San Angelo Native Writes, Directs and Stars in Own Film

When Marc Menchaca was in high school, drama was not exactly considered a “cool” elective. Rather, the cool kids of San Angelo’s Central High stuck to things like sports, Menchaca not excluded.

Twenty years later he didn’t say whether or not he feels that perception has changed, but coolness doesn’t appear to be an issue for the 38-year-old actor/director, who has made Manhattan his home and can been seen in series like “Homeland”, “CSI” and “Law and Order”.

Acting, he said, is just what he felt drawn to. “I just had this weird little premonition in college,” he says, recalling what spurred his start in showbiz. “I think I kind of always wanted to do it in high school, but I played football and soccer and number one, I didn’t have a lot of time to do it, and number two, I don’t know what your experience with high school theater groups are, but at the time it wasn’t a really cool thing to do.”

A Central graduate, Menchaca left San Angelo after high school and began studying English at Texas A&M University. During his studies, Menchaca auditioned for a part in a play and got the role, which ultimately changed his career path. He completed a summer program in New York while in college, and at the urging of a former teacher and friend from Austin, who desired to see him succeed, made the sleepless city his home in 2003.

With roles in several notable productions, Menchaca appears to have made the right decision in joining the acting community, and in the fall of 2010 decided to expand his experience a bit further and try his hand at writing. After approximately a year and four months, Menchaca’s ‘This is Where We Live” was ready for production.

The film, a 92-minute family drama, features Menchaca as both director and in one of the main cast roles, and centers on a small Texas family. IMDb offers the following description of the film’s plot:

Set in the Texas Hill Country, "This Is Where We Live" is a portrait of the Sutton family: Diane, while ignoring her own health issues, is caregiver to her son August, who has cerebral palsy, and her husband, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. Overburdened, she hires Noah, a local handyman, to build a wheelchair ramp up the front steps to the family home. August observes Noah working, and through dinner with the family Diane notices their connection, and stops Noah as he leaves to ask if he could use some money helping out with August. The friendship that Noah and August forge has a ripple effect; life makes unexpected turns for those around them, and forces Noah to confront his past.

“I have a good friend in Austin who has cerebral palsy and he was kind of the emphasis for that character,” Menchaca says of the plot. “Everything else is kind of just made up. The relationship is true—my relationship with my friend—but in the family, everything else is different in his life, the circumstances.”[[{"fid":"4227","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default"},"type":"media","attributes":{}}]]

Menchaca’s film premiered at SXSW last year and has since won and been nominated for several awards. Last year, the film was shown at roughly a dozen festivals, he said, and will soon premiere in Dallas before heading on to other cities. One of those stops is scheduled for San Angelo on Tuesday at the Museum of Fine Arts.

“It was super fun,” Menchaca said of acting in and directing his own film. “I got to work with some other people that I really like and that I always wanted to work with.

“I’m very pleased that people actually like it,” he laughed. “It can be a tricky thing, especially when friends see your work. I couldn’t be more happy about the reaction that we’ve gotten from audiences and I’m happy with the story we got out of it in the end.”

In the film Menchaca plays Noah, and says that although he enjoyed the process, he did get cold feet in the beginning. “I guess just because I was wearing quite a few hats,” he said. Menchaca doesn’t necessarily enjoy directing and acting in the same film, and is grateful for co-director Josh Barrett, whom he says is due a large portion of the credit for how the film turned out.

“I was nervous about it being my own piece and I don’t personally like to direct other actors when I’m working with them, so I had Josh come in,” he said. “It was good because he knew the story I wanted to tell and he was just very good at sitting down with me beforehand and saying, ‘What’s the story of this scene and how can we get it where we want it to go?’”

The film also featured other friends of Menchaca’s, including the teacher from Austin who initially pushed him to move to NYC and several he had been wanting to work with, he said. The project was something all his own.

“I’m an actor by trade,” he said. “It just came out of a desire to make something of my own. I’ve got friends who have been making their own films for a while and I just wanted to kind of take a stab at it and have creative control over something; be able to do what I wanted instead of just being hired and told what to do.”

The movie was filmed just near Llano in an old house belonging to a friend of Menchaca’s, one he’s known since high school. “My old high school football coach, coach [Kenneth] Bode, we shot at their house. That’s where the family lived, which is close to Llano. They very graciously gave us their house to shoot on…just in good favor,” Menchaca said.

Bode, a former CHS coach, has since passed away, Menchaca said, but he and Bode’s family have always been close.

Tuesday evening the San Angelo Cultural Affairs Council will play host both to Menchaca and his film, starting at 7:00 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts. A question and answer session is scheduled to follow and the event is free and open to the public. 

More information on the film may be found here.