Off drugs, native Las Vegan tells of his ordeal on film

Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007 | 10 p.m.

Two Las Vegas natives, acquaintances from childhood, teamed up to make a powerful independent motion picture.

“Self-Medicated” will be released by Think Films in 15 cities today -- including at the Village Square and Green Valley Ranch theaters.

Monty Lapica, 28, and Tommy Bell, 29, will attend the Village Square screening of the film, which is based on a horrific incident in Lapica's life.

Lapica is the writer, director and star, and produced the film with Bell.

“I realized we had something here during filming,” Lapica said. “A few scenes are so emotional that some crew members, off camera, were crying. I just didn't know if that emotion would translate into a finished film.”

It did. The movie, which cost about $1 million to make, has won 39 awards in the past 18 months at film festivals around the world.

And now Lapica and Bell are waiting to see if the public is ready for an intensely personal film that could turn the two Las Vegans into major players, in the same vein as Matt Damon and Ben Affleck -- two pals who shot to fame with their 1997 collaboration, “Good Will Hunting.”

But Damon and Affleck had been around the film business for 10 years before they hit the mother lode with their Academy Award winner.

This is Lapica and Bell's first film project, but because of the awards and accolades they have received it probably won't be their last.

Lapica has written a second screen play, “Methodical.” Bell is ready to produce that one and two others.

But for the next few days they are still focused on “Self-Medicated.”

Lapica

Lapica's father, Andrew Lapica, was an emergency room surgeon who, at 40, died in his sleep of a heart attack.

The death devastated Lapica, who was born and raised in Las Vegas and was 14 at the time.

“Up until then I was a pretty good kid,” Lapica said. “I had really good grades. I was an athlete. And then when my father died I went off the deep end.”

Depressed and angry, he spiraled out of control for three years. His grades hit rock bottom. He was kicked out of Bishop Gorman and Bonanza high schools. He did drugs. And he fought.

In desperation, Lapica's mother, Sally, hired a private agency that was supposed to rescue young people such as her only child.

Its methods were extreme. Agency employees barged into Lapica's house in the middle of the night, handcuffed him and took him to one of its facilities -- a place in St. George, Utah. The plan was to keep him there until the agency could get him a passport so he could be sent to a treatment clinic in western Samoa.

Lapica escaped several times and was never taken abroad.

“I finally convinced Mom this was not in my better interest,” Lapica said.

The mother and son made a pact. She would let him come home, and he would change.

The pact held. Lapica graduated from high school, attended Arizona State University and went to film school in Los Angeles.

“While I was incarcerated I had a great motivation to expose the unjust practices, and I thought I could use film to do that,” Lapica said. “Plus it was a great story, with a lot of drama.”

He and Bell hooked up in early 2003, raised money for the film and started shooting that year.

“We were able to get some really talented people behind us,” Lapica said.

They included director of photography Denis Maloney and actors Diane Verona (“The Insider,” “Heat”), Michael Bowen (“Kill Bill: Vol. 1”), Greg Germann (“Ally McBeal”) and Kristina Anapau (“Cursed,” “Escape From Atlantis”).

“We shot off and on for over a year,” Lapica said. “Sometimes we were forced to stop production for months at a time due to financial constraints and whether actors were available at the time, but everybody stayed with it.”

Bell

Tommy Bell learned the art of the deal at the Las Vegas Country Club, where as a youngster he often joined his father for rounds of golf with businessmen.

“I golfed with a lot of businesspeople in this town,” recalled Bell, who majored in liberal arts and minored in Spanish at UNLV. “I got my desire to put business deals together at an early age. I learned to just listen for the right thing. There's a lot of talk, but there's certain things you can decipher from that.

“But as far as producing a film, I learned that on the job.”

He and Lapica lived in the same neighborhood for a time and eventually went their separate ways. They renewed their acquaintance in Los Angeles, where Lapica had this movie idea and Bell was trying to produce records.

“We got together and put together a plan,” Bell said. “I didn't know much about the business, but I thought we would get a feel for how the production end of the business works.”

They succeeded where thousands of others fail every year.

“The movie business is not a poor man's game,” Bell said. “We paid strict attention to our budget and early on we got lucky.”

They kept costs down and found great talent, although not necessarily widely known to the public.

“We stayed lean and focused,” Bell said. “The key to our success is that we moved quickly and got quality material and we spent in the appropriate areas, such as the director of photography, who manages your lighting, the sound guy -- people who will affect the look of your film.”

“Self-Medicated” has opened doors.

“Initially when talking to key people, like distributors and agents, it's not easy to be taken seriously or to get someone on the phone,” Bell said. “This film has opened up the barricades.”

Jerry Fink can be reached at 259-4058 or at jerry@lasvegassun.com.