Have You Seen This PGH-Made Film? - “Cha Cha Real Smooth”
In 2018, writer/director/actor Cooper Raiff did something slightly unusual for a college kid. Instead of spending his spring break on a beach somewhere, he stayed on campus at Occidental College in Los Angeles and made a 50-minute short film called Madeline & Cooper. After finishing the film, he tweeted the link to Jay Duplass, a powerhouse in the mumblecore genre of filmmaking. Duplass met with Raiff and encouraged him to adapt Madeline & Cooper into a feature. Raiff would take him up on that and his debut film, Shithouse, would premiere at the 2020 SXSW Film & TV Festival. While Shithouse was shot in LA, Raiff’s second film, Cha Cha Real Smooth, would bring him to Pittsburgh.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
Cha Cha Real Smooth is written and directed by Raiff, who also plays the lead role of Andrew. He’s just been dumped by his college girlfriend and has moved back home to New Jersey. Listless and alone, Andrew accidentally stumbles into the business of being a “party starter” for bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s there that he meets Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her autistic daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). Andrew is drawn to both of them for different reasons, and finds himself in over his head as he takes his first steps into adulthood.
Principal photography began in Pittsburgh in August of 2021 and the film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Raiff had envisioned shooting the film in New Jersey, where the script is set, but it didn’t make financial sense. It was Pennsylvania’s tax credits, coupled with producer Jeff Valeri’s prior experience in Western Pennsylvania with Sweet Girl, that made the film shift location. Almost immediately, Raiff recognized that the tight-knit Jewish culture he was looking for in New Jersey was present in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Even so, he didn’t feel it was right to shift the script’s setting to Pittsburgh as he deemed it “too charming” compared to the “depressing delirium thing that New Jersey has.”
Courtesy of Apple TV+
The Cha Cha Real Smooth team took rooms in The Maverick Hotel in East Liberty as both a filming location and a homebase for pre-production. Surprisingly, though, the bulk of the shooting took place in the Pittsburgh Mills mall. Most recognizable is Andrew’s part-time job at Steak on a Stick in the food court, but what viewers definitely won’t notice is that Pittsburgh Mills served as the location for most of the on-screen bar and bat mitzvahs.
In a post-screening Q&A of Cha Cha Real Smooth at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Raiff admits that he was initially upset about having to shoot in Pittsburgh and in the abandoned mall. Anyone who’s been to Pittsburgh Mills recently and experienced the parking lot potholes can understand his frustration. However, it’s thanks to production designer Celine Diano that Pittsburgh Mills, along with a hibachi grill, could be transformed into seven wildly different parties.
Courtesy of Apple TV+
“Celine and the DP, Cristina Dunlap, we all three sat for, like, eight hours one day just trying to figure out a puzzle — how we can make the emotional arc work the way we want it to, but knowing we had to shoot in a hibachi grill sometimes?”
Raiff explains that one room in the mall was split down the middle, each half a unique bar mitzvah. It limited the direction the crew could shoot in, but allowed them to stretch the budget to make the film feel large. When watching the film, at no point does it feel like they were backed into a corner in the shape of a hibachi grill.
Most of the actors weren’t local, but Cha Cha Real Smooth did hire a few Pittsburgh natives to fill out the cast. Alison Weisgall, Jonathan Visser, and Amara Pedroso, a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, all had a hand in bringing the story to life.
Even though Pittsburgh wasn’t Raiff’s first choice, he and other out-of-town cast members discovered the magic of the city. Burghardt, who plays Lola, stayed at the TRYP Hotel in Lawrenceville and was surprised by the large number of record shops she could peruse on her days off. She specifically cites Millvalle’s The Attic, and recalled that she found a 1999 Foo Fighters record she hadn’t believed she’d ever be able to track down.
As for Raiff, he summed up his feelings in the way most first-time visitors do: “I fell in love with Pittsburgh.”
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