Filmmaker Dreams Big on a Low Budget

Producer-Director Has Visions of a D.C. Area Studio

When zombies roam the quiet streets of the Great Oak community in Prince William County, neighbors know there's nothing to fear.

It's just John Poague making another movie.

"Gosh, at first we were like, 'What's going on over there?' " said Debbie Bardwell, who lives across the street from Poague, admitting it did give her a bit of a start the first time she saw actors clad in scary costumes emerging from Poague's Colonial-style home.

Then she remembered that Poague was filming "The Wickeds," a low-budget, blood-spattered horror flick that was released on video earlier this month.

Now, Poague has moved on to making "Big Foot," another horror film starring a sasquatch terrorizing young people. He hopes the film will be another step toward building a Hollywood-sized business in Northern Virginia.

While not an ardent fan of horror flicks or creature features himself, Poague hopes these scary monsters can lead him to his dream of making bigger-budget movies. He owns a landscaping company, Four Seasons Ground Maintenance Inc., that he said employs 13 people and generates revenue of $1 million a year to help finance his passion for making movies.

Along with the scary movies, he has a fantasy playing in his head: "What I want to do is build a mini-Universal Studios here."

Producer Chanda Fuller, left, helps Johnny Ostensoe pick out clothes for his scene in the creature feature called "Big Foot" by John Poague.

He and fellow producer Tony Summers began collaborating on a studio -- they foresee it being a $500 million project -- after they both returned home to Prince William County from Los Angeles a few years ago, and though they couldn't pull it off, they haven't given up on it.

Poague, a native of Catharpin, had sold a local trash company he owned to finance his move in the early 1990s to Los Angeles, where he hoped to pursue his dream of producing a movie.

During his six-year stint in Los Angeles, he managed to snag small roles in commercials, television shows and movies, and he took script-writing and budget-filmmaking courses. He said he received investor interest but never made a movie there. Instead, he returned to Prince William to produce an independent and violence-filled film called "In the Name of Justice," which went directly to video.

During that filming, Poague shot car chase scenes in Old Town Manassas and shootouts in Summers's parents' home in Manassas and decided careers could be made here.

"I realized what a great market D.C., southern Maryland and Virginia was," Poague said. "We could be a Hollywood of the East Coast."