Hi, I’m Richard S. Ormsby and I’m producing Remnants of Nova. This is my story, my plans for the film, and my goal for the future of queer cinema:
Pulling photographs out of a Polaroid I-Zone instant camera was my childhood obsession. So much so that I broke the camera from overuse.
I was, and continue to be, captivated by images.
That obsession was followed by a natural fascination with movies, and eventually, the sacred art of storytelling. My early teens were spent convincing the neighborhood kids to star in my zombie flicks, adventure documentaries, and other ridiculous concepts. Making movies allowed me to escape and gave me agency to create magic.
It was safe being behind a camera or in a darkened cinema — barriers between myself and reality. My reality was whatever the celluloid captured, whatever the projector projected. The rest was relegated to fuzzy, uncomfortable memories. That barrier became important when the other kids laughed and called me “weird” for being gay. When I couldn’t imagine surviving to adulthood.
Like Silly Bandz for other kids, my camera became an important accessory on my wrist — a way to survive a Catholic upbringing. A filmmaking degree just made sense.
2016 brought my first explicitly queer film. My sophomore effort, a coming out story involving a hidden teenage romance, gave me the courage to come out to my parents, and met a drunken crowd with a disgusted “ew.” I shrunk into the shadows of that cinema, left out the back door in tears, and replaced gay kisses with metaphors of astronomical scale in my next two films.

Weeks out of university, I put a barrier between myself and Montclair — 3 thousand miles of land. Los Angeles’s snow-capped mountains, glitzy studio backlots, endless summers, prohibitive celebrity, sun-baked beaches, and progressive politics called and I responded.
It took leaving to realize all the love I ever needed, I already had — it was there all along.
For every kid that breathed “weird,” there was another ready to be my friend. For a theater full of homophobic drunks, there was an entire cast and crew of people who helped put my script on screen. For every moment I spent hiding behind a camera, I was missing the bigger picture.
What we watch matters. Films affect how we feel — they literally alter our minds. When we surrender ourselves to a story and empathize with a character, we change.
That change is my life’s purpose.
My lifelong love for and obsession with cinema isn’t for nothing. I won’t be curing heart attacks, but I will be curing hearts. And that’s enough. A revelation came a year ago: the power of cinema can shape our culture’s perception of queer people and have an effect on real people’s lives.
Making Remnants of Nova is a no-brainer.
When James pitched the script to me, it was the queer characters that intrigued me. I knew from then on, despite our culture's increasingly tenuous relationship with queer people, I’d make queer films exclusively.
This film will be the first stepping stone in my plan to build a sustainable business model meant solely for fostering and promoting queer filmmakers and putting their work in front of paying audiences. The gay A24 — Gay24 if you will.
By taking a page out of Roger Corman’s book, I believe, without a doubt, there is a path to make exceptional queer work financially sustainable, so that over time we can build a sizable body of work that will change hearts and minds. And, shape our culture to be more tolerant, empathic, and loving of LGBTQ+ people.
I call the company “Rock & Sky” because gay and trans storytellers deserve a chance to climb mountains and reach for the sky.
Remnants of Nova’s passionate embrace of queer characters, their relationships, and mental health + an incredibly powerful metaphor in the explosion of a star, makes it the perfect film to captivate audiences and meet this moment.
My years spent learning on the job at Media Services about film finance, tax incentives, producing, payroll, budgeting, and marketing will allow me to meet this moment.
Komentar