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'Dungeons
& Dragons'

Toronto filmmaker
Courtney Solomon
brings a favorite
game to life.

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Director Courtney Solomon, right, directs Jeremy Irons on the set o
"Dungeons & Dragons."

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

ow do you direct your first
movie with lavish special
effects, stars like Jeremy
Irons and a budget of $35

million?
You have to know how to finagle.
Just ask Courtney Solomon, 30,
whose debut feature, Dungeons &
Dragons, opens today in Detroit.
Bringing the fantasy role-playing game
to the silver screen was a decade-long
quest more taxing than the D & D sce-
narios Solomon created as a kid in
Toronto. He and his Jewish pals would
clear a place on the dining room table
and spread out the pens and dice and
handbooks required for marathon, 12-
hour sessions of the popular game.
Solomon may not have become bar
mitzvah ("My dad got sick; I totally
missed out"), but he did acquire skill as
a Druid and a Thief, a D & D character
noted for picking locks and climbing
walls.
Climbing mountains was the skill he
needed to scrape together his first movie.
It all began when he was 19: Solomon
had grown up on film sets with his pro-
duction-coordinator mom; he'd already
worked on 21 shows, so why bother
with film school, he figured. He'd just
make a movie about D & D, something
splashy like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
"Yeah, right," his friends said.

It didn't help that the D & D compa-
ny was wary of Hollywood and had con-
sistently declined to sell the movie
rights.
But the undeterred Solomon merely
cold-called the company, pretended he
was an economics student and got all
their marketing info. As for his first
meeting with D & D executives: "They
sort of laughed me out the door," he
recalls. "But I wouldn't go away."
His tenacity paid off. The company
finally, yielded; money arrived from
Hong Kong investors and super-produc-
er Joel Silver; and Solomon shot a horse
chase sequence ("It was a lot of people
getting trampled") to convince Silver he
could direct.
In May 1999, principal production
began in Prague with Thora Birch
(American Beauty), Marlon Wayans and
Jeremy Irons as the arch-villain.
The movie is dedicated to Solomon's
grandparents, Anne and Joe Smuckler,
without whom he couldn't have corn-
pleted the film. At one point when his
money ran out, his grandfather, a house-
painter, co-signed a $25,000 loan to
allow Solomon to continue the project.
"My bubbie and zayde didn't live to see
the movie," Solomon says, "but some-
how I feel they know." ❑

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