Local Color (film)

Local Color is a 2006 American drama film, written and directed by George Gallo and starring Armin Mueller-Stahl, Ray Liotta and Trevor Morgan in the lead role. It is based on a true story, that of the director/writer's experience when he was 18. The character of Nicholai Seroff was based on George Cherepov, to whom Gallo had been an apprentice in the 1970s.

Plot
In 1974, John Talia is a teenager who aspires to be a painter, despite the fact that his eponymous father strongly disapproves of his interest in art. Talia manages to meet Nicholai Seroff, an elderly Russian expatriate impressionist painter who had been quite successful in the years before the modern art movement threw realism into disrepute.

Seroff is bitter and has not painted for years. Gradually Talia attempts to befriend the elderly artist, and despite many rebuffs, finally succeeds. Seroff invites the young man to spend the summer with him in his summer house in the countryside. Talia's father is extremely skeptical, and suspicious of the elder man's motives, but the young Talia goes anyway.

During the first weeks, Seroff seems to be using Talia primarily as an unpaid laborer to fix up his house, however it becomes clear that the Russian is sharing with the young man many nuggets of wisdom about life and art. Eventually Seroff shows him many things about how to paint, and how to capture a shared experience.

When Talia comes home at the end of the summer, unknown to the young man, Seroff goes to Talia's house first, and manages to win over the young man's highly skeptical father.

Some years later, when Seroff dies, he leaves many of his paintings to the young man, who happily remembers seeing Seroff finally painting again.

Production
Gallo also painted all of the oil paintings in this movie, having "cleaned out his whole garage" of his paintings. In particular, the paintings that John (Trevor Morgan) showed to Seroff (Armin Mueller-Stahl) when asking him for advice in the beginning of the movie were the exact paintings that Gallo had shown to Cherepov as a teenager.

Although the film was based in New York and Pennsylvania, the film was actually shot in various locations in Louisiana in and around New Orleans, Covington and Baton Rouge. Production began in July 2005. The company stayed in two different hotels to avoid delays driving from New Orleans to a nearby location at the end of the schedule and were thus able to wrap production only 8 days before Hurricane Katrina without interruption.