The Decoy

The Decoy (2006) is a western film that was shot in 2005 and finished in 2007 by Higgins/Kreinbrink Productions, an Arizona motion picture company. The film project started as a short film to showcase the talents of Justin Kreinbrink. The original script was only 35 pages long (one page on a script equals one minute of screen time). However the story features a main character who is mute, which makes each page last much longer. At the end of principal photography, they ended up with a 70-minute movie, mostly due to the amount of time needed to show the mute's reactions. Taking their film to the 2005 American Film Market, the producers were told by distributors to make the film at least 90 minutes. So in December 2005, several new scenes were shot for the film, bringing the total running time to just over 100 minutes. In the summer of 2006, The Decoy was previewed to a sell-out crowd of over 1,100 people at The Fox Theatre in Tucson, AZ. The Fox Theatre, which had recently reopened from a 30-year hiatus, had also not had a new western shown there in nearly as much time. At the 2006 American Film Market in November, the film was again shown to distributors. This time, four distributors expressed interest in the project. The company ended up signing with Echo Bridge Home Entertainment in April 2007 for Domestic (US) and Canadian DVD distribution.