Filming wraps on Skyliners singer's story

While the filming of the Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises" in Pittsburgh has generated headlines, gossip and celebrity sightings, a local independent film company has quietly wrapped filming on its second feature.

"Since I Don't Have You," from Winter Morning Pictures, has no big name actors. Its $275,000 budget might just cover the catering for the mega-budget "Dark Knight."

But for one of its directors, the true cost of the film is incalculable. "Since I Don't Have You" is a coming of age story about a boy who struggles to cope with his parents' stormy marriage and his mother's suicide.

Gavin Rapp of Aspinwall wrote the original script based on events from his own childhood.

His mother, Janet Vogel, quit high school to join the Skyliners, a vocal group that formed in Carrick in 1958. The film takes its title from their biggest hit, a keening ballad of lost love sung and co-written by lead vocalist Jimmy Beaumont. Vogel's gossamer trill can be heard at the end the song, which has transcended its doo-wop origins to become a classic.

At the height of their fame, the group performed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and appeared on "American Bandstand." Pioneering DJ and impresario Alan Freed invited them to perform on a showcase that also included Fats Domino, Jackie Wilson and Bobby Darin. Fans sometimes tossed roses onstage during their concerts.

Two decades later, trapped in an unhappy marriage, Vogel had spiraled into depression. She may have suffered from bipolar disorder, her son says. In the depths of her despair, she began to write notes on the insides of dresser drawers.

"The messages would be 'Help me. I can't live like this. I can't take this,' " Rapp says.

He was 13 when Vogel took her own life on Feb. 21, 1980. She was 37.

"She was going to get an award that day," Rapp says. "She had to pack up her car with a lot of Skyliners memorabilia. She was going to be honored as a productive citizen for her achievements with the Skyliners.

"She never made it out of the garage."

The script grew out of Rapp's personal memoir, which he wrote as a means of dealing with the loss that haunted him into manhood and marriage.

"It was notes that I wrote after I had my first child," says the father of two boys. "I thought, 'What am I going to tell this guy if I die?' "

Rapp co-directed the film with Ron Hankison. The two founded Winter Morning Pictures with Mike Hamilton in 2005. Their first feature film, "Trapped," won best Crime Feature at the New York International Independent Film Festival in 2009.

"Since I Don't Have You" was shot in Aspinwall, Greenfield and Central Catholic High School, where Skyliners concert sequences were filmed. In the film, the actors lip-sync to recordings of the Skyliners. Rapp and Hankison hope to release the film by the end of the year.

"I didn't want to make this movie that's through my eyes or about me or a story about myself," Rapp says. "I think it's a little pretentious. I really wanted to write a story that encompasses what I did and what I grew up with in life, but that had an overtone of the Skyliners and the Skyliners' music that would carry people through the difficult times that I experienced."

Kristin Spatafore, who plays Janet Vogel, says it was unnerving playing the emotionally fragile mother whose son was watching her every move as the cameras rolled.

"It was a challenge to kind of go to that dark place," says Spatafore of South Fayette. "She was such a depressed person.That was not understood in those days. People didn't know how to deal with it then."

In the film, Spatafore's character is married to Kerry Rapp, an ex-Marine and street-wise city cop who is based on Gavin Rapp's father, from who he is estranged. He's played by Kenny Champion of Penn Hills.

"He does some bad things," Champion says. "But he's a nice guy at heart. We're just too toxic for each other. He was just too selfish, and she was just too tough to handle. I think they loved each other to death, literally."

The boy caught in the middle is played by Cameron McKendry, 15, of Cleveland.

The heyday of the Skyliners was 1959 to 1961, that cultural cusp between the coming of Elvis and the musical revolution he helped spark across the Atlantic. The group continued to tour in the '60s and much of the '70s.

Ron Marnich of McKees Rocks plays Jimmy Beaumont in the film.

"It's a dramatic story in and of itself," Marnich says. "But, when it's overlaid with the fact that these people were one of the most famous doo-wop bands in history, this will explode."

Beaumont, who still tours with the Skyliners, served as a consultant on Rapp and Hankison's film.

"She was pro all the way," he said of his friend Vogel. "I really didn't know that she was going through this. I kind of suspected something was wrong because she was not herself."

Details: www.wintermorningpictures.com .