taking off and everyone was investing in any weird idea,” Rudy said. “‘The Blair Witch Project’ had just come out, this crappy-looking film that made $60 million or something. So people all wanted to latch on to the next ‘Blair Witch Project.’”

They also broke one of the cardinal rules of independent filmmaking by putting their own money into the project.

With that they raised enough to make the film.

Once the script was polished, they began thinking of the cast.

Moe had worked with actor Jim Gaffigan on a commercial (“The Ellen Show,” “Three Kings,” “Super Troopers”), so he showed him the script.

“He read the screenplay and said he’d love to do Owen,” Rudy said.

“We were very fortunate in casting,” Knezevic said. “Erik brought Jim to the party. I used some casting directors in Chicago. They came on board very early and really tapped into Second City and the comedy world. It really all comes down to casting and actors.”

“From there it kind of snowballed,” Rudy said. “The next thing we know, we’re standing in this snowy field in Wisconsin with a crew and all these actors. ‘What have we gotten ourselves into? Ohmygod!’”

They brought David Fleer of Madison on board as third director. His ImageGate Films production company has produced ads for national clients, and Fleer’s documentary “What Does the Lady Do With Her Rage?” premiered at the 2003 Wisconsin Film Festival.

Knezevic said the production was fraught with problems.

“We were crazy for shooting in February in Wisconsin, but we didn’t lose any days,” he said.

“I’ve always wanted to make a movie about the making of the movie because that was 22 days of flying by the seat of our pants,” Rudy said. “The snow melted halfway through the shoot. We left our film equipment on the road one day and drove away with $50,000 worth of equipment sitting on the interstate. That was not a good one. Thank god a local farmer came by, picked it up and called us.”

Getting the film into its final form took about another 18 months, Rudy said.

Still they were not done.

“Then you have to find a festival that will play it,” Rudy said. “So it becomes another year of going around the country playing film festivals all over, trying to build some momentum until someone takes a chance on distributing it.”

“No Sleep” debuted at the 2002 Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison, where it won Best Feature in the Wisconsin’s Own category.

It also went on to win the prestigious Sundance Channel Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2003 St. Louis International Film Festival, as well as Best Comedy and Audience Favorite at the 2003 Santa Monica Film Festival.

“Obviously, in Minnesota and Wisconsin you expect a good response,” Knezevic said. “But we’ve had screenings in Florida and, particularly, Los Angeles where everybody’s a little more jaded and we had great audience response. That’s been pretty fulfilling.”

In September they thought they had a distributor. They wanted the potential distributor to see the movie in a friendly crowd, so invited him to see it during the Central Standard Film Festival in Minneapolis.

“We thought what would seal the deal was for him to see a crowd watching it,” Rudy said. “It’s one thing to see it on TV, but it’s really neat to get into a room with about 150 people who want to laugh.”

But lightning struck the theater that night and knocked the sound out. By the time the problem was fixed, it was 11 p.m.

“By then there were about 15 people left, and half of them are asleep,” Rudy said. “It was a disastrous showing. The distributor flew out the next day and we could tell he wasn’t that interested anymore.”

But the film had one more showing. It was a daytime showing, and it turned out to be a beautiful sunny day. They were expecting the worst.

“We thought no one was going to show up, but about 100 people showed up,” Rudy said.

One of those people just happened to be a co-founder of the Filmmakers Alliance in Los Angeles.

“She had a film in the festival that we had seen,” Rudy said. “Just as a courtesy, she came to see our film. We thought she would hate it, and she loved it. Little did we know that she was trying to come up with five films that would be part of the initial release of the Filmmakers Alliance Collection.

The deal was sealed, and “No Sleep ’Til Madison” is part of that initial release on Tuesday.

“If this has proven anything to us, it’s that you never know where your break’s going to come from,” Rudy said. “Now our biggest goal is to make back enough money for investors who four years ago took a chance on us and also pay back all the people who worked on the film and deferred their pay. Deferred pay in the movie business usually means you never get paid. We would love to break that tradition. We have a real shot of doing that with this distribution deal.”

Then, it’s on to the next film.

“We’re ready to go,” Moe said. “I’ve got a script called ‘American Monster,’ which is kind of a modern spin on the Rhinelander Hodag myth. I’ve already showed it to Jim, and he wants to play a part in it. What we’re hoping is we have a good run of DVD sales with ‘No Sleep” so we’ll be able to take that to potential investors and say, ‘Look, we can at least get you your money back.’”

With all the hard work expended over such a long period of time on this movie, the trio of friends all said it was their long histories together that probably kept everything rolling on track without any personnel conflicts.

“It’s a buddy movie on the screen,” Knezevic said, “but it’s also the quest of three lifelong buddies to make a movie together.”

Owen Fenby would like that.

Jim Lundstrom can be reached at 920-993-1000, ext. 374, or by e-mail at jlundstrom@postcrescent.com