My Spanish grandfather, dead for more than 30 years, came to life last month in the basement kitchen where he once cleaned fish and fried squid for Christmas Eve. It was stirring and surreal. There was Grandpop, head bowed in prayer over a bowl of pasta as I’d seen him do nearly every Sunday afternoon of my childhood.
Even the bowl—my grandmother’s “good china,” rose-patterened Limoges ringed with gold—was the same they used for special meals throughout their long marriage. At his elbow, as always, a juice glass of wine.
I’d resurrected Rafael Alvarez (1904-1990) through the alchemy of storytelling, casting a man who looks very much like the old Spaniard in a film adaptation of The Fountain of Highlandtown. His name is Ralph Feliciello, an actor out of New York who went deep inside himself to hit the role out of the park.
The Fountain story—by turns romantic, autobiographical and enchanting—has been around for a while. It was written shortly after Grandpop’s death on a trip with my then nine-year-old daughter Amelia to the village in Galicia where he was born. A graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts and NYU, she is now the mother of two young girls in Los Angeles and plays the female lead, a Hopkins doctor named Katherine recently landed in Crabtown.
The 1990 summer journey to Chapela included an unscheduled stop in Lourdes, France that changed my life for better and forever; an awakening that has held since, allowing me to do things like make a short film in my own backyard.
Unlike hundreds of other stories over which I’ve labored, Fountain arrived whole, as though dictated from above. All I had to do was keep up. The title also came to me without thought, a metaphor for the generations of my family succeeding one another from the day my grandfather landed in Baltimore on a ship, the Great Depression just around the corner.
Published several times over the years, including a 1994 spread in the Sun Magazine (RIP), it’s the story readers most associate with me. And an easy choice when Baltimore director Richard Yeagley suggested we adapt something for the screen.
I’d written a lot of scripts for TV and Hollywood over the years (Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, a couple of network pilots that never made it and an adaptation of Soho 88, a novel by Larry Hambrecht) but I’d never made a film. Without Yeagley, a well-regarded documentary producer, I wouldn’t have made this one. I know how to describe the sun setting against the side of the abandoned bottle cap factory at the end of my street. Richard knows what it takes—money, equipment, a talented crew—to get that moment on film.
The third primary actor—Matt Ippolito, a Yale graduate also living in Los Angeles—plays Basilio, an artist living with his grandfather, for whom he is named. The tale pivots on simple math: Two Basilios is one Basilio too many for a narrow rowhouse where life has all but slipped away.
After butting heads with the old man (the same argument every day, forgetting to turn off the lights), Basilio leaves for some fresh air. In a thin slice of the eastside known in my fiction as the Holy Land he meets Katherine by chance and shows her the neighborhood through the lens of his heart: What used to be.
The scene where Basilio and Katherine learn about one another (Baltimore is the only place he’s ever lived, she grew up all over) was filmed over at Karella’s Cafe on Newkirk Street. It’s one of the few Greek restaurants left in a community that now sells more tacos than gyros, an ethnic shift—along with gentrification—hinted at in the film.
This latest transformation, unsettling to some, is consistent for a neighborhood that has welcomed waves of immigrants since the 19th century, a few decades before Highlandtown was annexed by the City of Baltimore.
It began with Germans (thus the breweries and butcher houses) and by the time my grandfather arrived in 1929 was heavily Italian and Polish with a few families of Finns and Estonians. It didn’t become largely Hellenic until after the Greek Civil War immediately following World War II.
At Karella’s, where I often sip strong coffee while writing and glancing at whatever ballgame is on television, chief cook and owner Manoli Karela waited on Basilio and Katherine. Tentative at first, Manoli eventually found his groove and gave a beautiful answer when I suggested we practice his lines.
“Why practice?” he said with the confidence of a man from the island of Karpathos. “I make food for people every day.”
And when we broke for lunch, he did. With his wife Eugenia, he served the cast and crew whatever they wanted in the blink of an eye. Once the film is released sometime next year there will be a private screening at Karella’s for Manoli’s many friends, a few who appear on screen just as they do every day: Smoking at a picnic table on the sidewalk, quenching their thirst with frappe and shooting the breeze in loud and raucous Greek. The scene is led by a ringer I invited to anchor the loose fraternity—former Baltimore City Councilman Tony Ambridge. They did a great job just being themselves.
I am adverse to collaboration by nature. The appeal of writing fiction (aside from how hard it is to birth stories that vibrate on the page) is that it’s a one man show. I have fashioned dramas as diverse as a couple meeting in secret for decades to share each other and bowls of pig’s feet and a teenage virgin’s ride in a hot air balloon where she encounters the angel Gabriel.
The screen is the reader’s mind: No meals to be cooked, no balloons to be rented (or pilots hired to guide it), no budget beyond paper and pen. At first, Katherine believes Basilio to be a simple housepainter and although their stations in life are quite different she’s intrigued by a guy who lives in the dark with his grandfather. Slowly, Basilio is revealed to be much more.
To illustrate his calling—vocation with a capital V—we had to find an artist to produce the paintings he makes while living with Grandpop. And discovered a fabulously talented MICA student named Mara Bernhardt, a Northeast Baltimore resident currently studying in Scotland.
Mara’s response to our offer, several hundred bucks for four paintings that had to be turned around in less than a month, was enthusiastic. It reminded me of myself in 1977 when I fell in with the JHU kids putting out the fledgling City Paper. For the first year or so the pay was somewhere between non-existent and close to non-existent. But I was in the game, so thrilled to be in print that I loaded my trunk with bundles of the irreverent tabloid (ruining the shocks on my new Ford Granada, an old man’s car) to deliver papers throughout the city.
Before finding Bernhardt on Instagram I’d approached several friends for help, professional artists well past middle age. All were sympathetic and none were up for it. One said it had been a long time since he’d picked up his brushes and could not be persuaded to do so again.
Independent filmmaking is a new arena for me after years of sitting in prime-time writers’ rooms, handing off what you think is a nicely baked chicken only to see it chopped into chicken salad. Doing it yourself is both exciting and exasperating, a puzzle where unforeseen problems (like a neighbor who refused to let us film in her backyard) have to be solved in the moment.
With the help of Mara, Manoli, Father Mike Pastrikos of St. Nick’s Church on Ponca Street and the financial donations from friends and family, Yeagley and I seem to have pulled it off. It’s my hope that viewers will find it as memorable as the chestnut on which it is based.
The Fountain of Highlandtown will be entered into a range of film festivals in 2027. Rafael Alvarez can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
