California alumni gather to watch premiere of Dirt Nap,
the "other Marshall movie"

by Suzanne Cogar, Irvine, Calif., Class of 1990

 

On Saturday, Sept. 30th, 2006, our long-awaited movie, Dirt Nap, made its debut at the San Diego Film Festival. Dirt Nap is an independent film about three guys going through a mid-life crisis, who take a road trip to the Orange Bowl where Marshall is playing the University of Texas. 

 

In the summer of 2005, the Dirt Nap producers put out a call for Marshall extras to do tailgating and stadium scenes. More than 100 Southern California Marshall alumni and friends poured down to Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego over Labor Day weekend 2005, and participated as extras in the all-day movie shoot. Onlookers would not have known that there wasn’t actually a Marshall football game going on as the MU tailgaters wore their Marshall green in the stadium parking lot, and fired up their BBQ grills, complete with burgers, dogs and drinks. We got to meet hockey great Wayne Gretzky (whose wife plays in the movie), John C. McGinley (from "Scrubs"), as well as a few other celebrities who are in the movie.

 

Finally, over a year later, some of these same MU alumni, including Dr. Keith Spears who made the trip from Marshall, trekked back down to San Diego to preview the film. About 20 MU Alums met at the Hard Rock Café in San Diego’s historic Gaslamp District where we dined together and traded stories of the fun we had doing the ‘extras’ scenes, guessing which of our scenes would make the cut, and which ones would end up on the cutting room floor. Then we made our way to the Pacific Gaslamp Theater to finally see our long-awaited movie. We were able to chat with the producer/director D.B. Sweeney afterwards.

 

Within the first five minutes of the movie, “Marshall” was mentioned several times, and one character even said “I love the Thundering Herd!” to a great round of cheers from all the MU alumni in the audience. Marshall’s “M” logo with the buffalo face was also shown a number of times as the movie characters flashed their football game tickets throughout their road trip to the game. Even though Marshall’s fictitious opponent in the movie was the well-known Texas Longhorns, there were, by far, more Marshall "mentions" than UT.

 

After the movie, Sweeney and co-star Paul Hipp chatted with the audience and answered questions, such as, “Why Marshall?” To that, Sweeney answered that he had always been familiar with the tragedy of the 1970 plane crash and impressed with the resurgence of the football program, as well as the winning tradition of the 1990s, when he admitted that he had been quite lucky picking Marshall in some of his football pools. So he wanted to use our school in his first directorial film debut.

 

Betting on football was a major element of the movie, and even though Marshall did not win this fictional game against Texas, we covered the point spread and made all the characters in the movie happy.

 

Dirt Nap is tentatively due in theaters in wide release in March 2007.