Coming full circle with Webelo: The West Chester Movie

Part I: Webelo and the salvation of history

Webelo is a lot of things at once. The movie respects history and community while signaling a bright future. Its heart is grounded in the independent scene, but with an ambition and craft that looks outwards to greater things. Comedy and tragedy, this tribute to the history and character of West Chester borough in Pennsylvania is a statement to both the humility and ambition of its creators. I spoke with Casey Costigan, the film’s producer and one of its leads, about the process of getting here. In hearing about the community that built this movie and the filmic experiments that taught its crew, I found a strange creative homecoming for myself. The movie has plenty of heart and talent on its own, but those connections, the history of this filmmaking collective, give it a special potency that I’m glad to have uncovered.

The West Chester movie tells the story of two historians struggling to save a decaying historic landmark from conversion into a convenience store. This framing accomplishes a lot, letting the main character’s goals and hopes center on the town’s history, a subject that drives them into fits of apoplexy as the rest of the town rolls its eyes in apathy. It also gives them an excuse to teach the viewer about West Chester borough, a place with its feet firmly planted in Pennsylvania’s development. The place and many of its buildings were foundational to the Revolutionary war, and much more besides. That framing also accomplished something crucial to the film’s success: buy-in from the locals.

Make no mistake, this work was put together with love for the town and its community, but it also makes for a great pitch. As I’ll discuss below, Casey and the local team of filmmakers have been at it for many years, and the growth of their skills was not matched by the growth in audience they earned. Webelo was a smart maneuver on that front, growing their profile with help from Borough government and many local businesses. They got assistance in shooting, fundraising, advertising, and locations, making it easier to create the film and get it to an audience all at once. It’s why I know about it at all, despite living here and being firmly in the target audience for independent film.

That community spirit burns brightly in Webelo, but doesn’t uncover its intelligent techniques and subversive elements. There’s a lot going on underneath the movie’s surface, but there is still a lot to say for that surface level. It’s clear that the team, directed marvelously by Ian James Comstock, have a tight grasp of the language of filmmaking. There are tons of little jokes or good decisions made possible by deft editing and cinematography that even big budget films seem to be leaving behind. Ian knows when to go for a long shot and let a joke breathe or change things up with the Kuleshov effect. The writing is snappy and hilarious on its own, but gets seen in its best light because of those small nods, combined with the film’s many great performances.

I do have to talk about the acting too. You might expect some odd delivery from what feels like community theater with a camera, but apart from a few specific slip-ups, you will find yourself constantly surprised. Casey himself has a great energy, childlike but earnest for a wonderful comedic foil to Jared’s boisterous yet downtrodden historian. Desperate to save a place more important to their own development than West Chester’s itself, the team’s outlandish quest for preservation in the face of a changing world makes for a surprisingly deep story about nostalgia and moving on.

Talking about surprising depth, I cannot but tip my hat to Langdon James as Keith, the town official and de facto villain trying to tear the Farmer’s and Mechanic’s building down. He’s just spectacular, and embodies some of the most interesting thoughts underlying Webelo. Keith is much more than the greedy overseer you might expect from a movie like this. Reasonable, exasperated, realistic, he’s a contrast to the movie’s heroes, whose senseless passion doesn’t always align with the needs and reality of a modern town. While he might be an antagonist, the movie is sure never to portray him as really being totally in the wrong. It’s that clash of emotion and logic that gives the movie its real heart.

Keith isn’t trying to destroy history any more than the protagonists are really trying to save it. The building is a symbol for the inevitable decay of their youth, the health of the mentor that taught them about history, and the last vestiges of structure in a time when they both felt adrift. This doesn’t make their goals wrong, just less altruistic than they might admit, and puts the villains in a more complicated light than a movie like this usually strives for.

The feeling of community permeates Webelo, but in a way that strengthens its quality instead of diminishing it. The locations are local, the actors are local, and the references are sometimes specific and unexplained. Retired Philadelphia journalist Vernon Odom makes an appearance as narrator, and many of the cast are friends or relations of the filmmakers themselves. This doesn’t make the movie feel amateur as much as it does home-grown, a genuine tribute to the filmmaker’s hometown. This was filmed with some advice from the director of the upcoming Delco movie, and Hatfield PA has its own Crickfoot film based on a local cryptid plus the recent saint Nicholas of Bethlehem, I wonder if more smalltown love letters will make their way to our screens. I would love to think so. As political and filmmaking power keeps getting concentrated in the hands of people without talent or conscience, the answer is to go local. Find the artists who care as much as you do, and make a sense of community out of the people around you.

I attended the official release event at the Chester County History Center, but you can expect it Webelo to be released on Youtube on December 20th, with a possible Tubi follow-up soon. Look to the Youtube channel or official website for more updates. Webelo was hilarious, heartfelt, and informative about the history of West Chester Pennsylvania. For me, it was a lot more than that, a strange homecoming to a place I’ve already known for a long time. I’ll discuss that and the history of Webelo’s team in more depth below.

Part 2: The scrounging of legends
I ended up in West Chester by accident. Years back I was adrift and far from home, working in New Jersey criminal courts for a job that was about to end. Weeks away from having no job and no place to live, I found work in West Chester and moved in with no real understanding of the place. From there I spent years coming to love its nature, its history, and its people (including my now wife). Within the same two days I moved in, got a cat, started my job, and met her. For many years now I’ve been writing on independent film, searching desperately, I thought hopelessly, for a heart that Disney and Warner Brothers long ago tore out and sold for all it was worth.

I found that heart in the most disparate of places. Underground Youtube channels with barely a fraction of the views they deserved, I write pleading to an audience to give these people a chance, shouting into the void with a hoarse voice, begging the world to turn away from the silver screen and to the many geniuses being buried by the algorithm. Only a few months ago I made that plea for Punisher: Nightmare, a movie that by happenstance shares some of its cast and relationships with the team behind Webelo.

It’s with no small amount of surprise that I find the kind of talent I was looking for all along has been living a few minutes down the road all these years. Webelo is a culmination of the drive and understanding of filmmaking that Casey and the team have been working at for many years, and their efforts remain easily accessible on the Youtube channel I hope you’ll trust me to explore. Doing my diligence and making my way through these works, my cold dead little soul was warmed and impressed by what I found there.

Costigan Pictures is a dumping ground for many years of experimentation. Switching between directors, they cover ground between crime dramas, horror, and comedies all striving to sharpen their command of filmmaking and have some fun along the way. It’s that unpretentious, shameless love of creation that gives these movies their soul, and it’s a soul well worth experiencing. You can’t keep at it for this many years without learning something, and being able to watch to many of these movies back to back, you get a great sense of the team’s talent for writing, editing, acting, and how far all have grown. Modern American Vampires shows you their grasp of character with the creepy, disconnected hungers of its main crew. Wrapped in Silence has all the bravado and sleaze of the 70s crime thrillers that inspired it. But Optos is my personal favorite, and the one that truly brings all of this home and showcases some of the team’s greatest talents.

Before breaking Optos down, I have to give a shout out to the many performances of Alair Diremegio. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? Why would a just and loving God create a world in which he does anything with his time doing anything other than being on camera or stage? Every time he appears in one of these movies he knocks it out of the fucking stratosphere. He manages to cover a broad spectrum of emotion and characters in these movies, always getting the most out of the subtleties of the performances; the small ticks or movements that you might miss, riding over the bigger character pieces he’s getting across. His Modern Vampire has been out of America for too long, all of his lingo a few generations out of date. His one scene in Webelo has him as a lawyer for a deceased friend, mixing hopeful, empathetic, sorrowful, and (as lawyers often need to be) dourly down to Earth. Optos is probably my favorite appearance from the man, where his many frustrations and eccentricities come through better on rewatching, as you uncover where he’s coming from and what it is he’s actually trying to get across. Alair, buddy, wherever you are, keep going. You’ve got something and I want more people to see it.

Optos is my favorite work by the collective because of how well it encapsulates, celebrates, and interrogates the weird world of trash filmmaking itself. Partially autobiographical, Optos features Casey breaking his way into friend’s houses trying to get them to appear in another of his Captain movies. As children, they made a series of movies about the Captain, nonsense stories capturing the talentless but sincere kind of garbage that you make with friends and a camera. Everyone else has grown up, but Casey’s Optos can’t let go, spiraling into desperation and tragedy as he goes to greater depths to get them back in front of the camera. His friends are both disgusted with Optos and themselves. Him for never growing up, and them for giving up on the dreams he can’t leave behind.

I’ve never seen anything but Optos that captures the same feeling of ludicrous optimism of homemade film, nor the subtle tragedies of friends who can’t learn to move on. Easily the best joke in the movie happens when Optos finally gets someone to play along with his fantasy. He goes for the second shot (the only one without a truck noise in it), not caring that it’s awful and forced. He’s just so happy to be back in the saddle, shooting with friends, that the outcome isn’t a part of the consideration at all. I’ve been in an elf cloak at a national park as a ranger politely told the crew that we need to leave, and the one person with strong filmmaking experience was being ignored by the director. I get that kind of energy. You wonder if you’ve gone wrong in life, or if the guy holding onto his childish sense of wonder, not self conscious at all about what’s happening, is the one who’s got it right.

Optos has deeper levels digging into the heart of how you would get to this point, and what drives you so deeply to seek or make a community. I think it’s that drive, combined with what I need to emphasize is a strong set of filmmaking skills, that makes this team so interesting to watch. For many years they’ve been buried under the algorithm, but Webelo shows they won’t be there for long. I wasn’t the only member of press at the grand opening, and I won’t be the last to talk about them. From West Chester born, they have places to go. It will be an honor to see where that leads them next.

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