DENVER—Andrew Robinson says he didn’t plan to make a movie inspired by his survival of the Columbine High School shootings or release it near the 10th anniversary of the tragedy.
In fact, the independent filmmaker was working on another script when he started writing what became “April Showers,” exorcising lingering emotions from the shootings that left 15 people dead on April 20, 1999.
Instead of the gunmen, “April Showers,” featuring Tom Arnold and Illeana Douglas as teachers, focuses on the hundreds of students who tried to navigate a community suddenly made unfamiliar by the mayhem. Robinson said he hopes it reminds teens to appreciate what they have and to reach out to classmates who may be strangers in the hallway.
“The only way to honor those we lost and the sacrifices of so many people, for me, is not at a memorial or with a moment of silence. It’s to use their memory to promote change,” Robinson said by phone from Santa Clarita, Calif.
Robinson was a senior when students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire before killing themselves.
That morning, fellow student Rachel Scott, whom Robinson had mentored in a drama program, asked if he wanted to go to lunch. But Robinson headed to the computer lab.
Someone pulled a fire alarm. At first the halls were empty, hazy and smelled like sulfur, Robinson remembers. Then he and his classmates saw students running toward them.
“There’s a difference when someone’s running track and field and someone’s running for their lives,” Robinson said. “They were yelling, ‘Run, run, run! There’s a gun. They’re shooting everybody.'”
Students dove under tables and into closets. Robinson and his friends ran from the school. Outside, kids helped each other over a fence but eventually knocked it down in panic.
From there, Robinson remembers a frantic search for friends as police cars and reporters swarmed, and emergency responders and neighbors tried to treat the walking wounded.
He learned later that Scott had been killed.
“I didn’t have words, I didn’t have anything. I was just stunned,” said Robinson, who described Scott as someone he could talk to without her judging him.
The hardest part, he said, wasn’t the violence but wishing for more time with friends who died.
“There’s an awful lot of things I would’ve liked to say to them—how much I value them as friends, that I loved them dearly. All the things I didn’t get to say,” he said. “I let time slip away, and I missed my opportunities to let these people know.”
Those feelings kept surfacing in another script he was writing after graduating from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. He set that project aside and wrote “April Showers.”
Columbine survivor Kristi Mohrbacher said at first she was curious why Robinson was making the movie, which closely follows but doesn’t replicate what happened 10 years ago. She said she volunteered to help publicize it after learning Robinson wanted to open a dialogue on issues underlying school violence to prevent more tragedies. “That’s very noble in my opinion,” she said.
Part of the film’s proceeds will go to schools.
Robinson found industry investors, signed Arnold and Douglas to play teachers, and filmed in the Omaha, Neb., area where he grew up and had filmed another project.
At the end of “April Showers,” a list of people killed in various school shootings scrolls across the screen. The killers’ names are included in a nod to their friends and families, who were tormented by their deaths but also by knowing that their loved ones had killed so many, Robinson said.
“Their pain deserves to be acknowledged,” said Robinson, adding he hasn’t heard any complaints about the names.
“In loving memory of those we lost,” the screen says before the list scrolls by.
“And to those who survived.”
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“April Showers” is expected to open in about 25 theaters around the country April 24. One Denver screening was held for a school safety group, but Robinson said no Colorado theaters have immediate plans to show it.
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