By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A young actress from California found the St. Joseph area cold, but friendly during a movie shoot a year ago.
Kylee Levien admits she accepted the role in A Chrismystery without knowing anything about St. Joseph.
“Yeah, I booked the role, and I was like, wait, where’s St. Joseph, Missouri? What is that, you know?” Levien says during a visit to KFEQmmunity. “I was just aware that it was a really cold, but pretty Hallmarkee town. So, I showed up on Day One and I froze my boots off. It was cold, especially coming from a California weather, but I loved it.”
Levien plays the daughter of a deputy sheriff trying to adjust to a new city when all the town’s Christmas decorations disappear.
The movie was shot in St. Joseph and Savannah late last year.
Levien, who is from the Los Angeles, says though it was very cold when they filmed the movie, she found the residents very warm.
“This place looked naturally cinematic, like it was just the perfect Hallmark town. It looked like it was copied and pasted from our script and put onto a map. It was actually insane,” Levien says. “And I got here and I walked around the town a little bit. I got to go shopping a little bit. We visited Scooters. I don’t know, I fell in love with the town instantly, because the people were very nice and the places were very nice.”
Levien says she found area residents very interested during production, quite the opposite of filming in L.A.
“People are just in their own world, whereas here, it’s like, oh it’s such a cool thing that’s happening. Everybody wants to be in it. Everybody wants to be in the know of what’s happening,” according to Levien. “And so that was really interesting and seeing how much people wanted to; people were just so interested and I think that made me feel like, oh, we filmed in the right town.”
Levien recently returned to the area for a special screening of the movie at the Trail Theater in downtown St. Joseph. The production company calls A Chrismystery a light-hearted, family-friendly story.
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