A Movie Set in Omro, Wisconsin?

Omro Heist poster. Image provided.

Omro, Wisconsin is a small town on the Fox River just ten miles west of Oshkosh and Lake Winnebago with some 3,600 residents. No one is precisely sure where the name originated, with the prevailing theory that it’s a mangling of Charles Amereau or Omereau, a French trader and blacksmith who started a fur trading post at this location in the 17th century. Remove those pesky French vowels and you get a name we Badgers can pronounce — and one attached to a new movie with quite a back story.

One of the town’s prominent residents is Ken Bressers, who owns the Omro Pharmacy, a full-service operation that also offers “durable medical equipment, diabetic shoes, immunizations, compliance packaging, vitamins and over the counter products.”

All that inventory has apparently been good for business and Bressers has become wealthy enough to get involved in producing movies in recent years. He has acted off and on since his days at UW-Madison in the 1970s, where he took fine arts elective courses while getting his degree in pharmaceutical medicine.

“I wanted to an actor,” he told the Omro Herald. “I was really into theater, it was everything to me.”

As a young man he acted in a show at the Sunset Theater in Elm Grove where he met cast member and Milwaukee native Anthony Crivello, then beginning a career that led to Broadway stardom and a Tony award. Bressers later directed a production of Star Spangled Girl at a theater on Mackinac Island in northern Michigan and cast Crivello in the show. The two have stayed in touch ever since.

Over the years Bressers auditioned for roles in films, occasionally getting cast in independent films.  Along the way he connected to Irish-English actor and writer Simon Phillips and actor, writer and director Paul Tanter and the three united to create an indy production company, Dystopian Films in 2019, with Bressers as the major funder. As the name suggests, they created horror films and dark thrillers, including a series for Amazon, “Age of The Living Dead,” and such movies as The Fearway (2023) and What Lurks Beneath (2024).

Bressers had purchased a former bank in Omro to create a mail order pharmacy operation, but before renovating the building had a brainstorm: why not use it as a setting for a film? Phillips suggested a bank heist and began working on a storyline. He connected to writer-director Jamie Bailey, who ultimately wrote the script, with contributions from Philipps. Crivello was offered the part of the sheriff, became a co-executive producer, and made additional script suggestions. Bailey would serve as director.

Meanwhile Bressers had connections to other local businesses that agreed to become locations for scenes, including a diner and a bait-and-tackle shop.

“He was asking favors from others in town,” Crivello tells Urban Milwaukee. “We used real Omro fire engines, a real fire man in fire gear, a police car and officers. The owner of the diner appears in a key scene. You’re pulling favors right and left.”

Was the community of Omro excited about having a film shot there? “Big time,” Crivello says. “It made the whole process much easier.”

Besides Crivello, others in the cast with a connection to Wisconsin include Green Bay resident Heather Arendt, Kristin McCabe (Sheboygan), Cali Felix (Omro) and Milwaukee native Tony Lee Gratz.

Bressers projected a budget of $1.2 million, but all those favors and a super-fast shooting schedule slashed the cost. “It was incredibly low,” Crivello said, without disclosing the actual cost.

“It was shot in eight days, eight long days, which is kind of insane,” Crivello says. “But that’s independent filmmaking.”

The finished film, called Omro, was entered into the 2024 Milwaukee Independent Film Awards competition, and won awards for Best Feature Film, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress.

But the Dystopian team decided they needed a grabbier name and went with The Omro Heist. They are now in talks with a distribution company and have entered the movie in seven film festivals.

Meanwhile, Crivello pulled a favor and got movie theater owner Lee Barczak to program the movie at two of his venues in Milwaukee. Their friendship goes back to performing together at a community theater, based at what is now Thomas More H.S., and a company which Barczak co-founded and named Pioneer Productions, possibly after watching a few too many episodes of “Bonanza.” (Full disclosure: yours truly had some involvement in the company as well. Oh, those were the days.)

Barczak is a supporter of indy films and a bit of a showman himself, overseeing a magnificent restoration of the historic Avalon Theater in Bay View, which increased the number of twinkling stars embedded in the ceiling to 1,800, up from 150.

All in all this is a very Wisconsin story of creative movie making. The film that resulted will be screened at The Avalon and Rosebud Cinema in Wauwatosa on Monday-Tuesday, Jan. 27-28, and Monday-Tuesday, Feb. 3-4.