Long before he was thinking about a career in medicine, Dr. James Tucker was thinking about the movies.
“I love movies,” said Tucker, 73, of Fox Chapel. “They move my life. My first year of college, I saw the movie ‘M*A*S*H.’ I was so entranced with that movie that I went back to college and changed my major to pre-med.”
Starting a lengthy career as a pediatrician didn’t change things much.
“When I’d drive around to West Penn Hospital or Children’s or Magee, I’d have lots of time in the mornings and I’d think about story ideas.”
One of those ideas will be coming to Amazon and Apple streaming services later this month.
In the late ’90s, Tucker began working on a screenplay about a group of medical students on their first day of gross anatomy class who discover that a cadaver is actually a person who’d gone missing. Tucker finished the screenplay in 1997, but shopped it around without getting much interest.
“I ended up turning it into a novel, ‘Abra Cadaver,’ which was published by Signet,” he said. “I wrote two sequels and it turned into a series about a surgeon who does some detective work. And the novels did OK, but a screenplay was still the goal I had in mind.”
Tucker explored an idea about a psychiatrist who acquires a dangerous patient with a history of committing murder. The story revolves around how their relationship intertwines, with unexpected twists and turns along the way.
On April 21, that story will make its debut on Amazon Prime Video and AppleTV as the film “Basic Psych.”
“I was teaching a class through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at CMU, which offers classes to seniors, about writing a murder mystery,” Tucker said. “One of my students knew a cinematographer, who read it and knew a director and Carnegie Mellon instructor, Melissa Martin. She called up and said she loved it and really wanted to make it into a movie.”
Filming was supposed to start in early 2020.
“The filming was going to start almost exactly when the first big covid spike hit the Pittsburgh area,” Tucker said. “We delayed it three times for covid spikes, and we got very lucky and made it through all 27 days of filming without a single case of covid.”
The film stars two-time Tony Award winner Michael Cerveris, best known for his role as Ted Gunn in Netflix’s “Mindhunter.” Cerveris is a psychiatrist treating a patient played by Pittsburgh native David Conrad, who was also in “Mindhunter.”
And just like that series, “Basic Psych” was filmed all across the Pittsburgh region.
“We filmed at Towne Drugs in Aspinwall, we turned office space in RIDC Park into the psychiatrist’s office, we filmed in parks around the region,” Tucker said. “A wonderful family in Fox Chapel went on vacation and lent us their home to film in.”
The only hitch in the process was when the film’s sound engineer discovered that the audio had only been recorded in stereo, rather than the 5.1 surround-sound stereo that is now standard for home-theater productions.
“We went Downtown to PMI Studios, and they spent quite a while figuring out a solution,” Tucker said. “But they got it worked out, and we arranged for local musicians to write an original score.”
And as much as Tucker wanted to see his screenplay brought to life, he later realized that he had to adjust his conception of what it would look like.
“When you write it, you can ‘watch the movie’ in your head anytime you want,” he said. “And I really did feel that way. And you have to make an adjustment when you watch it, because the director has to interpret how they want the movie to look and feel. Now that I’ve seen it, the acting is marvelous and the actors’ interpretations of the roles is really great.”
”Basic Psych,” which premiered as an opening-night film at the 2024 Three Rivers Film Festival, will be available starting April 21 on Amazon Prime Video and AppleTV.
For more, see BasicPsychFilm.com.