PORTLAND, Maine — Growing up in Old Town, Aron Gaudet was crazy about movies. He saw about a hundred films a year, many of them at the theater complex at the Bangor Mall where he had a system all worked out. “I would go to one movie and then sneak into a second movie,” he told me. “I had everything down, like how I could get free popcorn. I had everything figured out.”
It was time well spent. Gaudet and his wife, Gita Pullapilly, co-wrote and co-directed a movie called “Queenpins,” which will be released September 10th. A comedy starring Kristen Bell and Vince Vaughn, it was inspired by the story of the biggest coupon counterfeiting scam in history. This is by far biggest picture yet from Gaudet and Pullapilly, whose previous works include a documentary about the troop greeters at Bangor International Airport called “The Way We Get By” and “Beneath the Harvest Sky,” a drama set in Aroostook County.
For all but a few heavyweight filmmakers getting a studio to agree to make a movie entails all the joys of pushing a boulder up a hill. Only those with inordinate persistence succeed. When pitching a film a few years ago, Gaudet and Pullapilly got a response that Pullapilly remembers well: “The financiers and studios would say, ‘We’d love to finance this. You’ve got a great cast. But you don’t have value.’”
That stung—and it wasn’t a one-time dismissal. “We would be told to our face, over and over, ‘You guys don’t have value,’” Gaudet recalls.
Their persistence paid off. According to entertainment news outlets, in June Paramount+ and Showtime paid more the $20 million for U.S. rights to “Queenpins,” which should provide a nice profit on a film with a budget of about $10 million. The next time he sees a movie at Bangor Mall Cinemas 10, Aron Gaudet should be able to afford his own popcorn.