New Film Seeks to Highlight Denver’s Tracks Nightclub

One of Denver’s longstanding LGBTQ bars, Tracks, may be seeing the big screen sometime soon, according to a Denverite report.

Local filmmaker Shawna Schultz started working on the film’s script after her production company, Mass FX Media, was hired to make a memorial video about Marty Chernoff, Tracks’ longtime owner after he passed away in 2019. As Schultz researched for the video, she felt that the club and the people who made it possible needed to be celebrated on a larger scale. Schultz started with a short documentary about Chernoff, which Rocky Mountain PBS ultimately picked up, before beginning work on a narrative feature.

Set in the 1970s and 80s, Schultz’s script centers on a teenager named Ricky after he is disowned by his family for being gay as he finds his way to Tracks and discovers the community within.

While the majority of the characters are fictionalized composites from the real history of Denver and Tracks, Schultz did choose to include Chernoff himself as a character within the film. Chernoff’s unique position in the community as a straight, Jewish man who considered himself more a businessman than an activist despite the great amount of support he gave the LGBTQ community, was captivating for Schultz.

Schultz has stated that it was difficult to develop an antagonist for the film as its borderline-impossible to distill societal homophobia into one character for the sake of a narrative. Ultimately Schultz chose the City Council and the AIDS Epidemic as the antagonists of the film and hopes to showcase how despite the major difficulties the community struggled with they rose to face it.

Schultz has an extensive career in film, largely in documentary and VFX; this film will be her first narrative feature which she will direct. Stephen Beer is a screenwriter who has worked on the script. Current Tracks owner and former business partner of Marty Chernoff, Andrew Feinstein, is an executive producer of the film.