Andover alum’s 1st horror movie Eloise debuts on DVD March 21 – The Oakland Press

First-time producer Sanford Nelson discovered pretty fast that the real work begins after filming a movie something he learned making Eloise.

Post-production is a very long process, he says. Between editing, re-editing, sound mixing, coloring, etc., etc., etc. its all very technical. And as this was my first time producing a movie, I was encountering all of this for the first time, so there was an obvious learning curve. Plenty of mistakes were made but nothing that I couldnt recover from.

The movie was made independently, meaning no distributor prior to filming. So once the movie was completed and ready to be shown, we then started the process of doing buyer screenings, explains Nelson, of Detroit, an alumnus of Andover High School in Bloomfield Hills and the University of Michigan.

Vertical Entertainment bought distribution rights in the United States and Canada; other companies are distributing it around the world. Eloise had a limited theatrical run in February, and will be released on DVD on Tuesday, March 21.

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Filmed entirely in Michigan over five weeks in 2014, Eloise is a horror movie with a well-known cast: Chace Crawford (Gossip Girl, The Covenant), Eliza Dushku (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bring It On), Farmington High School alumnus Robert Patrick (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Scorpion), West Bloomfield High School alumnus Brandon T. Jackson (Percy Jackson), Troy native Martin Klebba (Pirates of the Caribbean), and Ann Arbor native Nicole Forester (Chicago Fire, Guiding Light).

It was great to work with both Brandon and Robert, especially given their Michigan ties, Nelson says. Eliza was great to work with, too very professional, as were all of the cast members.

Eloise was inspired by the institution of the same name in Westland, which operated from 1839-1984. At first, it was a poor house and farm, but later converted to a psychiatric hospital. Over the decades, Eloise developed a notorious reputation and its abandoned grounds are rumored to be haunted.

When I first found out about Eloise, I was interested in its long history in Michigan and being one of the largest institutions of its kind in the entire world, Nelson says, noting it grew to 78 buildings on 900 acres.

It was like its own city, he says. It turns out I had some family connections to it. I had a relative who had tuberculosis that was treated there, and he ended up living most of his life there. My great-uncle did his residency there after medical school. Another family friend worked with the female mental patients in the 1950s. Through my research, it seemed to be a great backdrop for a movie, and so I set out to do it.

The plot has Jacob Martin (Crawford) investigating what happened to his late aunt, an asylum patient at Eloise, to collect a sizable inheritance. He needs his aunts death certificate from Eloise. He and his companions, Pia Carter (Dushku) and Dell Richards (Jackson), discover the abandoned asylum is haunted, and they must confront their own tragic pasts.

Its directed by Robert Legato, who did visual effects for The Wolf of Wall Street and directed episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and written by Christopher Borrelli (The Vatican Tapes).

Our home base was the Masonic Temple in Detroit. We got amazing production value out of that place, Nelson says. We also shot on location for a week at some different areas around Detroit, including historic homes in the Boston-Edison neighborhood. We also shot for a few days at the real Eloise location; a few buildings still remain.

All in all, it was a very rewarding experience. I am just glad that we are finally finished and the movie will be seen by people all over the world.

Eloise will be released on DVD on Tuesday, March 21, and will be available on streaming services including iTunes, apple.co/2knTxRx.

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Andover alum's 1st horror movie Eloise debuts on DVD March 21 - The Oakland Press