Film shot at Little Corona will premiere at Newport festival

A movie filmed two summers ago at Little Corona beach will have its world premiere this month at the Newport Beach Film Festival.

“Summer of 8” tells the story of eight close friends who are trying to spend a perfect last day together before heading off in different directions for college.

Little Corona isn’t identified in the film — rather, it represents all Southern California beaches, said the movie’s director and screenwriter, Ryan Schwartz, who grew up in Santa Monica.

Though locals will recognize the beach, Schwartz said he digitally changed a lifeguard tower number from 7 to 8 so it would work with the title and theme of the film.

“It became really important to me,” he said.

“Summer of 8,” featuring Shelley Hennig, Carter Jenkins, Bailey Noble, Matt Shively, Michael Grant, Natalie Hall, Rachel DiPillo, Nick Marini and Sonya Walger, will have its premiere at the Island Cinema at Fashion Island at 8 p.m. April 26. A second screening will be at 8 p.m. April 27. Tickets are on sale online for $15.

Schwartz said he was thrilled when festival organizers told him that “Summer of 8” had been selected.

“It’s the perfect home for us,” he said. “I was a beach kid, the story is set at the beach, filmed at Little Corona ... it’s just perfect.”

Leslie Feibleman, the festival’s director of special programs and community cinema, said films like “Summer of 8” are ideal for the festival.

“The geographically distinct coastlines of Newport Beach, Corona del Mar, Crystal Cove and Laguna Beach serve as beautiful, cinematic backdrops for filmmakers to capture the serene and natural beauty of our world-renowned beaches,” Feibleman said. “From narratives to documentaries, the festival annually presents world premieres of films shot locally and films with local talent, both in front of and behind the camera.”

Schwartz studied film at USC in 2000 after graduating from UC Berkeley.

“You think you’re going to graduate and make a film the next week,” he said. “Instead, it took 14 years.”

In 2000, he said, independent film producers weren’t as commonplace as they are today, and he never had the sense that he could write and film a movie without a multimillion-dollar budget. Over the years, he was slated to direct two or three bigger-budget movies, but those fell through. He also wrote five screenplays that never made it into production.

While he worked on movies, he also taught, designed websites and sold mortgages to pay his bills.

“You’re just unproven,” he said. “It took me a long time to accept reality.”

When another movie project fell through in spring 2014, Schwartz took action.

“I got depressed for six seconds, and then I said, ‘I’m going to do this.’ It shouldn’t have taken me 14 years to come up with that plan.”

He wrote a screenplay for “Summer of 8” in three weeks and was able to find a casting director. He also found an investor, Scott Dixon, the executive producer on the film.

“[Dixon] believed in me and the project,” Schwartz said. “It’s a happy ending, as we’ve now started a production company together.”

Schwartz did not disclose the movie’s budget, though he said it was “certainly under the million-dollar range.”

Filming was done at Little Corona for a week in August 2014, capturing the interest of locals who chatted up the crew for hints about what the movie was about.

More filming was done for a week at a house in Santa Monica before the editing process began. Eventually, Schwartz submitted the film to various festivals and continues to work on a distribution deal.

“We’re confident it will find an audience,” he said.

The 17th annual Newport Beach Film Festival, running April 21 through 28, will screen more than 300 movies, including shorts, documentaries, features and family and student films.