Retired Greenville teacher’s award-winning movie coming to Greenville

The award-winning Lucy and the Lake Monster will be making its official South Carolina premiere later this month at the Reedy Reels’ film festival.

However, hundreds of Greenville County Schools students may already know parts of the story.

Lucy and the Lake Monster tells the tale of an eight-year-old orphan named Lucy, and her grandfather as they search for a sea serpent in Lake Champlain – one of the largest national lakes in the country and located in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains of New York. They battle bullies, naysayers, and mercenary forces seeking to exploit them. Their journey is an allegory for humanity’s search for spirituality and carries a strong anti-bullying message.

It is based on the book of the same title that was written by Kelly Tabor Cromer, a retired Greenville County Schools teacher, and Richard Rossi, a filmmaker whose works include the award-winning Canaan Land and Baseball’s Last Hero: 21 Clemente Stories that starred Olympian Jamie Nieto and Project Runway winner Marilinda Rivera, and was published in 2022.

While a rough cut of the film was shown in Greenville a year ago, the debut at Reedy Reels: The Greenville Film Festival marks its official debut. It will be shown on Saturday, March 29, during the 9:30 a.m. block.

“We are excited to be showing Lucy and the Lake Monster as a special full-length family-oriented movie,” said Ken Seay, one of the founders of the film festival. “We have highlighted many local directors and actors in the festival, but this is the first time we are showing a film based on the work of a Greenville-based author.”

Lucy and the Lake Monster has earned numerous accolades including: Best Family Film from the World Film Festival in Cannes, the Audience Choice Award at the Great Lakes Christian Film Festival, Award of Recognition at the Accolade Competition, and Best Film at the Christian Film Festival-Menchville Baptist Church.

Tabor Cromer and Rossi have been friends since they were undergrads at Liberty University, and the project came together in the past few years. Rossi was playing the role of Rev. Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll in a stage musical in Los Angeles about Alice in Wonderland. He got the inspiration to write a classic children’s story of his own since he had just become a grandfather.

After a series of surgeries where he almost died, he moved the children’s book from the inspiration list to the bucket list. That is where he remembered Tabor Cromer’s stories of Champ, the legendary creature that lived in the murky waters of Lake Champlain near where she grew up and whose sightings were recorded by the Iroquois and Abenaki hundreds of years ago. Her stories about her childhood searches for the famed creature inspired hundreds of students over the decades that she taught in Greenville County Schools, most notably at Paris Elementary.

They authored the book together over the course of a year often using Zoom to communicate since Rossi lives in California and Tabor Cromer lives in Greenville, obviously. During this time, Rossi started working on a film version as well because it was such an inspirational story.

The film follows the story of the book, and stars Emma Pearson as Lucy, while Rossi tackles the role of her grandfather, Papa, and Tabor Cromer plays a teacher, Miss Marino.

During Reedy Reels, filmmakers Tabor Cromer and Rossi will have a limited number of DVDs, books, and movie posters to sign for attendees after the screening, available for purchase.

Learn more at www.lucyandthelakemonster.com and purchase tickets for the film at www.reedyreels.com/tickets, and the movie is being shown during the Saturday morning block of the festival.