George Sanchez already is famous in the minds of Lakewood diners. His Gold Rush Cafe has been an East Dallas center point for over 30 years. Now the little cafe is going Hollywood. East Dallas writer/director Eric Steele filmed his first first short, "Topeka," at the Gold Rush over three nights last week.
"Every time I went there, I thought, ‘This is the perfect location for my story,’" Steele said. He wrote "Topeka" about a year ago as part of a collection of one-act plays that center around business travel. It’s about a young salesman from the East Coast, who is in Topeka for one day. He stops into a diner to kill time before a meeting and notices that everyone there looks strangely outdated, even for Topeka. They’re dressed in vaguely religious garb — one lady looks like a Puritan, a couple of guys look Amish, etc. So he gets up to go to the bathroom, and when he gets back, he notices that all of his stuff — his laptop, his glasses, his coat — is gone. "And that’s where the action starts," Steele said.
He describes the film as "a psychological thriller where nothing is as it seems."
Read more about "Topeka" after the jump.
Steele took six months to hire a cast of all Dallas actors, including some who now live in Los Angeles. Filming at the Gold Rush gave the production a "real East Dallas vibe," Steele said.
"There was a commercial that was done here, but yeah, that was the first movie," Sanchez said.
The film’s director of photography is Clay Liford, who currently has a film entered in the Los Angeles and CineVegas film festivals. They will spend the summer in post-production on "Topeka" and plan to enter it in the Sundance Film Festival before a September deadline. The project has been picked up by the Screen Actors Guild, and has a chance to be viewed by the Academy Award committee.
But if it doesn’t win an Oscar, just remember: The Gold Rush IS big. It’s the pictures that got small.
