It’s not too often that a Gamecock alumnus becomes a film writer, which makes it especially rare when a former student body president does it.
After he received a graduate degree in journalism from USC in 1985, Glenn German made his way to NYU to attend graduate film school and he’s been making film for 14 years now. And on Tuesday night, Carolina Productions screened his most recent project “At Middleton” (co-written by German and Adam Rodgers) in the Russell House Theater.
According to German, the most exciting part of the night for him was watching his own movie in a theater he got to know very well in college.
“I’ve seen probably half of everything in my life in [the Russell House] Theater,” German said. “It was just a seminal part of my falling in love with movies.”
When Rodgers and German began co-writing movies, they sold seven different ideas but none of them ended up getting produced. Finally, the idea for “At Middleton” was born.
“At some point we decided that we weren’t going to write something that we thought somebody might buy, but we were going to write something that we could actually make,” German said.
“At Middleton” focuses on an uptight cardiologist who meets a quirky, off-the-wall mom during a college visit. They're there for their own children, but they bond while playing hooky from the tour and making a tour of their own. The movie is a romance, but it takes an interesting approach to a love story, considering both main characters are already married.
They ride bikes around the campus, explore the school's buildings, crash a drama class and more — German even admitted that the storyline was loosely based on a tour Rogers took when he was touring Wesleyan in Connecticut.
“[Rodgers and another girl on the tour] sort of played tour hooky. They went off for two or three hours, and they were just two 17-year-old kids,” German said. “We sort of liked this nugget of an idea, but then I think we just got old, and we wondered, ‘Well, what about the parents?’”
Originally, German said that Kevin Bacon and Meg Ryan were set to star in this film, but the movie ended up starring Andy Garcia and Vera Farminga. Even with several cast changes, he was pleased with how the movie and its cast turned out.
“Now that I look back on it, I wouldn’t have traded those two for the world," he said. "It was a huge thrill seeing wonderfully talented people saying the things that you’ve written."
Overall, German has come a long way since he pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon and took office as student body president in the ’80s. All the same, he was inspired by his time on this campus.
“If it wasn’t for this theater," he said from the stage of the Russell House theater, "I wouldn’t be doing this."