‘Lost & Found in Cleveland’ pays homage to ‘Antiques Roadshow’ at film fest

Ask Keith Gerchak about “Lost & Found in Cleveland,” and he’ll tell you it’s not a mockumentary about “Antiques Roadshow” on PBS. Rather, it’s a tribute to his hometown.

“We start the film off with a quote from Tennessee Williams, that ‘America only has three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Every place else is Cleveland,’” he said.

Gerchak, an actor and former architect, was drawn to showbiz at an early age, eventually landing in Los Angeles. That’s where he met Marisa Guterman. The duo wrote, produced and directed “Lost & Found in Cleveland,” which plays Sunday at the Cleveland International Film Festival. But it wouldn’t have happened if not for a chance meeting a decade ago.

“I don't know if you've ever been to a waiting room for an audition, but most people are vapid and it's very boring,” she said. “Keith is far from that.”

Both are married to other people, but Guterman said there was a creative spark between them.

“I was like, ‘Maybe this is my writing partner?’” she said. “I pitched him the idea for a film about ‘Antiques Roadshow.’ I just loved these real people coming in with their objects and telling their personal stories. And it was intimate, and you felt like you really got to know them in those two minutes.”

Guterman grew up in Los Angeles watching the PBS show, but said she didn’t think her idea would work with characters from the West Coast.

“It feels like a story of people in the Heartland,” she said. “And Keith said, ‘Well, I'm from Cleveland.’ And to be honest, I laughed because that was really what I was fed growing up on the coast.”

Gerchak defended his hometown, and, during a trip back to Northeast Ohio, found the inspiration they needed.

“I went to the William McKinley Presidential Library with my mom, and I called Marisa from the parking lot,” he said. “I said, ‘I found the tone of the film.’ It was earnest and quirky, and it had a dinosaur exhibit and a planetarium and a street of shops and two animatrons of McKinley and his wife dressed to go to the Pan-American Exposition, where he was assassinated.”

The movie looks at a day behind-the-scenes of a fictional antiques appraisal show, “Lost & Found.” They filmed throughout the region at spots including the McKinley, Slavic Village and Playhouse Square. One of the film’s Easter eggs happened during a shoot at the West Side Market.

“Dennis Haysbert plays the mail carrier,” Gerchak said. “We are at the butcher stand and there's a sticker, ‘Go Tribe,’ on the stall, and it's in frame. And we're like, ‘Cerrano? How is that possible?’”

Haysbert, who played Pedro Cerrano in 1989’s “Major League,” is one of many familiar faces in the cast.

“The luxury of an ensemble is that you get to have some of your favorite people,” said Guterman. “Jon Lovitz, for example, is doing his incredible Jimmy Stewart as the mayor of Cleveland. Liza Weil is doing a phenomenal job as a Hunting Valley socialite. You may know her from ‘Gilmore Girls,’ but her delivery is impeccable. And so we really just concentrated on, ‘Whose voice do we hear in this role?’ Everybody was working for the same amount of money and … it wasn't Stacy Keach's movie alone or Martin Sheen's movie.”

Guterman and Gerchak, as Double G Films, knew they had to craft a script that would compel actors to come to Cleveland to film in January. They pitched it with personal letters to the performers. The tactic worked, and they ended up with a film that Guterman calls “a love letter for people who are hungry to return to the theaters with their families.”

Gerchak said there was one other measure of the film’s success that he never anticipated.

“It makes people want to move here,” he said. “Marisa ended up moving here. That's the power of the film - that it can convince the filmmaker herself.”