Laura Fries & Maria Mealla: Creative Collaborators Make Magic
By Robert Delaney
Laura (left) and Maria (right) pose at the 2022 Stowe Story Labs’ Sidewalk Narrative Lab
Laura Fries and Maria Mealla are a creative duo channeling their wide ranging film industry experience into the dynamic, personal, magical realism feature, BODY SHOP.
The logline shows this is an ambitious project: “When mechanical body shops replace hospitals in an alternate reality, Lupe Corrales allows a trainee to work on her body and suffers an accident. Forced into a loaner body of an extremely white, quirky, anglo woman, she must now navigate the demands of her life in a new skin.”
Ambitious, yes, but this team is up for the challenge.
Laura Fries has had a prolific career as a producer, gaining credits on shows like THE ELLEN DEGENERES SHOW, THE NEWSROOM, JANE THE VIRGIN, PAUL MCCARTNEY AT THE WHITE HOUSE, THE MARK TWAIN PRIZE HONORING BILLY CRYSTAL, LAW AND ORDER: SVU, PERSON OF INTEREST, SOUTHLAND, and SUGAR AND SPICE. She has also worked as a producer for Showtime Sports, with notable directors like Julie Taymore, and with Emmy Award winning stunt coordinators like Peewee Piemonte.
Maria Mealla’s experience is rooted in directing, writing, creative direction, and producing. She is the Head of Production at Glass and Marker, a full service creative studio in Oakland, CA. Her first feature, BRING ME AN AVOCADO, is streaming now on Amazon Prime, and her newest short film, LA MACANA, is currently screening on the festival circuit. She is attached to direct BODY SHOP as well.
The concept for BODY SHOP began years ago, when Maria’s mother was diagnosed with early onset dementia. Maria, only in her mid twenties at the time, took on the responsibility of financially providing for her mother so she could get the type of medical care that she needed. As she explains: “I ended up just taking as many jobs as I could, I was barely ahead as her illness was advancing. One day I posted on Facebook, ‘I wish there was a place where I could just check in my body and rent a new one so I could keep going. Then that body can sleep, maybe get a facial, and get taken care of.’”
A response to her post sparked the idea for the script in Maria’s mind: “Somebody commented on it and they were like, ‘that sounds like a movie.’ I thought, ‘Hmmm, it does sound like a movie!’” Then began the development process, which was deeply rooted in her personal experience: “I took that concept, the idea in general of being in a different body, and then with my mom the idea that I couldn’t see her because I was working so much, and kind of united them with this experience of identity that we have particularly in the Latinx community.”
For Maria, the script also became a way to discuss the dynamics between ethnicity and race: “Latinidad is an ethnicity, and it constantly gets bunched in with race. Which is not the same thing because you have Latinos who are Asian, Black, Indigenous, Caribbean, White like myself, but they are always bunched in with people of color. So I decided to take that concept, and bring an Afro-Caribbean Latina woman and have her put into a White Anglo-American body and experience what that is like. And send her on an adventure to be able to recover everything she needs to get back into her own body.”
Laura became involved with the project when Maria sent over a draft of the script. As she explains, “When I read it I was immediately drawn to it, and knew that I wanted to somehow be a part of it. Many of the origin aspects of the story resonate with my personal experience. I’m a Korean adoptee, so I’ve had to straddle two identities at times of being Asian but I was raised by a white family. So I’ve often identified as being caucasian. Those aspects of identity were really prominent throughout the script and what really drew me to the initial concept.
This discussion of identity for Laura is what she believes makes the script special: “It’s such a complex story of identity that really opens up some much needed discussions I think. We’re not necessarily reduced to whether we’re Asian, Latina, there’s so much nuance like Maria said. The way that we talk about it, these people, people in general, don't fit into these nice little boxes that you check on applications. I think that’s what makes the story so unique, and why I was so eager to be a part of it.”
Maria is attached to direct BODY SHOP, and a crucial part of the development process is imagining the tone of the piece. Especially in regards to the auto shop/hospitals, where the positive connotations of healing are upended: “We want it to feel super junkyard gritty. It’s going to have a steampunk feel to it. In the same way that you throw tires into a corner but this time it’s lungs you know just flying into a corner. Or having a person on a crane and watching them straighten out their spine and moving people across a rack. Having this more violent junky feel to it.”
The tone of the body swapping also denies comparisons to other films that might come to mind like FREAKY FRIDAY: where the body swapping in that context is a fantastic, even silly event. In the world of BODY SHOP, it is a more regular occurrence that also connects to class. “One of the big differences is that it’s accepted in this world, people understand that this happens from time to time. But an actual switching of bodies, getting a loaner body, is something that’s reserved for the elite. People are bound to the body they are born with, unless there is an accident like what happened to her when they threw her into a body. It’s not necessarily like, ‘Now she gets to run around in a convertible!’ It’s just whatever junkyard body they had in the back,” said Maria.
“And she’s a line cook. So she’s exposed to a fast paced environment and heat. She’s scared of dinging this body up and then she’d have to cover the repairs. And at the same time she has a mom that’s sick and barely recognized her as it is when she was in her own body, so she’s eager to get back into her own body so she can connect with her mom more,” she said.
Laura sees it as her role as a producer to give writers or directors like Maria the freedom to conceive these visions without being bogged down in logistics: “I like to be able to take care of those things for her so she has the creative freedom to think as big as she wants to. I think that’s important for writers and directors, that they don’t feel inhibited by logistics or budget or these things. As a producer I really strive to do that creative problem solving for my writer and my director. And this happens to be the same person so it’s lovely that I can fulfill those things!”
Before BODY SHOP, Maria and Laura originally met as a part of the Bay Area filmmaking community. San Francisco has been particularly meaningful to both of them as creatives, as Laura explains. “We were part of a female filmmakers group. Maria was the first person to welcome me into the filmmaking community in the Bay, which was such a relief as a newcomer when I first moved there, to find my people.”
“With the proximity that it is to Los Angeles, many times some of the bigger productions that come in from LA, they bring their own people. But occasionally they’ll hire locally and we know a lot of the people that worked on these really amazing films. We know the production designer from THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO, the gaffer of the San Francisco unit for a lot of the Marvel films, the gaffer from MOONLIGHT is from the Bay. There’s just a lot of talent in the Bay that goes unrecognized, which is unfortunate. I think that the eagerness to create stories is something that I was thankful to be a part of,” she said.
Maria has a lot to say about the culture of the San Francisco filmmaking community, all good. “I love the Bay Area filmmaking community. It’s small, it’s super tight knit, they take really good care of each other. Everyone’s always down to do something creative. Corporate is the overarching thing that pays the bills. It’s not a union heavy town, just because most of the work is corporate. So they do a good job at taking care of each other: making sure that days are reasonable, rates are fair, and willing to work with an indie project because we all spend so much time on set doing commercial work,” she said.
“For me it’s always a positive environment when I’m on set with them, the energy is always good, people are down to hang out. It does feel like that phrase, that I usually try to steer away from, which is just making movies with your friends. My callback to that is always like, I tried to do ‘making movies with my friends,’ and it almost killed me and my friends (laughs). It is so hard to make a film.”
Laura and Maria brought BODY SHOP to Stowe Story Labs’ 2022 Sidewalk Narrative Lab.
As Maria explains: “I thought it was an incredible experience. I loved it. I left with a lot of homework, which I think is good and the best case scenario when you’re going into labs. We walked in and I thought we were fairly well prepared, I still think we were fairly well prepared (laughs), but they definitely kicked us up to a higher standard. We’re reworking everything right now: our pitches, our pitch deck, our budget, getting ready to present in a new way. Everybody there was absolutely lovely: from the peer to peer reviews, to the mentors taking the time to give us such detailed feedback. I really thought it was a valuable experience.”
Laura expands here: “I was part of the inaugural Producers Lab with Stowe, so I was really thankful that this opportunity with Sidewalk came sort of because I was an alumni of the producers program. The experience has been really invaluable. I can’t say enough about it. Both Davids, David Pope and David Rocchio, are great and have been wonderful in demystifying is kind of how I put it. As a producer, there are a lot of secrets that are held close to the chest by many producers about the filmmaking process. Things like: how to create a finance plan, really breaking down what is a pitch, these things that if you’re part of Hollywood a little bit it’s like insider information. These labs and the producers lab too demystified a lot of that for me, which I was so thankful for. I was like, ‘great finally people who are willing to share information and teach me because I’m so willing to learn and to hear advice.’ So to have the platform where we can explore these things together and really discuss it has been really amazing.”
As BODY SHOP continues to develop, one of the things binding and propelling the creative process forward is Fries’ and Mealla’s deep respect for each other as artists.
Fries explains about Mealla: “When I first met her I recognized immediately what a force she was. Maria’s super fierce. She’s the hardest working person that I know. She’s constantly writing. She can spit out scripts, man, I don’t know how you do it. Her first feature, she had a producer and everything, but she was also pretty much producing as well as directing, she wrote it, it was a beast to undertake. She did it with flying colors and it’s a great feature. I’ve just always been super impressed with her.”
Mealla feels similarly about working with Fries: “I’ve known Laura for years now, we did meet through this film community, but she’s a very well rounded filmmaker in general. She’s acted, she has a stunts background, she’s worn so many hats and I’ve seen her do both narrative and high end commercial work everywhere. I felt very safe with her taking on this project. I know that she really understands logistics, that she really understands financial implications and timing and all of that basic stuff. But more than anything it’s our communication style that really works with me.”
We were happy to have these filmmakers and their project at the Lab, and look forward to screening the film one day soon.
Robert Delany is an Academic Intern with Stowe Story Labs. He graduated in 2020 with an MA in cinema studies from NYU and was a Program Associate for the 2020 Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, where he now conducts interviews for their “Filmmaker Spotlight Series”. Robert also writes for Split Tooth Media, an independent film and music publication based in Portland, Oregon. He is currently acting as a researcher on the film ASCO: WITHOUT PERMISSION, directed by Travis Gutierrez Senger and produced by North of Now. He was also an Office Assistant at Senger’s production company, Asa Nisi Masa Films, where he focused on the development of numerous projects. Robert graduated in 2018 with a BS in film and TV from Boston University’s School of Communication. Robert Delany was selected for this academic internship to focus on interviews and other writing for The Story Board, Stowe Story Labs’ bi-monthly newsletter. He will also assist in the establishment of a curated short film platform for Stowe Alumni.
