The camera bulbs flashed as gowned ladies and suited gentlemen sauntered down the red carpet at Saturday’s movie premiere. After the screening, actors took the stage to accept shining award statues and answer questions from the cheering crowd.

The star leading the red carpet processional — the movie’s director, screenwriter and leading man — is 14-year-old Jake Fair of Chittenango, N.Y. This film, which premiered in Goldstein Auditorium, was his wish, one that Syracuse University professors helped make come true.

Fair’s film, ‘Jewel of a Thousand Suns,’ was the wish granted to him by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which works to make dreams come true for children with life-threatening medical conditions. Fair was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age 5.

In May, the foundation contacted Michael Schoonmaker, chair of the television, radio and film department at SU. Schoonmaker said he gets a request a day from people asking the department to shoot their movies.

‘This wasn’t just, ‘I need somebody to work for me,” he said. ‘This was, ‘We need to make a dream come true.”

At age 5, Fair started losing weight rapidly, becoming gaunt and malnourished. He fell asleep at kindergarten, prompting calls from his Catholic school to his mother, asking why she was keeping him up at night.

His mom, Kathleen Penny, thought he was dying. A barrage of testing followed, and the possibilities arose: brain lesions, severe heart problems, asthma, digestive problems.

After six months, doctors diagnosed Fair with cystic fibrosis, a defective gene that causes the body to produce mucus that clogs the lungs and prevents the pancreas from absorbing food. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation predicts the median life expectancy is in the mid-30s.

Penny cried as she recounted what Fair said to her two years ago. ‘He asked, ‘Why am I doing all this medicine? I’m never going to get better.”

But then Fair started working on the film that premiered Saturday night in Schine Student Center in front of more than 200 people.

Right after Make-A-Wish contacted Schoonmaker, he got a call from his son, Vaughn. A 2008 SU alumnus, Vaughn was taking a summer hiatus between jobs at MTV. Vaughn thought he would help for a weekend, so the entire family, including Schoonmaker’s wife, went in on the project.

Sharon and Michael Schoonmaker served as field producers in Syracuse and Cazenovia, and Vaughn became the movie’s producer. ‘Helping out’ turned into a full-time job for Vaughn, who led the team through 16-hour days on sometimes the same number of coffees. The project took three months, hundreds of volunteers and six packed days of filming. Vaughn said it helped that Fair knew exactly what he wanted.

‘When I knew I was going to do the project, I was not expecting a 14-year-old to have any clue what they wanted,’ Vaughn said. ‘And he knew, down to every tiny second, what he wanted.’

What Fair wanted turned into a 28-minute action thriller called ‘Jewel of a Thousand Suns.’ Myke Wolff (played by Fair) and his best friend (played by John Fredrick, Fair’s real-life best friend) find magical necklaces in the Forest of Darkness that give them special powers. Then military personnel abduct the two friends to help save Tralovano City from an evil villain named M. Baress.

‘I didn’t want to push them too hard,’ Fair said about the film, ‘but I still liked getting the things I wanted to do.’

Fair said his favorite part of the experience was wearing his super suit and magical necklace. ‘His necklace gave him super strength,’ Fair said, clutching the shark-tooth necklace he wore to the premiere. ‘Mine just makes me look good.’

He said he also enjoyed acting with his mom, who played his on-screen mom, and his friends. Another friend, Alicia Koenig, portrayed Lola Croft, the film’s leading lady. Fair was disappointed on one count, though.

‘I wanted some bad language in it, ‘cause it’d be more realistic of how people talk,’ Fair joked. ‘But we couldn’t. There were children in the audience.’

Fair and the entire crew got a dose of the chaos that comes with making a film. One smoke bomb produced a little too much smoke. A stuntwoman drove into the camera with a bike scooter. Army soldiers, who play military men in the movie, had to push a stuck car out of a country field traffic jam after the last day of filming.

And at the end of it all, Vaughn sat down with 13 hours of footage and the pressure of making a dream come true.

‘When Fair said the film was marvelous, I almost started crying,’ Vaughn said.

‘When you hear someone is sick or in some kind of health trouble, it means absolutely nothing about their spirit,’ Vaughn added. ‘Except maybe that they work a little harder and try a little harder at everything they do.’

After the screening, Fair wrapped up the moral of the film — and maybe even the entire wish.

‘You don’t need powers to be superhuman,’ Fair said. ‘You just have to believe in yourself.’

shmelike@syr.edu

Published on September 12, 2010 at 12:00 pm