They Laughed, They Eyed as Helix Grad Screens ‘Intervention’ Mockumentary

Saturday night at Helix Charter High School, classmates, family and friends of 1985 Helix graduate Stephen Moramarco saw him ride a Segway nude while playing a guitar.

They laughed as he threw a house party for being friended on Facebook. They gasped as they saw his shaggy back harvested for hair transplants. They moaned as they witnessed a music club booker rip him to shreds for performing songs like “Satan, Satan, Lend Me a Dollar” for two hours to an audience of “zero.”

Moramarco hopes they were witnessing film history.

The Great Intervention—his low-budget fictional docu-comedy in the style of This Is Spinal Tap and Kenny—has no distributor but high hopes.

“It was like magic—how it all fit together in a weird way,” he said.

Moramarco, 44, is shopping the “mockumentary” to film festivals and handing out DVDs to others in a position to help, including one associated with AMC’s Mad Men, he told an admiring audience that included La Mesa’s David Moye, who profiled the filmmaker last January for AOL News.

The film had its La Mesa premiere Saturday in the 111-seat Little Theater where Moramarco performed for four years. Helping screen the tightly edited film was current Helix performing arts teacher Gregg Osborn, husband of 1985 Helix alumnus Jennifer Osborn, now the school’s spokeswoman.

When told that he’d entertain questions afterward, one audience member said: “Oh, we have questions!”

Classmates spoke of inside jokes and Helix lore, including Moramarco’s own parody of “Louie, Louie” in his teen years.

Present for the film’s second screening (after one in Los Angeles but not counting what Moramarco called a “disaster” in Brooklyn) was his father, Fred Moramarco, 73, who plays his dad in the film.

The senior Moramarco is a retired English literature professor at San Diego State (35 years on Montezuma Mesa) who lives in the Bankers Hill neighborhood of San Diego and also acts.

He and others followed a basic script but improvised dialogue for all scenes—often shot with a handheld camera. 

Fred Moramarco called the result “a hybrid of truth and fiction.”

The film is about an immature former rock ’n’ roll wannabe, poet and actor with delusions that people still want to see him perform. It gets so bad that his parents go to a “personality cleanser” and self-help author named Dr. Amber Thorne, whose books include Change Your Underwear, Change Your Life. 

The resultant intervention—featuring more than a dozen family members, friends and at least one female stranger who walks into the house off the street—leads to Moramarco vowing to clean up his act and find a girlfriend. 

The woman he pursues is his long-ago date from the Helix senior prom—the fictional Ellen Day, operator of Topanga Turtle Rescue, played by Karen Zumsteg of Los Angeles.

Made for $5,000 via 108 donors on Kickstarter.com, the 90-minute movie was projected from a DVD player onto a screen in front of about 35 people.

Actors were paid below-scale $100 a day under Screen Actors Guild rules allowing discount salaries for films with budgets under $200,000, the Los Angeles resident said after the showing.

The film was shot in 10 days, with Moramarco—a UCLA graduate—credited as  writer, director, producer and editor, turning out the current product in about four months.

Zumsteg worked the makeshift box office (a table in the Little Theater entrance), collecting the $10 admission and standing with Moramarco and his father afterward for a 20-minute Q&A period.

Afterward, Moramarco asked classmates to meet later for drinks. He promised to hand out DVDs.