A suburban grandmother of five, Elyse Roberts is into the arts, horses, and the family she’s created with Ray Roberts, former CFO of an electronics manufacturer. She helps operate the Roberts Family Foundation, which supports organizations like the Lyric Opera, the Barrington Area Arts Council, and the Pioneer Center, which provides developmentally disabled people with housing, jobs, and life skills. “I spent my whole life as the wife of a manufacturer, working in social charities, entertaining, and riding horses,” says Roberts, who’s 64. “I try to make the social events and the parties and the charitable balls and the hunt.” The hunt? “Yes. I’m a member of several hunts in the area,” she says. “The fox hunt and the basset hunt. It’s kind of a dying activity, but it shouldn’t be. It’s a marvelous sport.”
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They sent Coppola a cease and desist letter. “I got a thing in my fax saying stop using the term Digi-Flicks,” says Coppola. “Basically that’s how we met.”
The dispute was settled out of court. Coppola agreed to stop using the name and, as a favor of Roberts and Kurzeja, to produce a 20-minute digital movie they could use to try out their encryption software, which scrambles a digital movie while it’s being sent electronically from one place to another so no one can burn copies at any point along the way. “It didn’t need to be anything,” says Roberts. “We just needed a strip of film. His attorney said he could do anything he wanted. He could have gotten up on the table and danced naked.”
A couple months later Roberts’s company had a booth at ShoWest in Las Vegas, an expo for the film industry. She decided to show The Digital Revolution at the booth, and she invited Coppola to show some of his other work. He agreed. “No one but me thought he was going to,” she says. “It was asking a lot. It wasn’t his booth. He is so good-humored. He brought me flowers.”
The movie’s plot involves a monster, an evil clan that takes over a trailer park, and two estranged brothers–one white, one black–who are racists but who must team up to destroy the clan and the monster. Roberts was impressed. “I just liked his ideas,” she says. “He has great artistic vision.”
“My friends thought I was having a great time, but it was not fun,” she says. She won’t disclose how much the project finally cost.
“It’s kind of surprising,” she says. “How does a grandmother from the midwest meet a child of Hollywood and end up making a movie and going to Cannes? I just sort of fall into these things.”
