Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Irina Caldara and actor Ross Malinger, who recently became a regular on TV's 'Party of Five,' happily embrace at the Santa Clarita Film Festival, where 'Frog and Wombat' was named runner-up in the Best Comedy Feature category.

Best pals learn important lessons

'Frog and Wombat' at Los Gatos Cinema

By Shari Kaplan

Sometimes, growing up can be murder.

For most pre-adolescents, that's true at least in the figurative sense. For best friends Allison "Frog" Parker and Jane "Wombat" Walker--who accidentally become privy to a possible killing--it's also true in a literal sense.

While the 11-year-olds search for clues about the alleged dastardly deed, they also learn the lessons life teaches about loyalty and friendship. They've been taking audiences with them on this journey at various film festivals this year and just finished a run at the Nickelodeon Theater in Santa Cruz.

Now they're about to arrive in Los Gatos.

The girls are the protagonists of Frog and Wombat, an independent film written, directed and produced by Laurie Agard, a Ben Lomond resident and president/CEO of locally based Pigtail Productions. The movie, filmed last summer in Santa Cruz County, opens Aug. 14 at the Los Gatos Cinema. About two weeks later, it will be at Camera 3 in San Jose.

Together with associate producer Nadine Porterfield of San Jose and assistant producer Irina Caldara of Los Gatos, Agard created a coming-of-age buddy flick she calls a combination of a Nancy Drew mystery and Alfred Hitchock's Rear Window.

There's also an adventurous Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn mystique about Frog and Wombat, played by newcomers Emily Lipoma of Corralitos and Katie Stuart of Sonora. The girls spend their summer communicating on walkie-talkies (hence their C.B. nicknames) and investigating a possible murder committed by school principal Mr. Struble.

The movie shows both the comedy and conflict experienced by the girls and a handful of other characters, including Lindsay Wagner as Frog's mother, Ronny Cox as Mr. Struble and Ross Malinger as Steve Johnson, Wombat's "boyfriend-wannabe."

Agard began writing and directing plays while a pre-adolescent herself in Durango, Colo., and headed her junior high school's drama club. She also received a summer's worth of free movie passes for good school attendance.

"I think that had a profound effect on me; I watched movies 10 times a week. There's just something different about watching things on a big screen," says Agard, who recalls the unlikely combination of Star Wars and Grease as the movies that inspired her most because she watched them so often that summer.

"When I'm writing, I lose track of time. I can do it 12 hours a day. There's something about getting lost in that space that's a very intense feeling," she explains. When she does have writer's block, she takes a break by planting rhododendrons. She and her husband now share their property with more than 200 of the flowers.

For Caldara, working with Agard was a dream come true. Formerly a schoolteacher and tutor in Italy before moving to Los Gatos, Caldara says she was waiting for a creative niche to fill and found it when she, Agard and Porterfield met and "clicked" as extras on the set of Mad City when it was filming in San Jose.

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