BY ANDRE MORGAN
The wrestling community often feels slighted and misunderstood by the rest of the sporting world. But James Oliva plans to do his part to correct this.
Oliva is filming an independent college wrestling movie, “7 Minutes.” Using local wrestlers, locations and actors, production of the movie has moved forward, with this weekend’s first audition netting several athletes starring roles.
The movie is based loosely on experiences and observations from Oliva’s college career at Northern Illinois, where he finished 25-8 as a senior and was the Mid-American Conference runner-up. A media production major, Olivia first got the idea of writing a script his sophomore year, started taking notes during his junior year and completed a 50-page outline his senior season.
With help from co-writer Joe Ziegler, the movie’s script is on its fifth version, but it’s getting close to a final stage.
The movie follows a fictional college wrestling team through a season. The movie’s lead character, Anson, is a wrestler who has been expected to do big things since high school but has one final season to meet his collegiate potential.
More than 50 hopefuls auditioned at the Congress Plaza Hotel downtown for 16 roles. Eight wrestlers were cast on the spot, and another audition has been scheduled in a month to complete the casting.
Several current and former Division I wrestlers were on hand, including former NCAA champ Tony Davis (Northern Iowa), NCAA runner-up Matt Murray (Nebraska-Lincoln), Jeff Harrison (Northern Iowa), Steve Ertl (Northern Iowa), James Wood (Nebraska-Omaha) and Doug Leclair, the coach at Wisconsin-LaCrosse.
“I see the movie ‘7 Minutes’ 15 years from now being a motivational movie for wrestlers the way ‘The Program’ with James Caan was for football players in the ’90’s,” said Matt Kucala, who wrestled at Providence and Northern Illinois. “The movie will show how much we train for those seven minutes that basically becomes our whole life.”
Filming is set to begin June 20 at NIU, Wisconsin-Baraboo and Ottawa High School, with background shots around the Chicagoland area. The Web site 7minutes-movie.com has generated 50,000 hits in the last year, and word of mouth promotion is growing.
When production finishes in the fall, Oliva plans to shop his movie to independent film festivals and hopes to catch the eye of the major movie moguls.
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