Don Maki’s “The Ace of Coins” will premiere at East Longmeadow High School on Nov. 6 and Nov. 7.
Photo credit: Don Maki
EAST LONGMEADOW — Former ELCAT Director Don Maki is preparing for the premiere of his first narrative feature film, “The Ace of Coins,” written, directed and produced by Maki and created with East Longmeadow students, alumni and community members.
The Nov. 6 and Nov. 7 showings are free to the public, beginning at 7 p.m. at the new East Longmeadow High School, 180 Maple St.
Maki will introduce the film and hold a panel with the cast and crew immediately after. The film’s runtime is about 75 minutes and contains some strong language.
“The Ace of Coins” follows Leo Draghetti, a magic coin and his family’s Italian restaurant.
Leo must navigate through life, love and the path for his future when put in charge of his grandfather Carmine’s restaurant after a stroke and having a group of friends itching to get out of town.
The film’s synopsis states, “When Leo spies his pals fleeing from a prank gone bad, he must reconcile his feelings of loyalty, guilt, aspiration and loss with the implications of magic, truth and the nature of fate itself.”
Maximilian Simonelli stars as Leo. Other cast members include Rich Freccero, Ed Fitzgerald and Ariana Jones.
Maki told Reminder Publishing he found his love for filmmaking while teaching a film class at the high school after the COVID-19 pandemic. He had been teaching news and broadcast journalism classes, which didn’t come back after the students did.
“I always loved film, I mean as a kid, I ran around with an 8mm movie camera,” Maki said. “I was really, really lucky to have a group of students … It was really 2023 when we were, sort of, up and running again. The spring term, the first thing we did, we made a baseball movie.”
Maki said he and the students came up with the idea for a movie set in a restaurant, but his group of seniors were burnt out and it didn’t get off the ground.
“That was that, and that was fine, but I couldn’t let go of the idea,” Maki said. “Would it be possible to make this movie and rather than do it as a student project, have it be my project and work with students?”
Maki enlisted the help of four art students to help build the restaurant set in the high school’s ELCAT studio as an independent study before his 2024 retirement.
“My last year running a production class at the high school as the ELCAT director was bringing in a load of lumber and a bunch of tools from home, and basically teaching these four young students how to build movie flats,” Maki said. “They started doing research, looking online, looking at magazines, bringing stuff from home and talking about restaurant movies that they loved. They were brilliant. They built a dining room in an Italian restaurant and painted a beautiful mural. It’s unbelievable, it’s just gorgeous.”
Maki said the set was built before writing the script. He said he had an outline and the characters in mind, so the rest came organically.
“I didn’t have actors, I didn’t have cinematographers, I didn’t have anything,” Maki said. “I had former students who were interested in helping, and that was a really fascinating process for me, and gives an idea of how organic it was and rooted in the process of teaching and learning.”
He said there were many challenges during the filming process and the crew’s scheduling was very limited in a race against the school’s demolition.
“There were a lot of technical challenges, and then as the time crunch came up, we still hadn’t shot like two big scenes,” Maki said. “I’m trying to get everybody to come in on a Saturday and we’ve only got so many weeks. There’s no reshooting anything so it was very challenging, and people were wonderful. Everybody was great, people had so much fun. Nobody had ever done anything like it and they had such a wonderful time. They were so good to me, so good to me.”
Maki said the film is an accumulation and affirmation of everything he’s learned.
“I didn’t know if I was gonna have a movie until a month after we were done shooting, because I didn’t even know what the footage looked like,” Maki said. “I’m proud of this movie. Is it the movie I would make if I had all the means to do it again? No, but I have the experience of having worked with these people and created something that I don’t know if anybody really thought was possible.”
Maki said he is unsure of the future for “The Ace of Coins,” but he is submitting it to film festivals around the country.
He said he wanted to show the film in East Longmeadow because it wouldn’t have been made without community support.
