In1960s rural Kentucky,tormented professor Woodrow Lincoln Roosevelt drifts into a small town enduring bias of time and place. Quietly he is saved by a fearless six-year-old boy, his dog and his wise grandfather who see more than the tortured man cares to reveal. When the boy is caught up in the raging ice filled river Woodrow must face his deamons.
2 Story Tellers
Woodrow began as a memory and became a mission: tell it right, or don’t tell it at all.
One of us came to this film sideways — a sailor who has crossed oceans alone, and whispered dialogue to himself in the cockpit of a sailplane, a lawyer bybtrade Somewhere in that restless mix, he became a writer, and one of his plays, Woodrow, refused to stay on the page. Converting a stage play into a screenplay is its own craft, and once it was ready, the harder question arrived: who could actually make it?
The answer was one person, willing to do the work of five — a producer who had run a television show and steered ad campaigns before turning his hand to directing, editing, cinematography, and the rare skill of bending AI tools into service of a story rather than letting them tell it for him. That became our mantra from day one: AI as a tool, never a creator. Every performance, every line, every human moment in Woodrow is exactly that — human.
With two of us and a budget that forced discipline over spectacle, the writer became executive producer, actor, and de facto production counsel — whatever the film needed that week. We built the sets by hand. We found actors who brought real credentials to a project with no studio behind it. And we found our Zip: a six-year-old whose performance anchors the entire film, discovered rather than cast from a pedigree.
Woodrow exists because two people — one who’d rather cross an ocean than take the easy route, one who’d already built things for television and Madison Avenue — refused to let “limited budget” mean “limited ambition.
