Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
American screenwriter fashions ‘Dead Fred’ in English setting
“I really have those friends who would help me hide a body. I really do,” novelist and screenwriter Sherrie Kelley-Presson says from her home in Manila, Ark. “Maybe I shouldn’t say that in the paper …. There’s nothing wrong with saying that, right?”
Fortunately, Kelley-Presson is not plotting anyone’s demise but is instead discussing the plot of the 2019 British comedy “Dead Fred,” which she wrote.
The comedy concerns a trio of lifelong buddies Rebecca (Jane How), Georgeanne (Sandra Dickinson, “Ready Player One”), and Sissy (Susan Kyd) who are struggling to help a friend with Lewy body dementia named Julie (Judy Norman) stay in her own home despite the fact that her daughter (Melissa De Mol) is eager to put her in a facility and make a few quid off the sale.
Complicating their efforts is the discovery that there is a reason Julie keeps insisting that her long missing husband, Fred, is down in the cellar. His very real remains have been in a freezer for years.
Julie’s memory is unreliable, and she has a habit of seeing objects and animals that don’t exist, so figuring out how Fred met his demise and finding a more permanent resting place becomes even more challenging.
“Dead Fred” won a Best
Ensemble Cast award at Toronto’s Reel HeART International Film Festival last year and will make its streaming debut Tuesday.
ACROSS THE POND
Kelley-Presson has lived most of her life in Arkansas and Missouri and considers Kennet, Mo., her hometown (it also gave us Sheryl Crow). Originally, her four characters were Americans, but British director Deanna Dewey and producers Gemma Wilks and Terry Wookey thought her tale might work across the Atlantic.
“I posted my screenplay at Talentville.com,” she recalls. “It was for aspiring screenplay writers. What we did was we traded off. If read someone else’s screenplay and gave feedback on it, then you got yours read, and you get to post one of your screenplays free. I kept it there, and that’s where Deanna Dewey and her husband found it. They were looking for something that was low cost.”
While the outline of her story has remained intact throughout the process, Kelley-Presson worked closely with her British collaborators to make sure the dialogue didn’t sound artificial coming out of the mouths of actors whose accents differed from her own. Even the one Yank in the cast, Sandra Dickinson, originally hails from D.C.
“It was a learning experience. I learned a lot more British terms than I ever thought possible,” Kelley-Presson recalls. “Deanna told me she was on the phone to a friend, and they were searching for a freezer. In my original screenplay, it was one of those old rounded ones like my grandpa had.
“She had someone looking for one, and she was waling along, and she asked if there was one big enough to hide a body in, and people were staring at her. She said they found one in the ‘rubbish tip.’ That’s what they call their junkyard. There were so many terms. I forgot the term that they use for a dolly, but then I wondered, why do we call it a ‘dolly?’”
Adding to the potential difficulty is that Kelley-Presson never got to visit the country house in Fordingbridge, Hampshire. Dewey sent her photos of the locations, which the screenwriter used to make the action more applicable to the new setting.
“I wish I could have been (there). I have a brother who flies for Delta Airlines, and he could have flown me over there,” Kelley-Presson says. “She had a reader’s group, and they’d give me feedback, and to tell you the truth, I was sick of the script by the time I was finished. It stayed true to the story. They did that at (Dewey and her husband’s) house. I got to see pictures of every room in the house when I was rewriting it. That’s not something a screenwriter gets the opportunity to do often.”
In addition, audiences who saw the movie in theaters and online in the UK, got to see some brief gags involving Fred’s, um, manhood. “It’s sad that they had to take that out. The U.S. version will not have that. I cannot believe it. We are more conservative than the British on this. I haven’t seen the U.S. version yet. I’ve been grinding my teeth all morning,” she laments.
HER BACK PAGES
When she hasn’t been writing scripts or “boring” human-interest stories for local newspapers, Kelley-Presson has been a single mom, a waitress and a prolific novelist. She and Donna Smith Eller, who inspired Georganne, have teamed up on several books under the pseudonym Sheridon Smythe, including the recent thriller “Dead Rich.” Much of their work can be found at TheWildRosePress.com.
Kelley-Presson recalls that using pseudonyms was a marketplace necessity because some Walmart stores would only allow so much space for writers who weren’t named Stephen King or Nora Roberts, even when her books are continuations of previous stories she has written.
She says that some of her books are comedies like “Dead Fred,” and the same sort of dark and occasionally ribald wit comes through. “My Dorchester editor called me, ‘quirky.’ One of my books involves a condom factory, and the heroine tests the condom, and she has a test penis in her pocket and pretends it’s a gun. Sometimes I make myself laugh. Let’s put it that way,” she says.
She also recalls contributing to the True Story magazines and freely admits that her tales for them weren’t exactly fact checked. She explains with a laugh, “They’re not true, but they’re supposed to be true. With 7 billion people in this world, you know it had to happen. What they loved was ripped from the headlines, stuff like, ‘I Stole a Kidney’ or ‘I Want My Kidney Back.’ The first story I wrote for them was ‘36 Inches of Flaming Love,’ and that’s what they put on the cover. And it was about a midget.”
She’s proud of her debut novel, “Blackberry Winter,” and consistently demonstrates enthusiasm for the stories she has written. She has donated scripts for short movies (like “Trial by Twitter”) made by film students, and she says she and the other members of the crew and cast will receive “Dead Fred” royalties once the film is in the black. She dubs their contributions “pro bono.”
Estimating that’s she’s probably made seven dollars an hour for her trouble over the years, she sounds only mildly disappointed that she hasn’t shoved King’s books off the shelves. She praises what she describes as his photographic memory for details. She’s also happy to share her movie with the women who inspired the story on screen.
“It’s always been the fame without the fortune for me,” she says. “Whoever wrote the screenplay is not usually somebody’s top priority when they’re watching a movie.”