Convention says that most actors would rather be onstage than on-screen - you know, the smell of greasepaint, the roar of a live crowd, the thrill of getting an immediate response to your performance.
But that's not Mark Redfield, a fixture on the local stage for much of the 1990s. Five years have passed since his last performance before a live audience; this summer, he completed his first movie, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, for which he wears the myriad hats of actor, director, set designer, co-producer and co-screenwriter.
On-screen, Redfield insists, is where he wants to be.
"I've always wanted to make movies," he says. "Movies just got to me, even at a very early age. I wanted to make them from the beginning."
Tonight at 8, he'll see part of his dream fulfilled when Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde receives its Maryland premiere at the Walters Art Museum, where several scenes were shot. And the Maryland native can barely contain himself.
Redfield, who admits only to being in his upper 30s, displays an enthusiasm that's controlled, but impossible to hide. His eyes dart this way and that as he recalls bits of cinematic trickery that served to inspire him (the names Hitchcock and Kubrick come up frequently). He stabs the air with his index finger for emphasis, bangs his fist on the table to substitute for the exclamation points that end most of his sentences, tousles his hair when the nervous energy has no other means of escape.
Clearly, he is a man doing what he loves, and thrilled that people are taking notice. Although he's only screened Jekyll for audiences three times, it's already won "Best Independent Film" at the Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester, England, and a pair of awards at Los Angeles' Shriekfest horror film festival.
"I'm just one of those people, I had to make them," Redfield says of his nascent moviemaking career. "And now I can."
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde suggests that Redfield's severe case of cinephilia is not a passing fancy, but an avocation. Made with obvious care and a surprising level of sophistication - few things seem amateur about it, not the acting, not the writing not the design, not the lighting - it freely adapts Stevenson's famous novella, about a doctor who devises a formula that, when drunk, allows his uncivilized side to emerge, into a dawn-of-the-20th-century morality tale complete with class struggle, advancing technology and an unavoidable hint of eroticism.
His own twist
Like every other filmmaker who's adapted Stevenson's cautionary tale - and there have been more than 20 versions since 1910, starring such acclaimed actors as John Barrymore, Fredric March (who won a Best Actor Oscar for his work), Spencer Tracy, Kirk Douglas and Michael Caine - Redfield has taken plenty of liberties with the original story. He's added women to the plot (there are none in the original, he notes), moved it in time from the 1870s to 1900 (allowing Dr. Jekyll to play with such newfangled inventions as the phonograph and movie projector, both of which prove key to the plot) and added what sure looks like an incestuous relationship between Jekyll's fiancee, Miriam (played by Kosha Engler), and her brother, Mordecai (a drippingly slimy R. Scott Thompson).
Sean Paul Murphy, a Baltimore-based film editor who worked on Jekyll, said, "Mark was great to work with. He had a very strong idea of what he wanted and how he was going to achieve it.
"He was always willing to do what's best for the movie and not Mark the actor. He's very driven. Nothing gets in the way of his goals."
Redfield gets to ham it up royally as the title characters, while London native Elena Torrez is spicily seductive as Claire, the prostitute Jekyll befriends and Hyde ravishes.
"The story really plays on the idea of, 'What is the concept of God one holds to,' " Redfield explains. "I think that's why the story has held up so well. It replays that debate in a way that you can have fun with."
Fun is something Redfield has been having with movies for years. He remembers watching silent comedies and Lon Chaney horror films as a third-grader, and vividly recalls a pre-adolescent dream that played out like a mix of Beneath the Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey. He even starred in a movie early-on, when his father used film of a young Mark, screaming while getting his first haircut, in an amateur antiwar film he put together (it also included shots, Redfield says, of a pig being slaughtered and some ordnance being detonated in a field).
"I'm not one of those people who remembers their first movie," he says, "but I remember the whole flood of movies."
'We were everywhere'
Growing up in Maryland, however, one has few chances for movie stardom. So Redfield made the most of the opportunities he was afforded, directing and starring in locally produced plays for about 15 years, beginning with his debut at Center Stage in 1983. He even formed two theater companies of his own, Industrial Strength Theater and, from 1989-1991, New Century Theater.
"We were everywhere," he says, noting some of the spots in which he produced shows: Theatre Project, the Spotlighters and St. John's Church. His productions included Clifford Odets' Golden Boy, Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Shakespeare's The Tempest, as well as original works -including a 1991 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde written with frequent collaborator Stuart Voytilla and expanded for Redfield's film.
About four years ago, however, he decided to dedicate himself to his first love. He found some studio and office space in White Marsh, a place big enough for him to store costumes, build sets (most of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was filmed there) and serve as a base of operations. He hasn't appeared onstage since, earning the capital to keep his studio, christened Redfield Arts, open by designing sets for others, doing voiceover work and renting out space for film projects.
"I've been toiling very quietly for the past three years," he says. With luck, Jekyll could prove his entry to bigger times.
"I'm really aiming for the cable and home video markets," Redfield says - stressing, however, that he's open to larger budgets (although coy about exact figures, he says Jekyll cost between $100,000 and $200,000) and bigtime production deals.
He's already got several other projects going. Filming has been completed on Cold Harbor, a drama about four brothers coming to terms with their father's suicide, and The Sorcerer of Stonehenge School, a fantasy-adventure yarn; both are in post-production and almost ready for release. A comedy with origins in Greek mythology, entitled Alex and Alex (script by Redfield and Voytilla), is about halfway complete; The Dummy, a supernatural thriller set in 1918 Baltimore, is set to be filmed next year.
And after that? Mark Redfield has a dream, one that he hopes might play out like those of a filmmaker by the name of Walt Disney, who began by animating popular songs, and developed those silly little cartoons into quite a career.
"I hope to look back someday," he says, "and these will be my Silly Symphonies."
- Michael Morris contributed to this article.
Tickets for tonight night's Maryland premiere of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, priced at $20 and benefiting the Walters volunteer program, are available at the museum box office or by calling 410-547-9000 Ext. 212.