INTERVIEW: Stealing Pulp Fiction to Receive Special Screening at Albany’s Spectrum Theatre
Photo by Carly Kaplan
“...a quirky heist movie about a group of friends that set out to steal Quentin Tarantino’s personal 35mm print of Pulp Fiction.”
Stealing Pulp Fiction, Danny Turkiewicz’s debut feature film, will be showing at the beloved neighborhood theater, Scene One Spectrum 8, starting on July 11th. The film’s other screening engagements will include cities like Los Angeles, New York, Boston and New Orleans, amongst others. With all due respect to our fair city, one of these places is not like the others. So how did we get on this list?
Capital Region native and Bethlehem Central High School Alumnus Jordan Ferrin is the answer. Ferrin, an executive producer and the first assistant director on the film, thought it would be cool to have the film play at his old local theater.
“I hit up the director and one of the producers and the answer I got was ‘the distributor only wants very specific theaters,’” Ferrin told us. “And then lo and behold, here it is playing in Albany.”
Ferrin’s story is like the stuff you see in movies. Small-town kid heads out to LA without a job or a place to live and just tries to make it. He always knew he liked telling stories. He started out with a group of friends doing comics and eventually that same group just started making little short films together for various school projects.
He eventually went to school as an English major but quickly found out it wasn’t for him. He transferred to Emerson College in Boston where he switched majors and began studying film. At Emerson, he spent a semester out in Los Angeles doing an internship and taking various film courses and that experience cemented that he wanted to be in Hollywood for the long haul.
Ferrin had not lost his passion for telling stories and after college, the plan was to find a job out in LA on the writing side of the film industry.
“The expectations I had were not aligned with reality,” Ferrin said. “I thought I was going to find a job in LA from New York and tried doing that for six months with no luck. Eventually I just decided to go there.”
Ferrin packed up and set out for California and ended up falling into the production world.
“I was just applying to everything that popped up and the first call back was from a movie that was filming on the Sony lot (Butterfly Caught),” Ferrin explained. “They hired me as a production assistant and I just loved being on set.”
As it is for most artists, the early days in LA weren’t easy. Ferin worked at least 20 different random jobs to make ends meet, including at a tattoo parlor and a think group website. He was couch surfing and staying with relatives that he didn’t even know he had.
After a couple years working odd jobs and picking up freelance film work, Ferrin began working at a post-production house while still picking up whatever freelance work came his way.
Eventually, he joined up with fellow Emerson alum, Danny Turkiewicz. While they didn’t know each other back at school, Ferrin became part of the team that went about making various short films together. One of those short films was Stealing Pulp Fiction, a quirky heist movie about a group of friends that set out to steal Quentin Tarantino’s personal 35mm print of Pulp Fiction.
“The great thing about Danny is he likes to bring back a lot of the same people from project to project,” Ferrin said. “That continuity really helps facilitate creativity and successful collaboration.”
The filmmaking team behind the short returned to expand the story into a feature length film. Production began in January 2023 on a very modest budget. The familiarity the team had with each other allowed them to finish the shoot in just 14 days.
After premiering at the Newport Film Festival, the feature enjoyed a successful festival run and Stealing Pulp Fiction was able to secure both domestic and international distribution.
In addition to the limited theatrical run, Stealing Pulp Fiction is available digitally for rental or purchase on Amazon or wherever you get your digital movies.
Stealing Pulp Fiction stars Jon Rudnitsky, Karan Soni, Cazzie David and Jason Alexander. For a full listing of showtimes, visit https://www.btmcinemas.com/showtimes/. For more information on the movie itself, visit https://www.stealingpulpfiction.com.
