🔒Willie ‘Pep’ movie team goes the distance in Hartford

Famed Hartford-area boxer Willie Pep won his first four featherweight title fights in the 1940s by going the full 15 rounds to a decision. In boxing, that’s known as “going the distance.”

A production team that’s been canvassing Greater Hartford’s investor class to help make a feature film about the late fighter’s 1960s boxing comeback can be said to be doing something similar.

Script writer and producer Steve Loff and his longtime friend and actor James Madio have been trying to tell Pep’s life story for more than a decade.

After multiple attempts — and lowering their production budget by more than half to $1.6 million — they’ve recently begun to make real progress, right here in the Capital City.

The two Brooklynites were in Greater Hartford last month, where they said they secured about $130,000 in commitments at an investor reception held in a swanky Farmington mansion. Existing investors, like former Protein Sciences CEO Manon Cox, as well as a handful of Pep’s family members were in attendance.

The money raised in Farmington adds to approximately $300,000 the team, operating under the umbrella Pep Films LLC, raised in January and February, when they hoped to start filming in the winter.

They ultimately didn’t make that deadline and have now pushed off production to the fall.

“We made that heavy push to shoot in the winter of 2019, and it was very ambitious, and it didn’t work out,” Loff said in a recent interview at The Hartford Club with Madio, 43, who is slated to play Willie Pep and has appeared in the HBO series “Band of Brothers,” the Leonardo DiCaprio film “Basketball Diaries,” and, if you squint a bit, is still recognizable as one of the child actors in the 1991 Peter Pan film “Hook.”

“At some point, we had to take the foot off the gas and say ‘this is not going to happen, let’s regroup, let’s consider it progress,’ ” Loff said. “The first money is not easy to get, and money follows money.”

Loff and Madio are accustomed to delays, but their hopes are high for Hartford.

Madio said Pep’s well-known brand in the city as well as early investments from executives like Cox have helped create some buzz about the film being shot in Hartford.

“The good news about this one … is that Willie Pep is from here, he’s a local icon, so the support we’ve been getting has been great,” Madio said.

Loff plans to be back for more fundraising in Hartford soon, perhaps with his director Robert Kolodny, who visited in January to scout shoot locations.

They hope to have a film office open by August, perhaps in the Colt complex, and to begin shooting in October and November, likely saving winter scenes for the end.

Madio, who stands just about the same height as the five-foot, five-inch Pep once did, and boasts he can throw a jab too, said he was relieved to hear from some of Pep’s family members last month that they thought he looked like the boxer. Despite his confidence in the role being a perfect fit for him, playing a real-life character — like when he portrayed U.S. Army sergeant Frank J. Perconte in “Band of Brothers” — can make an actor feel like a bit of an imposter, he said.

“It’s great to hear from the family,” Madio said. “I know I look like him. Physically, I have the same attributes as him, I’m pretty much the same size.”

If the film raises the money, Madio hopes to soon be training at Hartford-area boxing gyms, jogging the streets, and talking to people who knew Pep to help him get into character.

Besides Madio, the “Pep” movie’s recently updated details on the entertainment website IMDb list a cast that includes Ron Livington (“Office Space,” “Sex & the City”), William Fichtner (“Armageddon,” “Crash”) and Keir Gilchrist (“Atypical,” “It Follows”). Steve James, who directed “Hoop Dreams,” is listed as executive producer.