Royal Love Story From The Grave

Most first films are made by people who went to school for it, moved to Los Angeles for it, or knew somebody who could open a door. This one was made by a man in Florida who had never made anything, working part time, teaching himself out of library books.

The film

Royal Love Story From The Grave is a supernatural romance told almost entirely without dialogue. That was a decision made before a single frame was shot. The belief behind it was simple: in a truly powerful film, what the characters do and what the music says carry the story, and the words come a distant third.

It is loosely built on The Shell of Sense, a short story by Olivia Howard Dunbar published in Harper's Magazine in December 1908. A century-old story about the dead, the living, and the things that pass between them became the spine of a modern independent film.

Every scene was shot at a single location in Coral Springs, Florida, on one camera. The bedroom, the shed, the swing set and the lighthouse grounds that appear throughout are all real places, filmed by a crew that had no business pulling it off.

How it took twelve years

2008 — cutting his own income in half

Kevin Douglas Wright had wanted to make a film since he was twelve years old and had never once calculated the odds. In October 2008 he transferred out of a management job into part-time work, losing half his income, and spent the recovered hours reading everything he could find about writing, producing and directing.

2011 — a newspaper advertisement

Three years later he saw an ad for the Miami Film School in Hollywood, Florida, offering a sixteen week course in making an eight to ten minute short. He enrolled. Two weeks in, he decided he was not going to make a short film. He was going to use the school's equipment to make a feature.

2012 — the school disappears

He wrote the screenplay, shot the film, and had edited roughly a fifth of it when the Miami Film School was sold and eventually relocated to the Philippines. The editing equipment he depended on went with it. Replacing that setup would have cost between four and ten thousand dollars he did not have.

It got worse. The affordable alternative, Apple's newly released editing software, was not compatible with the version he had been using. The twenty percent already finished could not be carried across. He taught himself the new software and edited the film again from the beginning.

2017 — five years of rejection

The final cut was completed in May 2017, after which came five years of contacting studios, producers and distributors and being told no, or more often being told nothing at all. He went back to school, was accepted into an advanced management program at Babson College, and pitched independent distribution of the film to a room of investors in November 2017. Everyone in that room was looking for the next Uber. Nobody wanted a silent romantic melodrama from a first-time director.

2020 — the pandemic opens a door

In January 2020 COVID-19 reached the United States and the cinemas closed, which took his odds from slim to none. Then the American Film Market, always held in Santa Monica and always too expensive to attend from Florida, moved online for the first time. Suddenly it was affordable.

He contacted more than 1,400 people who attended that virtual market. One of them offered to help.

2021 — it streams

In March 2021, twelve and a half years after he cut his income in half to buy himself reading time, Royal Love Story From The Grave began streaming, reaching audiences across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.

Why the story matters

At any point in those twelve years there was a perfectly sensible reason to stop. The equipment vanished. The software broke. The industry ignored him. A pandemic closed every cinema on earth. Each of those was a dignified exit, and each of them was declined.

What finally worked was not talent or money or a connection. It was still being there when circumstances outside his control happened to line up. That is the argument the film's existence makes, and it is the reason the origin story was written down at all.

Watch it, read it, hear it

The game

Everything in the game on this site comes from the film. The faces are the actors. The voices are the recorded dialogue. The music is the score. The bedroom, the shed and the sword are the real locations and the real prop. Nothing was invented for it and nothing was borrowed from anywhere else.

You slay Monster Valentina and protect Gavino, Steffi, Dr. Ali Venge and the pink flowers. Valentina and the monster are the same person, which is the film's idea as much as the game's: the fight between the selfish thing and the right thing, held inside one character.