Comal County’s Parker has a Political Engagement with moviemaking / By Maria Sprow

There’s always been a bit of a love affair between politicians and fame, between entertainment and politics – it’s the same marriage of money and power. On a grander scale, celebrities and politicians are one and the same – think Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura and Fred Thompson, the Bush twins and Al Gore – but county government tends to hide itself from the larger beast.

Then comes Comal County Commissioner Gregory Parker, the anti-stereotype. For a county government official, Parker is young, in his mid-30s. He’s also black, and has his own Website. His office in downtown New Braunfels is remarkably clean and organized, though that could be an act. But it’s not until his phone rings and he starts talking about how well-made the Jennifer Lopez movie Maid in Manhattan was that the extent of Parker’s love affair with politics and entertainment becomes clear.

Some politicians campaign on the promise of cleaning up government. But Parker, while committed to his county and constituents, has been running a different campaign for the last three years. It’s a campaign to make Hollywood original again, hopefully via his own movie, Political Engagement, a screenplay he co-authored with his younger brother Christopher about “a divorced, womanizing mayor (who) enlists the aid of his ex-wife in his plan to fake an engagement to win his election for U.S. Senate,” according to the film’s tagline. “Political Engagement is about, really, the approach we take to love, divorce and politics,” Parker said, adding that he was tired of boy-meets-girl plots and wanted to create something more mature. “Since I know politics, I based the story around politics, and how that could be the motivation to fake an engagement.”

Making his own feature film may sound like a pipedream, but it’s a pipedream coming true – though the road to Hollywood had some bridges that needed repaired.

“It has been a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,” Parker said. “Hollywood is a business of who you know, it’s not what you know. You can have the greatest script in the world, but if you don’t know someone, you’re going nowhere. Our first crash course in getting into the industry was in meeting people who really didn’t want to further our project.”

But Parker persevered. He sent the script to a professional critiquing company, made changes, found some contacts, and, when that still wasn’t enough to sell the film to big-name studios, he and Christopher decided to co-found Two Brothers Entertainment and co-produce the movie themselves.

“We had actually taken the screenplay around and we found some interest in it, but the prevailing interest was more, ‘we can give you a couple hundred thousand dollars for it, or you can make it yourselves as an independent movie,’” Parker said. “We had to get a track record, and just writing wouldn’t get us the experience we were looking for.”

Now, the commissioner will be sitting in the director’s chair. “There are clear-cut examples of how politicians have gone onto acting, and how actors have become politicians,” he said. “I think it’s an easy step to move into, because as a politician, you meet a lot of people and those contacts can help you, and it’s the same way when you are maneuvering through the entertainment industry. As a politician, you already know how to talk to people and sell people on your ideas.”

Parker was actually new to county government when he started writing the script; his political experience came from the private industry, where he worked as a public policy analyst on mostly city issues. His experience in county government still paved the way for his journey through the star-studded challenges that make up Hollywood. “Being a director or producer is a lot like managing a county. You have several million dollars you have to manage, and you have several people working for you doing many types of jobs. As a county commissioner, we have a whole lot of functions we have to coordinate together, to do the best for the county as a whole, and that’s just like producing a major project,” he said, adding that, just like in government, the green light or red light for any project is always based on dollars and cents, and county officials know how to do their homework.

“The target audience we have identified is between 25 and 59 years old, and those people make up 60 percent of the movie-going public. The first marriage for a male and female usually happens at around age 25, and the first divorce is usually around 30 years old. The average voting age for our nation is around 40 years old,” he said. “I did all the research, because being a first-timer, I don’t have the luxury of failing. I had to make sure I overplayed. I had to make sure I did everything right.”

To sell the script, he purposefully set the movie in a non-descript every-city city and focused the movie on a city mayor running for the United States Senate because, traditionally, those are the most tumultuous campaigns.

“I could write a screenplay based on county government, but the key is, there is not a lot of friction in county government. You see a lot more friction between your state elected officials or your city officials. County government is one of those unsung heroes, it stays in the background and doesn’t make any waves, so it’s probably the last place to gain any entertainment interest at all,” Parker said. “You’re not really going to cure that unless you start seeing that type of friction, and in my opinion, the less friction we’re making, the better we’re doing.”

The movie’s budget stands at $10 million, raised through a variety of tax credits, loans and investors. The $10 million is a healthy budget for an independent film, though a drop in the bucket for many feature films, which cost an average of $60 million. It’s large enough that Parker has already been able to sign two professional actresses – Jennifer Sciole, who has had one-time roles on TV shows Everybody Loves Raymond, Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, and Entourage, among others; and Elise Neal, who has had roles in Scream 2, Hustle & Flow and Money Talks. He’s also partnered with another producer, a photography director, an assistant director, a composer and a stunt coordinator.

Filming is scheduled to begin soon in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Parker wanted to film in Texas, he said, and had even hand-picked filming locations in San Antonio, but the tax credits here were too low to make shooting an independent movie feasible, one other way in which politics and movie making intertwine.

Parker hopes that his two love affairs – with politics and entertainment – continue to co-mingle. His company is already developing more projects, including a science fiction novel about bioterrorism, an action script about a computer monitor that tells the future and another comedy about a woman who is turned into a guy for a day. “I love politics, and I love helping people. If I can help people through politics or if I can help them through the entertainment industry, I want the ability to do both,” he said. “My brother and I are looking to really make movies. I know a lot of people say, this is a hobby, but I see us possibly making a movie a year. We will make all these projects independently, and then push them through whichever distributor picks them up first.”