American East - Production

Production

In March 2003, writer-director Hesham Issawi and actor-writer Sayed Badreya, both Egyptian-born and living in Los Angeles, met with actor Tony Shalhoub, then in his second season of Monk. The two young filmmakers wanted the veteran actor to commit to a short film idea they wished to shoot. A few years previous, Badreya had met Shalhoub in a Cuban restaurant in L.A. by walking up to him and introducing himself and managing to leave the chance encounter with Shalhoub’s phone number in hand. Against all odds, and much to his credit, Shalhoub agreed to consider working with the two young men.

The concept for the short film, written by Issawi and writer Dick Grunert, was, in fact, very close to Sayed Badreya's real-life conundrum as an Arab-American actor struggling to find roles in the U.S. – he was always cast as a terrorist. Shalhoub responded strongly to the idea, seeing both its poignant and comedic possibilities—and so began the production of the short film T for Terrorist, which the three filmed in March 2003 with Tony Shalhoub performing, Sayed Badreya starring and producing, and Hesham Issawi directing and producing.

When the short did well on the festival circuit, winning Best Short Film awards at the Boston International Film Festival and the San Francisco World Film Festival, the three determined to expand upon the idea of T for Terrorist to develop a bigger project that would represent more characters from the Arab-American community who they felt were constantly being stereotyped by Hollywood. Out of their frustration with that misrepresentation, the idea for AmericanEast began to take shape. Keeping the concept of the frustrated Muslim actor who is always cast as a terrorist, but now giving it a more tragic spin, they began to work on a storyline that touched on their own lives and experiences as Middle Easterners, and the lives and experiences of others, such as Tony Shalhoub’s father, himself a Lebanese immigrant. With Shalhoub providing support as an executive producer with development funds, and Issawi and Badreya writing, the project began to take form.

In 2005, once a feature-length script was in hand, Shalhoub began looking for a producer and production company. Through a mutual friend, he approached producer Brian Cox at Distant Horizon, an international film financing company headed by Anant Singh and known for taking a stand on political and social issues in films such as the Oscar-nominated Yesterday. Cox read the script and immediately saw the relevance and timeliness of the project. The company optioned the rights to the project, which they considered the first true Arab-American film, and Cox began to develop the script further with the filmmakers. Eventually, co-production funding was sought through Zahra Pictures, a company run by independent producer Ahmad Zahra, and backed by investor Mohannad Malas, which had made its name specializing in films focusing on Muslim and interfaith issues. Next, line producer Jeff Kirshbaum was brought on to oversee day-to-day production. So, with the production team, the script, and the full funding in place, the film was slated to begin principal photography in the summer of 2006.