Filmmakers Mary and Ronald Bronstein met while making a movie, of course — Frownland, a gloriously abrasive 2007 indie that remains the first and only feature Ronald ever directed. They were both children of the tristate suburbs, Mary from a working-class Connecticut background and Ronald from middle-class Long Island. Ronald had emerged from a bad experience at NYU’s film school with a stolen flatbed editor and a determination to make a movie on his own. He gathered friends to serve as the cast and crew for what would become a portrait of a compulsively off-putting door-to-door salesman who shared a one-bedroom apartment with a hostile roommate and who was dating an unhappy high-schooler. But when it came time to find a female lead, he realized, as he put it, he “didn’t know any women.” Mary, who was just finishing up undergrad at NYU herself, responded to a casting-call flyer Ron posted and slipped into the role with the confrontational zeal of a creative soul mate.
Frownland, made on the extremely cheap without the slightest thought for commercial appeal, is the kind of project we tend to describe as “a labor of love.” The truth is that eking out an exacting vision on your own can feel as much like suffering as fulfillment. Thanks to funding issues, it’d take six long years to finish the movie, with a yearlong break during which Ronald lied his way into a Swedish copywriting job, copying and pasting work off the internet to cobble together a portfolio when finances got especially grim. By the time Frownland was finally completed, Ronald and Mary had started dating and gotten married, and everyone in their lives stopped asking about the status of the project in the way that people might avoid bringing up a recent bereavement. With no idea what to do next, Ronald submitted the completed film to a festival in Williamsburg he’d seen advertised on a telephone pole, where it played in an almost empty residential garage.
“There were these two teenage boys,” Mary explains, grinning. “The movie started, and literally ten minutes in, one turned to the other and was like, ‘This blows.’ Then they loudly slammed their skateboards down on the ground, skated out, and it was just the two of us.”
