Lights, Camera, Action - Collier County Style

Pythons have slithered stealthily into our concerns as they’ve multiplied, greedily decimated Everglades wildlife, and wriggled northward in search of new feeding grounds.

Well-camouflaged, long and lethal, the apex predators stir primal fears fueled by visions of their deadly embrace. As Keith Wallace will attest, they can also spark one’s creativity. In his case, the stealthy serpents inspired plans for a proposed sci-fi action film to be shot primarily in Collier County and elsewhere in Southwest Florida. 

Wallace is CEO of Naples-based Wallace Entertainment, a multi-service company he founded in 2021. Film production and editing, acting-model training and placement, movie-TV production and development, voiceover work, entertainment events, graphic design and marketing all fall under the WE umbrella. 

He’s currently in fundraising mode to generate the capital necessary to produce what would be the company’s first feature film. The plot poses a question: What if giant pythons, possessed with consciousness and the ability to reason, began dining on the local populace? 

The idea first popped into Wallace’s mind about two years ago, before he started WE. At that time, the exploding population of Burmese pythons in the Everglades had become a staple of South Florida news coverage. 

“I was driving down the road, and I thought, ‘What if people went out and started hunting snakes because they were just getting out of control, and now the snakes have sentient awareness, and they're planning coordinated attacks, and the military gets called in,’” he explained. “I'm like, ‘That's pretty cool. I'm going to just tuck it away to think about at some other time.’”

A sense of danger is imparted by the film’s title, “Ophidian,” a Latin-derived term meaning “of, relating to or resembling snakes.” 

The plot envisions an Everglades ecosystem severely degraded after decades of man-made pollution. The conditions cause the already enormous pythons to mutate into super-sized monsters. 

Government officials launch a search to eradicate the threat, but the hunters soon become the hunted and begin to disappear. Next, the ravenous pythons overrun populated areas, dining on pets and people as they travel. Ultimately, the president dispatches a team of highly skilled, former special operations forces to try and quell the crisis. 

Will the commando’s succeed or meet the same fate as the hunters? Will the mega-snakes devour their way through Collier County, the country, the world? The answers to those questions reside within the script for “Ophidian” Wallace commissioned and is now using to assemble a cast and secure financing. 

The company catchphrase is “Wallace Entertainment: The closest thing to Hollywood in Southwest Florida. It Starts With A Dream….” After starting WE, Wallace threw himself a multi-pronged approach to achieving his goal of making the region Florida’s entertainment hotspot. 

A focal point, initially, was generating film financing and lining up casts for clients’ films that had scripts and business plans at the ready. But he found the variables involved in getting a project off the ground to be maddening. Last year, those challenges led him to revisit the idea that became “Ophidian.” 

“I said, ‘You know what? I have a movie that I’ve thought about and I'm going to get that into production,’” recalled Wallace. “So I created a synopsis and sent it to my graphic designer and she created a poster. Then, this January 1st, I said, ‘Okay, I'm going to start trying to find a writer.’”  

What a writer he found. 

Hollywood veteran Carl Goldstein is not just crafting the script, but he’s also going to direct. Goldstein has worked on 50 feature films and more than 100 television projects as a producer, writer and director-assistant director. Among them are the hit movies “Last of the Mohicans,” “Last Action Hero” and “Die Hard with a Vengeance.”  

“After hiring Carl, my original idea and concept for Ophidian has amazingly improved and is reading like a Hollywood motion picture,” Wallace said enthusiastically. “It’s simply incredible is all I can say, and all I can do is smile while reading it.”

Wallace and Goldstein are billed as the co-creators. Wallace is also the producer. Hope Daley and Matt Dykes, owners of Naples-based full production company Guerilla Media, are executive producers.

Goldstein’s Tinseltown background is proving useful in lining up a cast, and the script has attracted the interest of some well-known actors, he added. While Wallace isn’t ready to name names yet, he hopes to make an announcement in December. 

A wide nest has been cast geographically in the search for financial backers, looking locally, statewide and beyond. A GoFundMe crowd-funding campaign https://gofund.me/cf134a02) has also been started. In addition, Wallace hopes to garner governmental support for the project. 

“What we're trying to do now is bring awareness to what we're doing,” he explained. “We're definitely looking for donations. We’re offering small business owners opportunities to make a small donation and in return, if they take a picture with my movie poster, I'll post it on my social media sites and discuss what they do. That way, they're getting something out of it now rather than waiting for the film to be finished.

“Our main vision is to get Florida businesses and residents excited about our film once they see how much it will benefit not only the state but them as well,” said Wallace. “This movie will showcase all that this area has to offer and make the state and everyone in it money.”

Building wider awareness about the state’s Burmese python problem is a goal, as is expressing the need for everyone to do their part in protecting the planet, he added. 

The script leaves open the possibility of prequels, sequels and even TV shows.

Wallace is also an actor and model. He’s dabbled in those fields, primarily as a sideline, for more than 20 years. The former chief of security for Collier County government, he conducted security assessments at the Marco Island Historical Museum to prepare for the 2018 arrival of the Key Marco Cat. Today, he is an area asset protection manager for a North Naples department store. 

Since 1996, he’s appeared as an extra in a host, TV shows and commercials after deciding to try and leverage a lifelong love of fitness into modeling and acting work. In fact, he can lay claim to an experience that few others can: appearing in a smash Hollywood movie.

Wallace had a non speaking role in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” the second highest-grossing movie of all time, behind “Avatar.” He portrayed an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division), Marvel’s fictional law-enforcement organization. 

His character appeared in the film’s final scene, set in Stark Tower, the fictional New York City headquarters of Ironman’s alter ego, Tony Stark. The scene features Loki, Thor’s arch enemy. When watching the movie, he discovered the scene was included in the trailer for the 2021 debut episode “Loki,” the Disney+ series that picks up where “Avengers: Endgame” left off. 

Today, Wallace’s resume also lists commercials for Best Buy, Dunkin’ Donuts and Rooms to Go, among others; infomercials and industrial films; independent films such as “Florida Dreams,” “Baseball Wives” and “Chill Out;” and appearances on the former USA Network show “Burn Notice,” which ran from 2007 to 2013.

Those experiences provided inspiration.

“It kind of told me, ‘This is what you’re supposed to be doing, your own thing,’” explained Wallace. ‘“I think I need to do something different other than being in front of the camera. I think I need to go to the next level. You’ve got the background and all this knowledge, now what are you going to do with it?’”  

Since starting WE, Wallace has secured acting and modeling work for himself while also connecting others with industry assignments and agents. 

“I’m providing opportunities and people are taking advantage of them, so the engine I created is working,” he said. “That makes me feel good.”

The company has also been part of charitable fundraisers, providing such things as celebrity bartenders, celebrity and character look-alikes, and more. Wallace has donned the costumes of popular Marvel superheroes and lifted the spirits of hospitalized children with his visits. He’s also begun consulting with people interested in the entertainment business and taking part in scholastic career days to provide insight to youths.

Aside from raising funds for “Ophidian,” Wallace is also working to see Florida resurrect the state’s film and television productions incentives program, which ended in 2016. In fact, the WE website contains a petition citing the program’s financial benefits and advocating its reinstatement. 

His hopes are high regarding the movie’s potential to benefit Southwest Florida’s economy and, of course, the long-term success of Wallace Entertainment: “One of the exciting things is this could pretty much launch my company and take it to where I want it to go,” he said.

For more information about Wallace Entertainment, its services, events, “Ophidian” and more, visit https://went.media/ or call 777-2299. Keith Wallace can also be reached at keith@went.media.