By Margaret A. McGurk
Enquirer staff writer
This summer, Freshly Squeezed Films graduated from a movie-making club for four Walnut Hills High School buddies to an actual business.
For the first time, they got paid.
In the previous three years, they had made some 16 video movies, including a sci-fi trilogy called Big Banana that culminated with a 90-minute feature unveiled to 200 family and friends at the Mount Lookout Cinema Grill on May 22.
Ben Dudley, John Fischer and Alex Greene met in the seventh grade and picked up video cameras in ninth grade to make a 15-minute video advising students how to behave on a class trip to Chicago.
Their next effort, O America, Where Art Thou? "proved to be a disappointment, ensuring there would definitely be no sequel," according to their Web site, freshlysqueezedfilms.com. They later added esnior Colin Duffy to their team.
This year, the four were approached by Ron Sofranko, the uncle of a friend, to make an audition tape for Donald Trump's reality show, The Apprentice.
Two long days of staging, shooting and editing the 10-minute reel netted each FSF partner "about $20," said Dudley.
Sofranko "didn't get on the show," said Dudley, "but it was a good experience for us."
