This year, the makers of the opioid crime thriller King Ivory had a rather interesting experience on their way to the Venice Film Festival.
When a late Mason Flite from New York meant that the connection was missed by minutes, drowned many, including Foster and Melissa Leo, producer Jeremy Rosen, and writer-director John Swab. Unfortunately, the rest of the group, including an actor and the sources of funding, were in Munich waiting for a long wait list for all other planes bound for Venice.
Rosens states all getting seats is a slim possibility so he made an executive decision which included hiring a Mack van for a seven hour road trip through the Alps from Germany to Italy.
This was the festival where both Rosen and John Swab made their debuts and were pleased to be receiving a series of positive receptions for King Ivory that made its debut in the Extra Horizon competition. The film had a multilayered narrative compounded on the story of opioid traffickers, their drugs, their addicts, and the law, which also starred best caulk leos foster Michael Mando from Better Call Saul and was distastefully dubbed “Traffic” in the age of fentanyl.
The trip allowed for yet another step also for Rosen and John Swab, deepening links of their increasingly troubled production hub in Tulsa, Ok.
under the control of Rosen’s Roxwell Films. As the producer explains, aside from its title, “King Ivory” is also the seventh feature in five years that has been produced by the pair and, interestingly, it is their biggest as well as the most ambitious project. “This is the pinnacle of all that we have achieved so far.”
The Couple Chose To Meet. After that chance meeting, it was not long before they met up again. At the time, during the American Film Market in Santa Monica in 2016, Swab was marketing his first feature film “Let Me Make You a Martyr” and rosen was with Paul Schrader’s “Dog Eat Dog”, his first producing credit, and it was not before long that they found themselves in Swab’s hometown of Tulsa raising funds with wealthy local private equity financiers for their ventures. “In a dodgy lounge… I think we ordered a couple of seafood pans, recalls Rosen.” Up, pitch, and pans, and it all came together and eventually they got around to what became their first feature together, action crime drama ‘Run With the Hunted’ starring Ron Perlman in the lead role.
One is inclined to assert that John and I are rather well suited, Rosen says. He happens to be an entertainment manager and an attorney representing a lineup of celebrities inclusive of Boyz II Men, Aerosmith, Boy George, and Frank Ocean over the years. “We are both anxious, and so we do not want to allow the grass to grow, but at the same time, we do not want to sit hyping on simply producing the projects for the heck of it.”
“It’s changed, and thanks to them now we sit here with studios and streamers, where these moderate guarantees and credits are not so much be all and end all,” he explains. Rosen as well recollects that reducing the gap financing, ‘I am the backstop this is me’ has been beneficial, them refusing some domestic opportunities for King Ivory that may have caused the project to halt in the course of the actors’ strike.
Many of Roxwell’s movies have been filmed in Tulsa, not only because it offers good tax incentives but also due to the importance of Swab in the city and his contacts that help.
Together with a friendly team he has turned to many times in the past, a bunch of people that he knows for way too long and describes them as: “a little bit of a militia,” there’s a long list of people they know who can help a great deal in opening doors.
How, I ask, do you get into buildings in the middle of the night? ”Because of the relationships, which we have here in father’s land… When you start to work from this place and you know the police and sheriffs, it’s easier to get into buildings in the middle of the night. People love us. Relationships like that are the reason we make these kinds of movies. We can blow up Tulsa’s downtown area and have machine gunning shooting for one hundred dollars. It is permissible only here!”
But in addition to the setting and the crew and a number of protagonists who keep returning after the success (for instance “King Ivory’s” Leo has starred in three of their films and Frank Grillo has starred in four) there is also another thread which connects a lot of works created by Roxwell.
It’s evident in the films that there are intermingling parts of crime, addiction, abuse and erosis, majority of which were incorporated from Swab’s life events and are presented in a rough realness (so much so that Sean Baker even inquired about the sex worker-themed “Candy land,” and eventually casting one of its actresses for his Cannes-winning pono “Anora”). “I was an opiate addict for approximately 12 years and right towards the end of my addiction, fentanyl started to appear on the United States drug market,” says Swab, noting that the crisis has claimed many of his acquaintances to sickness and overdose. “But I became sober and sorted my life and began directing movies with Jeremy.” This is what drives King Ivory (one of the street names of the substance ‘fentanyl’) which adittionally Swab explains that it, “… has hurt the most people I know,” and wrote directed the script, because after almost ten sobered years he went to see a new facet of the native for America problem: in a step of drug soldiers, border crosses, cops, unable or the other individuals immersed in this part of life. “I was simply interested in finding out how it started and how everybody involved in it thought,” he adds. “It was informative.” And since this movie has already been presented at Venice and received interest, this film may also be the most important one for Swab and his production partner Rosen.
According to the producer ‘King Ivory’ is definitely ‘opening doors’ and the duo ‘is in the mix for some studio projects with proper budgets.’ There is a work missing a title, ‘King Ivory’ TV series that was at least started, and Mando introduced them to his ‘Better Call Saul’ executive producer and former head of Sony Pictures TV, Jeff Frost. The latter says “He’s interested in our series and he adores it and we’re working on our presentation with him.” And a future visit to Los Angeles might also result in the couple obtaining agency representation.
But with their priorities being what they are, both Rosen and Swab who, in their defense, state that there are quite a few scripts that they could “pull the trigger on”, start shooting tomorrow even, have opted to go in for something they haven’t done since the last 8 years – when they first came across each other time and patience.
“In retrospect, it would be ideal to say that we hate to do nothing and would hate to just watch the grass grow and waste time quite the opposite, it is insanity to even think such a thought, however, the time to wait seems to be the best choice,” explains Swab. Not that Swab is not being productive though.
In this case, the filmmaker has temporarily stopped the process of shooting her music video for wife Sam Quartin, the main vocalist and the guitarist of the punk band The Bobby Lees (she also acts in some of her husband’s pictures, for example, ‘King Ivory’).
Whether it includes another small-scale, in-house, feature film shot in Oklahoma, or a bigger studio-assisted project, since they would never stop working anyway, this Venice-induced gap is likely to be the last one for quite a while for a filmmaking duo that has produced a greater number of films within five years than most people do in twenty.
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