Edie Arnold Is a Loser Brings Its Utah-Made Punk Comedy Home

Fall is the season of homecoming, and fittingly, the locally made teen film Edie Arnold Is A Loser is having its own homecoming this weekend. Written and directed by Megan Rico and co-directed by Kade Atwood, the coming-of-age film makes its Utah premiere on Sept. 4 at the Salt Lake Film Society’s Broadway Centre Cinemas.

“I wrote this script ten or so years ago,” Rico says. “While I was trying to figure out how to write a feature film, I decided to kind of keep it simple and just pull a lot from my own coming-of-age story in my own community that I grew up in.” Edie Arnold Is a Loser is the story of a timid Catholic-school student, Edie (Adi Madden Cabrera), whose life changes when she and her best friend, Frances (McKenna Tuckett), secretly forms a punk band, The Nundead, with a group of fellow misfits and enter a battle of the bands. Rico drew on her own experiences growing up in Miami and attending an all-girls Catholic school. 

“I was kind of a dork,” Rico says. “And then, I guess the other aspect of it is maybe a little bit of wish fulfillment, where maybe I wish I had been a punk rock musician, maybe I wish I had found people at that time and found my creative community.”

For Atwood, the appeal was immediate once he read the script. “When Megan initially told me about it, I was like, I guess sure, I’ll read it. I don’t know if it’s gonna be for me,” Atwood says. “And I absolutely loved it.” What particularly struck him was how authentic the characters felt.

“I knew these kids, like these people growing up, especially girls,” Atwood explains. “I had a lot of friends that were like that, that were girls, but I had never really seen them portrayed like that in entertainment.” Atwood was especially excited by the fact that the young women in Edie Arnold Is a Loser aren’t sanitized versions of teenagers. “It was very refreshing to read characters written like that,” Atwood says. “Girls that are messy and rambunctious, a little horny, and that’s just how they are.” 

While the story takes place in Coral Gables, Florida – Rico and Atwood shot the entire film in Salt Lake County. The challenge, then, was in making Utah convincingly resemble South Florida. “Sourcing locations that matched that was kind of challenging because they are very different places,” Rico says. But the filmmakers found that Utah’s tight-knit filmmaking community made making a micro-budget independent feature less difficult than it should have been.

“Everyone was just so down to help,” Rico says. “It just felt like such a community effort.” Sometimes that support came in unexpectedly simple ways. For one warehouse sequence, the production needed a van. “That’s a van that was just sitting outside of a mechanic shop across the street from one of the locations we were filming at,” Rico recalls. “We just went over there and asked if we could rent it. And the guy was like, ‘I’ll just let you use it.’” 

The production of the film was filled with this same spirit of community and support, and Rico and Atwood are singing the praises of Salt Lake. “People believed in the vision and came in clutch because they cared about the art,” Rico says. Edie Arnold Is a Loser also gave the filmmakers an opportunity to move beyond the constraints of working on an established television series. “I think it’s a difference between doing a job and doing your own art,” Rico says. “At Studio C, I’m expressing myself creatively through that. But at the end of the day, it’s someone else’s brief, whereas this really felt like the purest form of our expression, and that was nice to let loose in that way.”

Atwood has also enjoyed the opportunity to do something with some bite to it, though both retain close ties to the Studio C gang. “We’re friends with a lot of the cast members,” Atwood says, noting that when he and Rico went to breakfast with a member of the ensemble recently, they found themselves envying each other. “We were like, ‘Oh, we wish we had the budget that Studio C had, it would be amazing.’ And then he was like, ‘I wish I had the creative freedom that you guys had.’ So I feel like the grass is just always greener on the other side.”

Next, Edie Arnold Is A Loser will be going on the road, screening in venues across the US. While the chance to share the film with a variety of audiences is an exciting prospect for Rico and Atwood, the Salt Lake premiere is a cherished opportunity to celebrate the creative community that helped make it possible.

Read more film reviews by Patrick Gibbs:
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Film Review: The Magic Faraway Tree

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