William Roebuck

William Roebuck was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Maryland and Florida. He attended the University of Kentucky where he was a walk-on member of the Kentucky Wildcats football team. He received a BS in Resource Management from UK in 2000. William was working the university’s control room when he wrote his first screenplay, “Housing and Maintenance”. He always knew he wanted to be a writer, but never wanted to go into journalism, screenwriting was the next logical step. “Housing and Maintenance” focused on the hilarious, but true horror stories, he had heard about working in the control room. He spent nearly four years researching and writing Sodom and Gomorrah. He also co-produced and directed “BushWhacker”, a satirical short that pokes fun at attack ads used during political campaigns. The short received a lot of attention and ranked #1 for several weeks on Ifilm.com.

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Summers in Florida are hot and humid. I normally don’t even go out during the day, not even to get the mail. Hurricane season has begun and Charlie, Francis, Jeanne, and Ivan are all reminders of why we couldn’t wait to shoot this film in August. But, why the middle of summer, many have asked? Because if I would have waited another minute, I may have lost my nerve.

This film has been in the works for nearly four years. Most drafts languishing in my head, or once on paper being burnt, torn up, or destroyed in one way or another. It was shortly after my first trip to Sundance that I was inspired to write this film. I was in Park City for the 2002 edition of the festival and my first feature, Housing and Maintenance, had a Filmmakers Alliance screening at the Treasure Mountain Inn. It was energizing to be a part of the atmosphere- to se so many films and dreams come to life in the thin mountain air.

After returning home, I awoke one morning with the idea for Sodom and Gomorrah. I immediately put the thought out of my mind and said, “NO, you cannot approach that subject, there is no need for it”. So for the next few months I collaborated with a writer from New York on a treatment for a comedy. It was a very interesting project and we had fruitful writing sessions, but in the back of my mind, this story kept calling me.

To make a long story short I went back and forth a million times before finally committing myself to writing this script. I did countless hours of research, read many books, and conducted online and telephone surveys and interviews. I felt like I needed to qualify myself to tell the story. Almost two years passed before I had even gotten a word onto the page.

As I was driving one day I saw a large billboard for GAYDAYS.com it was well positioned on Orlando’s principal interstate next to the luxurious Millenia Mall. It was at that point I began writing. It was my feeling that if the land of ‘Mickey mouse”, and all things family, was ready for Gay Days, then our country was ready for Sodom and Gomorrah.

At the time I wrote the screenplay there was a lot going on in the news regarding homosexuality. The gay marriages in California, Legislation of marriages in Massachusetts, the hurricanes in Central Florida being blamed on gays and indifference to gay culture by Rev. Jerry Falwell, and the Marriage Act bolstered by President Bush and the Republicans. Homosexuality was and remains a hot button issue. These media stories did not make it into the script though. I didn’t want it to be a “ripped from the headlines” movie of the week. Rather, this film is a dramatic feature that deals with the state of the human condition. Florida is hot in the summer, but if you believe in heaven and hell, hell is much hotter than Florida and it lasts forever.

Nevertheless, we embarked on our journey July 10, 2005. It was a chore to keep this project quiet, even more so to get people to come on board before getting a glimpse of the script. However, after the first read through you could tell that people were excited. My associate producer asked me to postpone production. He was so sure of the script that he wanted to go to investors he knew to secure a larger amount of money for production. As tempting as it was, I knew that if I waited it may have been another four years before I made the film.

Five days before production began we lost our church location. Really it was four days because it was the weekend of July 4,2005. One of the church’s board members returned from vacation and requested more money than our budget would allow. He politely told us we could not use the facility. Thankfully we found an even better location. We had secured a fabulous home to serve as the Gooden family home, but the evening before we were to set to shoot we had trouble getting the location agreement signed. We took the next day and with the help of Don Lupien, Carroll Dunnet, and First Class Florida Pool Homes we were able to find the perfect home. If we would not have found something production would have surely come to a halt.

Throughout the shoot we had various ups and downs, but we always remained on schedule. We only cut two scenes from the entire script. Two, and not because we were out of time. We cut them because they were not needed. We had a tremendous amount of locations and setups. Three of the locations that we secured required a significant amount of traveling for the cast and crew, on top of sixteen hour days. We had two days that exceeded twenty hours. The second of which was our last day of shooting. No one saw the light at the end of the tunnel. No one was eager to finish the film. We were at the end of the film and a six day shooting stretch. There were a lot of giggles and a lot of idle chatter, but I didn’t mind. I saw a group of people who had bonded and who didn’t want this to be the end. Even under these circumstances we still received superb performances. At 11:15 pm on July 25, 2005 we quietly commenced production.

We survived the heat of summer, but now we are stepping into the fire.