‘Lost On A Mountain In Maine’ Producer To Come Full Circle With Movie Debut

Eighty-five years ago this July, a 12-year-old Boy Scout from Rye, New York, visiting Maine with his family, got lost on Mt. Katahdin for nine days. Not only did Donn Fendler manage to survive this harrowing ordeal but he would go on to share the details of his adventure in a book.

Fendler's "Lost On A Mountain In Maine" has been one of the state's most treasured books, so much so that it has become required reading for most Maine elementary students.

One of these students was a young boy from Central Maine named Ryan Cook.

Cook grew up in Waterville, and like many Maine 4th graders, read "Lost On A Mountain In Maine" in class. He also met Fendler when the author visited his school to talk about his book.

That's when Cook's connection to the story began.

"From that point on, he [Fendler] was a hero of mine. It was a story that I really connected with and was inspired by. I mean I hiked the mountain shortly thereafter, with my family. So I've known the story for a long time. It's been a big part of my life."

In High School, Ryan Cook became interested in movies, after working on the project, "Empire Falls", which was shot in Maine not far from where he lived.

While attending Waterville High School, Cook made a student film that was shown at the International Film Festival at the Waterville Opera House, taking the top spot in the student film contest.

Cook, ended up going to film school at Emerson College in Boston. While looking for a film project to work on, he kept coming back to the book that had left such an impression on him as a kid. So he started to explore the idea of putting Fendler's story up on a big screen.

He reached out to Fendler, and a friendship developed, as the men got to know each other.

"The Fendler family is like family to me. I became very close with Donn through the years. There were times when I would come up and go visit him in Newport and we would literally not talk about the movie at all. We'd just hang out, go to dinner, sit on his porch on the lake...we became very close."

Cook put together a documentary about Fendler called “Finding Donn Fendler: Lost on a Mountain in Maine 72 Years Later", and that film debuted at the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville on July 16th, 2011.

But Cook had even greater ambitions for the story, he wanted to bring Fendler's tale of perseverance to the big screen as a feature film.

Read More: 'Lost on a Mountain in Maine' Making Its Way To The Big Screen

Cook says he approached the publishing company, Harper Collins, who own the rights to the story, and they immediately understood how important this story was to the people of Maine, and supported the project at once.

Next, Cook partnered up with another producer, Dick Boyce, who had also read the book when he was younger. Boyce then brought the project to Balboa Productions, the production company run by Sylvester Stallone himself.

The screenplay was written by Luke Paradise and Andrew Kightlinger was named as the movie's director.

With the team in place, production could begin.

"It was the perfect time with the perfect people to come together. The key here was that myself, Dick, Balboa, Andrew, and I all wanted to make the same movie. We all wanted to tell the same story. We have this saying amongst the group that this is not based on a true story, it is the true story. And so that's what we set out to accomplish when making the film."

They began to film the movie in upstate New York (due to economic reasons) in the summer of 2022 and it took about a year to edit and score it.

Not all of the movie was shot in New York, Cook says. There were quite a few scenes filmed in Maine.

"You'll notice the most beautiful shots in the movie are shots of Maine. When you see the mountains, and you see the rivers and you see the landscape and all of that stuff, that really helps tell the story of the environment that Donn was lost in."

Cook explained that while he would have loved to film everything on location in Maine, taking advantage of the monetary benefits of New York's incentives allowed him to put the right people together who would do this project justice.

"Over the 15 years that I've been working on this, I've had other opportunities to make the movie with other people; with other people from Hollywood, with other producers, with other actors, that I've had to walk away from...Ultimately finding the right team to work with to make this reality, that's what was important.

The new movie also features a Maine actor, Caitlin FitzGerald, who plays Donn's mom.

"The exciting part about this movie is that the book tells Donn's story, but we also get to tell some of what was happening in the outside world, some of the stuff they were facing when they were trying to search for the kids...Those are things that we get to explore in the movie which were shared with me through personal stories of the time that I spent with Donn. So that's an exciting piece that I'm looking forward to people being able to see. "

"But really, to be honest, this movie that we made, it is a movie about family just as much as it's about anything else."

Cook says there's only been one member of the Fendler family who has seen it, "because everyone wanted to wait till we could all see it together. The only person who's seen it is Donn's brother, Tom, who is 96 years old...I went down to Rye, NY, and shared it with him and he absolutely loved it."

Cooks says the Fendler family has been very supportive of this project and very connected to it, throughout the entire process.

Another neat connection between Cook's production and the Fendler family came about when the grandson of Ryan Fendler, Donn's twin brother, joined the crew of the "Lost On A Mountain In Maine" movie.

"It was pretty special to have a Fendler family member as a part of the filmmaking crew, while we were telling this incredible story."

Read More: 'Lost On A Mountain In Maine' Movie Gets Premiere Date

Coming full circle, Cook says the "Lost On A Mountain In Maine" movie will have a special premiere at the place where he screened his very first film, The Maine International Film Festival on July 13th at 7 pm.

"It's a special presentation as part of the festival and kind of a celebratory way for us to share the movie with Mainers and people who had a hand in making the movie."

The National release to theaters will follow later in the year, this fall.

"Being able to kind of the place where the whole thing started, and share it with my hometown, and the community that's been supportive of this project, at a festival that I think highlights some great films, but also some great Maine-centered projects, is exciting."

"20 years later, after winning the student grand prize, I get to come back with this movie that I've been working on for a long time, that is obviously an iconic piece of Maine's history. I'm excited to share that with everybody."

Although sadly, Fendler did not live to see his story play out on the big screen as a feature film, having passed away in 2016, at the age of 90, Cook says he feels a responsibility to tell his story the best way possible.

"We felt like we were stewards of Donn's legacy, and of his story, so we tried to be as faithful as we possibly could in staying true to the story that everybody knows."

The Waterville Opera House is located at 1 Common Street in Waterville. Tickets for the July 13th screening are currently on sale at MIFF.ORG.