El Dorado Hills-filmed movie had a long road to Amazon Prime. How it got there

Graham Womack
·6 min read

Some films get made but fail to catch the eye of distributors. Time passes and people forget the project all together.

That’s not the story of “Not Your Year” that was filmed in 2015 in the Sacramento area.

The 89-minute film was made for under $500,000 using actors from B Street Theatre and Sac Republic FC chairman Kevin Nagle as executive producer. It had its premiere at the Sacramento International Film Festival at the Crest Theatre in 2017 and also got an IMDB listing that year but not a distribution deal.

Instead, “Not Your Year” debuted on Amazon Prime on April 17, having been submitted through its Prime Video Direct program by Indie Rights, a Los Angeles-based distribution company.

“When you’re making a low-budget, indie film, there are no guarantees about distribution at all,” said Jim Meyers, who directed the film, wrote its screenplay and served as a producer. “But you just work as hard as you can and make it as good as you can and see what happens.”

Actors Jason Kuykendall, left, and Tate Hanyok, far right, appear in a coffee shop scene in the movie “Not Your Year,” filmed in El Dorado Hills, while executive producer Kevin Nagle, chairman of Sacramento’s Republic FC soccer team, makes a cameo in the background.
Actors Jason Kuykendall, left, and Tate Hanyok, far right, appear in a coffee shop scene in the movie “Not Your Year,” filmed in El Dorado Hills, while executive producer Kevin Nagle, chairman of Sacramento’s Republic FC soccer team, makes a cameo in the background.

A different approach

Local cinephiles might remember Meyers as co-writer of another film, “Her Minor Thing” that was shot in the region in the summer of 2004 and given a straight-to-DVD release the following year.

“Her Minor Thing” featured model and actress Estella Warren, as well as “Saturday Night Live” alums Rachel Dratch and Victoria Jackson and comedian Kathy Griffin, among others. Meyers took a different approach with “Not Your Year” after getting inspiration from hearing a woman perform live music in a cafe.

“It was just an intentional decision to just fit the budget and the scope of it to the story I was telling, which was actually a very small story,” Meyers said.

Even getting to the shooting of “Not Your Year” was a journey. Paul Nicknig, another producer on the film, said he met Meyers in 2008 and first read the script around 2012. They began to pitch it in earnest over the next two years and approached Nagle after learning he would be acquiring El Dorado Hills Town Center near where Nicknig had worked.

Jim Meyers, left, who wrote, directed and co-produced the film “Not Your Year,” speaks to actors Lyndsy Kail and Elisabeth Nunziato, right, on set in 2015. The film was made in the Sacramento region.
Jim Meyers, left, who wrote, directed and co-produced the film “Not Your Year,” speaks to actors Lyndsy Kail and Elisabeth Nunziato, right, on set in 2015. The film was made in the Sacramento region.

The idea Meyers, Nicknig, and Nagle settled on: Shooting much of the film at the town center. Nagle, who’s also a minority owner of the Sacramento Kings and recently purchased English Football League club Huddersfield Town, lives in El Dorado Hills and welcomed the chance to showcase his community.

“The demand for culture is increasing over time,” said Nagle, who has a cameo in the film. “And as a result, it should come as no surprise that all of a sudden, we want to have cinematography here.”

Nicknig said “Not Your Year” was shot over the course of 18 days, for a budget somewhere under $500,000. Aside from El Dorado Hills, there are also scenes at a Sac Republic FC game. Late developer Ali Youssefi, who died of cancer at 35 in 2018, provided permission for the film to shoot at the Warehouse Artist Lofts on Sacramento’s R Street Corridor.

The waiting game

Cast and crew got to see a screening of “Not Your Year” at Regal El Dorado Hills in July 2016. Following the movie’s premiere in April 2017 at Sacramento International Film Festival, Meyers uploaded it to video platform Vimeo.

“I don’t consider that distribution,” Nicknig said. “That was just something you could literally do on your own.”

The film struggled to gain traction on Vimeo, with Nicknig hearing through Nagle that he’d only gotten a few hundred dollars at most. Eventually in 2022, the filmmakers took the movie down and re-edited it, cutting 14 minutes from its original runtime of 1 hour, 43 minutes. Rather than put the film back on Vimeo, he renewed his efforts to find a distributor.

Nicknig had previously struggled to shop the film, in part because of its lack of established names in the cast. While one of the principal roles is played by Elisabeth Nunziato, who was Ella in the 1996 film “Phenomenon” that was shot in Auburn, the cast members for “Not Your Year” are largely unknown nationally.

Nunziato and the other three leads, Jason Kuykendall, Lyndsy Kail and Dana Brooke are all veterans of B Street Theatre.

Actors Jason Kuykendall, left, Lyndsy Kail, center, and Dana Brooke, all veterans of B Street Theatre, watch a concert performance during a scene from “Not Your Year,” which was filmed in the Sacramento region in 2015.
Actors Jason Kuykendall, left, Lyndsy Kail, center, and Dana Brooke, all veterans of B Street Theatre, watch a concert performance during a scene from “Not Your Year,” which was filmed in the Sacramento region in 2015.

The subject matter of “Not Your Year” is also clean and family-friendly, the story of a struggling music industry worker, Ben (played by Kuykendall) who breaks up with a woman he works with, Claire (played by Kail) and gets to know a free spirited artist, Melissa (played by Brooke.) Nunziato plays Helen, a would-be investor.

Nicknig made multiple trips to Southern California in 2016 to shop the film.

“I went down and literally knocked on doors in Hollywood for distributors,” Nicknig said. “The common thing they would say: ‘It’s a good film. I can’t sell it.’”

The cast members were acquainted with the idea that some projects might never find a distributor.

Kuykendall said that in the mid-2000s, he shot a pilot in Los Angeles for what “was basically like an altruistic version of ‘Jackass.’” It never aired.

Brooke said she shot an unaired pilot and even was part of another show that had six episodes filmed but never made it to air. “When I work on a project, I don’t always think about it in terms of big picture,” Brooke said. “It’s like, you’re doing the thing at the time, you’re doing the best job you can do.”

Kail has appeared in commercials with multi-million dollar budgets only to see the products never launch and the ads not air. She’s done voice work for video games that didn’t come out. “It’s always, you booked the gig and then whatever happens happens,” Kail said.

Actors Dana Brooke and Jason Kuykendall appear in a scene from “Not Your Year” that was filmed at the Sacramento Republic’s stadium at Cal Expo in Sacramento.
Actors Dana Brooke and Jason Kuykendall appear in a scene from “Not Your Year” that was filmed at the Sacramento Republic’s stadium at Cal Expo in Sacramento.

While everyone played the waiting game for “Not Your Year” to get a distribution deal, life continued to happen.

Nicknig, who used to live in Carmichael, got divorced and moved to Denver. Meyers’ wife Debra Meyers, the co-writer for “Her Minor Thing,” died unexpectedly in 2022 at 60 following a stroke. And Kail got married in 2020, having her first child the following year.

Kuykendall and Nunziato, who are married, were at Kail’s wedding, a tiny celebration during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Actors Dana Brooke, left, Elisabeth Nunziato, center, and Lyndsy Kail, all veterans of B Street Theatre, appear a scene from “Not Your Year,” which was filmed in the Sacramento region.
Actors Dana Brooke, left, Elisabeth Nunziato, center, and Lyndsy Kail, all veterans of B Street Theatre, appear a scene from “Not Your Year,” which was filmed in the Sacramento region.

Getting a distribution deal

Finally, Nicknig submitted “Not Your Year” to Indie Rights on Feb. 20.

When “Not Your Year” went on Vimeo, it struggled in part due to a lack of promotion, according to Nicknig. Indie Rights CEO Linda Nelson is adamant that the filmmakers she works with promote their films on social media, telling them that this is the “post-post” phase of production.

Nelson said her company has been around for 15 years and regularly puts movies on as many as 20 streaming platforms, paying filmmakers 80 percent of revenues. She also intends to have “Not Your Year” be available on Tubi, Google Play and YouTube Movies.

“We have some films that make $5 a month, we have some films that make 50,000 (dollars) a month,” Nelson said. “So there’ll be somewhere in between.”