Sonoma Valley High School (SVHS) senior, Pete Coburn’s film, “The Roomies,” will be showing at the Sebastiani Theatre on Sunday, March 28 at 1:30 p.m. Ten months in the making, the film stars Coburn’s classmates and friends in lead roles and even a cameo appearance by Coburn himself in the 47-minute feature.
In making the film, Coburn spent hundreds of hours working on the storyboard, screenplay, scripting, filming, directing and all the related mechanics of movie making. And “The Roomies” will not only be his directorial debut but a fundraiser for the theatre as well. It also qualifies as his senior project. Admission to the movie is free but any donations given at the door will go directly to fund the Sebastiani Theatre.
In the film program at SVHS since his sophomore year, Coburn decided that producing the film was the perfect combination of something he loves – movie making – with something he had to do anyway – his senior project. “I planned to do a film for my senior project anyway and then Roger Rhoten, the theatre’s owner, offered to show the film there. It worked out perfectly,” said Coburn.
The story line is a simple boy meets girl tale where roommates – who try their best not to – fall in love. Coburn and fellow filmmaker Ian Albrecht developed the screenplay over a number of months – it started out as a musical – and then began filming in November.
“Once we got rolling we just fell in love with the story and created all sorts of new characters. It just evolved into a feature length film.”
Upon graduation, Coburn is planning on attending Santa Barbara Community College where he’d like to take film courses. From there he hopes to transfer to a film school in southern California. He’s looking forward to experiences outside of Sonoma.
Editor’s note: While this film is not rated, please note that it depicts the lives of the 20-something crowd and not be appropriate for all audiences.
