Brownstein: Non-Stop Montreal Filmmaker David Lipper

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There are overcomers. Then there is the Montrealer David Lipper.

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The pandemic hasn’t been kind to most of the film industry, but Lipper’s career has somehow managed to thrive over the past two years. You will have had, count them, six films made and then they will appear on screen from the start of the pandemic in March 2020 to March 2022. Lipper is the star, the writer, the director or the producer of the productions, and often he it fulfills two or more functions in each one.

Nor does he stick to a specific theme in either. His three most recent films are a festive family affair, a fiery satire, and a hardcore horror flick.

A Christmas Letter, which premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. on CBC Television and also begins airing Wednesday on CBC Gem, fills the bill as your classic holiday family meal. In addition to writing and co-producing this heartwarming shot in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Lipper plays an unlucky mailman whose professional hockey career was cut short by a car accident, but who finds purpose and love (with Glenda Braganza) to help save a home for foster children.

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Then there’s Death Link, which had its commercial premiere on Monday at Hollywood’s famed Grauman’s Chinese Theater with Lipper in attendance and is now available on iTunes and Amazon. Winner of best horror film at the Cannes Indie Film Festival, not to be confused with the more well-known Cannes film festival, this slasher story is about apps that went horribly wrong and led to sinister consequences in a class of last high school year. Lipper is a director, producer, and co-star here.

And there’s Reboot Camp, a satire in which Lipper produces and plays the lead role as a fake cult leader. Winner of the Austin Film Festival Audience Award for “Comedy Vanguard Feature” and the Garden State Film Festival… Yes… Abbott and Costello Award for Best Comedy, also available on iTunes and Amazon.

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“I never wanted to be stereotyped about anything, because that would get me nowhere,” says Lipper, 52, in a telephone interview. “I’m more of a character actor anyway. I have never seen myself as a protagonist. So I decided to take a chance. “

Lipper, who first rose to prominence on the hit sitcom Full House and later appeared on Fuller House, has certainly been successful on that front.

“After Full House, all I was reading was sitcoms. Then I played a bad boy in a movie, and all I was reading was more bad boys. I thought the only way to build a career would be to be all over the map. Then when I added production to the equation, it just changed everything, because for the first time I had the ability to say, ‘Well, I’ll do it.’

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While it’s only just out now, Lipper first wrote A Christmas Letter in 2005. At that time, a producer acquired it, but came back to it later. In all three producers they had opted for the property and had returned it.

“I just finished the whole process and decided to do it myself. I said I would figure it out and joined this fantastic group at Sault Ste. Marie, 180 sorority productions. It was a difficult shoot in the middle of the confinement in northern Ontario last May, but they all made it.

“The good news was that no one person got sick on any of my sets in two years. But A Christmas Letter was the fourth movie in a really short period, and I started to think that maybe I was pushing too hard. “

That thought process didn’t last long.

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Three more works by Lipper are expected in the coming months: Just Swipe, a romantic comedy he produces and stars alongside Full House co-star Jodie Sweetin; the horror thriller Wolf Mountain, which he directed, produced and has a co-starring role alongside the always terrifying Danny Trejo; and My Favorite Girlfriend, another romantic comedy he produced.

“I really don’t know how to explain that all of this is happening at the same time,” says Lipper. “When I started Death Link in Hollywood, there was no pandemic. Then a week later, there was and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re so screwed up.’

“Clearly, I was very lucky to get through all of this during the pandemic. I just put one foot in front of the other, and when I saw that it was working, I said to myself: let’s keep making movies. What else was he going to do then anyway?

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There is no time for air yet.

Lipper plans to shoot five movies in 2022: he will produce the comedy Candy Flip in Los Angeles; producing and starring in the Mississippi-set drama Hunt Club with Mickey Rourke; produce Joe Baby, another drama set to shoot in Mississippi; and directing and producing the drama Crocodile Greek in Los Angeles, also with Rourke.

“Then I can take a vacation,” he says.

“But not before making the fifth movie, Showdown in Little Moscow, which I am directing this summer and which will finally take me back to Montreal. The plan was always to go back and make movies at home ”.

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