Like most veterinarians, John Stein manages to keep a straight face while talking to clients about their pets’ reproductive systems.
Imagine their surprise when Stein’s recent entry to the Vero Beach Wine and Film Festival was a comedy short film about the sex life of chairs.
It was Stein who was surprised when festival judges picked “Ludwig: A Secret Life” for its Vero Visions Award. “I’m stunned,” said Stein, clutching his trophy, a stylized wood carving of the letters “VB.”
As he told a cheering audience after the screening, “Ludwig” was inspired by a row of stacked chairs lying face down in a production barn. “One chair was on its side, and next to it was a pile of empty bottles. I thought, that guy was too drunk to get in on the action.”
From that moment of anthropomorphism came a story line: Ludwig, the lonely chair.
Stein wrote the entire script while waiting for an oil change. His Grammy-nominated friend Chris Munson wrote the music in 15 minutes – without seeing a single frame of the film.
“Ludwig was sad and lonely,” says the mournful-sounding narrator – Stein himself. “Life was one fat (backside) after another.”
Then Ludwig meets Helga, and gets a leg up on his love life, so to speak. But then Helga meets Pedro, who has a car – and now we see the chairs reclining in the backseat of Pedro’s Lexus. (Stein recruited neighborhood kids to shake the chairs.) When Ludwig meets Hans, a director’s chair (he’s in the movie business), a whole other side opens up in him.
While in print, Stein’s explicitness may seem graphic; on screen, it resonates as, well, resin. After all, how dirty can PVC be?
Stein got used to such humor early in life. Not through his father – he left before Stein turned 3. It was his otherwise perfectly lovely mother who all her life “was a great hand with an off-color joke,” he says, repeating one she told him when he was 12 – word for word.
It was around that time that films became “the biggest thing in my life,” Stein recalls.
“I saw ‘South Pacific’ in the theater seven times,” he says. “I was horribly hung up on Mitzi Gaynor.”
Television proved a close second: He was glued to “The Ed Sullivan Show” waiting for the stand-up routine. “Jackie Mason, Myron Cohen, the Catskills guys – I lived for them.”
A less-than-stellar student, Stein says no one was more shocked than he was when his SATs came back through the roof, earning him a scholarship to the University of Miami. From there he went to vet school at Ohio State, graduating in the top 10 percent of his class. Anxious to return to Florida, he ended up in Fort Pierce in 1972, opening a vet clinic and buying a horse farm.
“It was my dream to be the big-shot horse doctor with race horses,” he riffs. “It was going to be my picture on the front of Blood-Horse magazine leading Bold Ruler off the airplane.”
While the thoroughbreds grazed, he took care of the town’s dogs and cats (this writer’s included). Now 69, after 15 years or so testing out his talents in comedy, commercials and filmmaking, he has just joined Florida Veterinary League – and won his first film festival prize.
“Ludwig” was one of four that made it into the Vero Visions category.
Stein was surprised they didn’t take another of his films, “Tea Time,” about two socialite assassins, a movie Stein considers “very, very Vero Beach.” Another is a spoof of French cinema, “Le Poisson and Les Fleurs,” complete with fabricated subtitles, ubiquitous cigarette smoke and exaggerated camera angles that, for example, followed a character up the stairs so intimately that the shot jerked with each step.
Stein came to filmmaking in late middle-age. Entering film school in his mid-50s, he had studied acting before that with a respected academy in Orlando, and stand-up comedy before that.
It was in the mid-1990s that a marketing person for a veterinary supplier found Stein’s phone calls so hilarious that she urged him to find an open-mic night at a comedy club.
He came up with three minutes of material and headed to West Palm Beach’s Comedy Corner on a Sunday night. Instead of the normal 30 or so for open-mic night, he found a packed house waiting for the headliner, a national act.
Still, he wasn’t nervous “once I got up there,” he says.
“I opened up with some screwy joke, and the place was like a tomb. But it was a joke you had to think about. Suddenly, there was this tidal wave of laughter washing over me. I was hooked.”
Over the next few years, he played the West Palm club, Vero’s Atlantic Grill and Melbourne’s Groucho’s, and in between wedged in three trips to New York to the Stand-up Comedy Institute. Each time, he and his classmates would perform at Caroline’s or Don’t Tell Mama.
Back in Florida, after performing at Groucho’s, he was approached by Lisa Maile, owner of an Orlando acting school. “I would love for you to attend,” she said. Expecting a ruse, Stein looked through the stack of information she sent him, and saw that the fee – $2,200 – had been crossed out. “It was complimentary,” he says.
Stein went to a half-dozen weekly classes, each several hours in length. After that, the acting jobs started trickling in, a half-dozen spots including the “fat guy eating chicken” in a commercial for Shoe Carnival sandals. And there was a bit part in the 1998 movie “All Shook Up.”
“I got the role of a red-neck Elvis spotter. I saw Elvis in a giant flying guitar.”
While the big parts eluded him, he found the process of filming riveting.
“It was fun as hell. I was fascinated by everything about it, setting up the cameras, moving the stands, the multiple takes,” he recalls. On the other hand, he was awed by the amount of talent around him.
“You have no idea how many D-list actors are out there who are really talented, really good-looking. I’m looking at all this talent and I say, I’m making a movie and they’re going to be in it.”
On an offer of gas money and a few meals, Stein got his cast and crew to come to Fort Pierce. But the film he made was so awful, it drew laughs when it wasn’t supposed to at a small film festival in West Palm.
So in 2001, he decided to go to film school at Rockport College in Maine, selling his Fort Pierce veterinary practice as well as his house in Vero. There he made several more shorts, including “Ludwig,” and others he felt were at least as good. For a time, he worked with a production house in Portland, but ultimately went back to work as a veterinarian. He and his wife Karen have been dividing their time between Maine and Vero until last year.
Stein started with Florida Veterinary League in February. He gets up early to work on his novel for a half-hour or so, before heading to the office. With multiple doctors, it is a busy practice; in the long row of chairs in the waiting room, there is rarely an empty seat.