Kentucky-born writer filmed ‘Maysville’ in Pacific Northwest. Now it’s on Amazon.
.jpg "Film poster for the movie Maysville, written, directed and co-produced by Leslie Goyette.")
Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, Leslie Goyette remembers vividly the first time she saw the little town of Maysville, with its pretty historic homes and suspension bridge crossing the Ohio River.
She was about 4 or 5 years old, and she remembers thinking,“This is where the rich people live, and nothing bad could ever happen here.”
Goyette lived on Furnace Mountain in Powell County until she was about 5, when she moved to Mount Sterling. After graduating from Montgomery County High School, she headed west in 1990 to study film and theater at the University of Oregon.
“I had big dreams,” she said. “I was going to be the next Steven Spielberg.”
Thirty years later, she’s made her first feature film.
And when Goyette, who lives in Portland, Ore., began thinking about what to title the independent film she was making about a young man who tries to escape his past in a Kentucky town, the name “Maysville” stood out.
The 1920s drama follows the story of Teddy Rogers, a boy who, according to Goyette’s IMDb plot description, “is devastated by a tragic accident and taken from his family to pay a penance which forces him into a life of hard labor. Four years later, he escapes to the town of Maysville where he finds love and a hopeful future, but is soon hunted and haunted by his past. Teddy must begin to forgive himself and challenge the demons that pursue him in order to find the life he so desperately desires.”
Goyette said it’s a love story and coming-of-age story with “a huge twist at the end.”
“Maysville” the movie began streaming on Amazon Thanksgiving Day. It’s also available on Google Play and YouTube Movies.
After college, Goyette said she became a director and producer for theater projects and then a mom to two child actors, which took her behind the scenes on all kinds of film sets, from small indie projects to television shows.
“My kids worked for DreamWorks, NBC,” she said. “You talk to all the people who make the movie happen, and you learn from them. I learned so much ... just from watching the industry.”
She said those experiences and the connections she’d made along the way all coalesced to help bring her story “Maysville” to the screen.
Goyette wrote and directed the film. She co-produced it with Michele Englehart, who, like Goyette, had also spent years on film sets while managing the acting careers of her children.
The women had met years earlier on a set where their children were both working, and they had stayed connected on social media. After Goyette reached out to Englehart with her film script for “Maysville,” the women formed a production company, Hold Your Horses Films, and got to work.
“We didn’t know each other well, and we were two women who had never pulled off anything like this before,” Englehart wrote in a producer’s statement. “But, between the two of us, we knew a boat load of people in the Pacific Northwest film community and we both had the get up and go to put the pedal to the metal. And that’s exactly what we did.”
Goyette’s son, Holden Goyette, now 16, has a key role in the film, playing the young Teddy Rogers, and Englehart’s son, Forrest Campbell, plays his best friend, Willy Stamper.
The women raised money for their project through an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign and a fiscal sponsorship from a nonprofit called Fractured Atlas.
And, Goyette said, they put in a lot of “good old-fashioned sweat equity.”
When they needed canned goods for a general store, Goyette said the filmmakers collected cans from restaurants, peeled off the labels and pasted on old-fashioned ones they’d made themselves.
“We made this film for less than what some people would pay for a brand new car,” she said.
The movie was filmed in Centralia, Wash., and Chehalis, Wash., in 2019, with lots of help from the local communities.
Goyette said antique stores lent items for set decorations, and the city council waived permitting fees. The classic car owners who attended car shows each weekend in Centralia loaned their vehicles, the local tractor museum let them borrow a tractor, and there was even a man in town who just happened to own a steam engine like the one they needed for a scene.
The courthouse, an old hotel and a historic home that has been turned into a museum all worked well as sets, Goyette said.
“What we didn’t have in funds we made up for in chutzpah,” Englehart wrote. “We believed that people want to help you, you just need to ask. So, our motto became ‘well...let’s just ask!’ and ask we did.”
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While Goyette said the film was offered “a small theatrical run,” the filmmakers had to decline because of the expense.
“Everyone’s kind of moving away from the theaters,” Goyette said. “Even the big studios are showing films on their own platforms.”
Maysville runs one hour and 54 minutes and is rated 16+ on Amazon, though Goyette said “we have no idea why” because it has no “f-words” or nudity. The film does depict children playing with firearms and has some violence.
“PG-13 was definitely what we were going for,” she said.
While the story is fictional, Goyette said some elements of it were based on things she remembered from her childhood, like the time she helped steal her grandpa’s tractor, and the time someone came to the door who wanted to “whoop” her sister, to which Goyette’s mother responded, “Like hell you will.”
Teddy Rogers and his friend Willy Stamper are based loosely on Goyette and her sister as children, she wrote in press materials.
While “Mount Sterling” doesn’t have quite the theatrical-sounding ring to it that “Maysville” does, Goyette said her hometown does have a Maysville Avenue, so she likes that little connection to the film.
And she said the film’s composer, Christopher Kennedy, of Las Vegas, has a connection in that he graduated from Morehead State University and spent a summer in Maysville.
“He was able to capture an Appalachian feel,” with the music, Goyette said, in a way that she says is “honoring of” the story and the people of the region.
Goyette said a number of Maysville residents have reached out to her, mostly via social media, and have been very supportive.
“Maysville is kind of the hero of the story in a roundabout kind of way,” she said.
Though she’s spent her adult life on the west coast, Goyette said she’ll always be a proud Kentuckian.
“I am a Kentucky Wildcat through and through,” she said.
“This entire experience has proven to be one of the scariest and most rewarding adventures of my life,” she said in a director’s statement. “Telling stories is the greatest gift I could ever have been given, and I only hope this is the first of many I will share with you on film.”
