NewEnglandFilm.com

This month at the Boston Underground Film Festival, Bostonians on hand to view the trailer for a film entitled "Dog Eat Dog" may recognize familiar faces, settings and issues. Alice Stone, the writer/director of "Dog Eat Dog," said the idea for the film came from her experiences living in the South End.

"I get inspired by everyday life," Stone said. "There’s plenty of tension and humor on a single T-ride to find the kernel of a story."

"Dog Eat Dog" is the story of the unlikely coalition formed between gay, prosperous dog owners and Puerto Rican skateboarders in the South End. The two groups work together to get what they want, the skaters a skate park and the dog owners a dog run. "They’re both pariahs," Stone said. "And as a result of this struggle, people who are worlds apart are suddenly getting to know each other. It’s an interesting twist on community involvement, and the way that neighbors come together."

Now an experienced filmmaker and editor with several films on her resume, Stone was not a film-school student with big-screen dreams while in college. While writing her senior thesis as a social studies major at Harvard in 1985, Stone said she first realized a passion for film during a screening of "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute." The film was written by John Sayles, and was about single mothers. "It was really powerful and had a lot to say," Stone said. "That was my big epiphany moment. I just had stories I wanted to tell that could best be told visually, because my first love has always been storytelling."

After graduating from Harvard, Stone moved to Mexico, when she said she talked her way into a job working for a Mexican filmmaker shooting a film "about dubious missionary work in Latin America — places where missionary workers were in cahoots with foreign corporations, exploiting natural resources at the expense of indigenous peoples."

Stone worked in Mexico, and was paid minimum wage under the table while she learned about cameras and filmmaking techniques. "That was kind of my film school," Stone said. Stone soon parlayed her experience into making her own short documentary about an elderly woman potter called "De Barro (Of Clay)" in 1986.

Her experience proved valuable, and in the late 1980s and 90s, Stone worked as assistant editor on high profile Hollywood films, including "Swimming to Cambodia," "The Silence of the Lambs," and "The Crucible."

As one would expect, working on these films taught Stone a great deal about the medium. The experience, however, may have set her career back a bit. "I learned how to tell stories visually," Stone said of working on the films. "But when I first moved to Boston my resume hurt my career. I was trying to get work as an editor, and in Boston most of the work is documentary. People flat out told me that I would be ‘bored’ working on documentaries since my background was in studio features. So my credits haven’t really helped me so much as the filmmaking skills I learned earning them."

In 1994, Stone made her first feature-length documentary, "She Lives to Ride." The film was funded by the Independent Television Service, and is a portrait of woman motorcyclists. Stone blended cotemporary interviews with old newsreel footage and photos to examine women’s involvement motorcycle history. Stone said she was "very lucky to shoot on film and finish on film" while making "She Lives to Ride," because it taught her discipline as a filmmaker. "With video, people just cover the hell out of everything, because tape is cheap and there’s no equivalent of a magazine running out," Stone said. "Then they get back to the edit room and realize they don’t have the shots they need to tell the story because the shooting had no conceptualizing behind it. On film, you have to figure how to tell the story of the events you’re documenting while shooting."

In addition to being a valuable experience, it was a successful one as well. "She Lives to Ride" aired on PBS, then played all over the world, including showings at the Montreal Film Festival and the London Film Festival. "I was quite spoiled, but like most people who had a film with a little success or great success I was broke and had to start all over again," Stone said.

Stone said she then "fell back" on editing to pay the bills, including jobs for PBS’s Nova series. In 2000 she wrote and directed "Expired," a narrative film about a Boston delivery man who is fed up with his countless parking tickets and begins to take out his frustrations on meter maids. The film aired on WBGH and a few festivals. Stone drew her experiences from living in Boston for "Expired," saying she was inspired to make the film because of the amount of "time spent by Bostonians looking over their shoulders for incoming meter maids, talking about the outrageous tickets they got, or bemoaning the unfairness of it all."

A resident of Boston’s South End since 1991, Stone has returned to social commentary about the city with her feature length script for "Dog Eat Dog." The script was inspired by Stone’s experiences living in the South End, where there is conflict between dog owners who want a place for their dogs to exercise, and non-dog owners who feel the dogs mess up the few green spaces available.

Stone said she has been to community meetings where the issue divides residents along class and racial lines, themes that she examines in the script. "There’s a lot of edgy stuff both touchy and hostile — and it’s a fictionalized account of true events," Stone said. "The story centers on a dog run, but an underlying theme is city life, diversity and how unlikely people can come together. It’s a very funny film, but I really wanted to create a film that commented on how hard it is for people to live together in an area that is very densely populated. It’s really about gentrification."

After reviewing the script, the LEF Foundation provided a $5,000 grant that Stone used to make the four-minute "Dog Eat Dog" trailer. The trailer was shot on location in the South End over two and a half days in November 2003. "It has a real look to it, it definitely does not have that glossy look," Stone said of the trailer.

Adding to the authenticity, only a handful of professional actors are used in the trailer, with many cast members people from the neighborhood. Residents of a local housing project and skateboarders from the South End are featured in "Dog Eat Dog," and Stone said the cast members were very interested in participating after reading the script because the topic hit so close to home. "It really is a community-spirited film," Stone said.

Stone experimented with visual techniques when shooting the "Dog Eat Dog" trailer, including using a "cigar camera" for shots producing "doggie vision" and "skateboard" vision." Rather than just a fun way to entertain the audience, Stone said she was "trying to get across that in the city you have a lot of different people with different points of view." Stone added she used visual metaphors as well, including purposely shooting scenes with crowded frames "to get across the notion of trying to use space for a lot of different purposes."

Stone hopes the "Dog Eat Dog" trailer screening at BUFF and other festivals boosts fundraising so she can begin filming the feature-length version. Stone said she would like to see the film air on PBS and WBGH to spark further public debate, and possibly tie in a radio-call in show about the dog issue, which sees one side seeing $200 fines for dogs off their leash, and the other seeking open space where dogs can run on their own. "People are really passionate about this," Stone said. "I think exploring how people from all walks of life can come together and share limited open space and build communities is a compelling topic for a film."

In the meantime, Stone said she has some other projects she’s "trying to get off the ground," and continues to edit documentaries for Boston-area filmmakers as a part-time job. She insists she has no interest in making big-budget Hollywood pictures as her reputation grows, but wouldn’t mind a having access to a little more funding to get her films made the way she visualizes. "I’d like to have a big enough budget so everybody can get paid and to get the actors I want, but to still have control," Stone said.