Ten months after its premiere at the 33rd Hamptons International Film Festival last fall, “On the End,” based on actual people and events, will see its Montauk premiere.
The debut feature by Ari Selinger, a lifelong, part-time resident of Sag Harbor, will be screened at Gurney’s Resort next Thursday at 7:45 p.m. on the spa roof. A pre-screening reception will start there at 6:30, and an after-party follows at 10:30 in the Chelsea Living Room. The screening is sponsored by Melisa and Alan Geller.
“On the End,” which Selinger recently learned will see national distribution by Submarine Entertainment, depicts the tension between ordinary folk and the tidal-wave force of money, specifically the value affixed to “Hamptons” real estate. In the end, though, “On the End” is about love and, fitting for a tale set at “the End” — a.k.a. Montauk — endings.
In the bucolic setting of Navy Road on Fort Pond Bay, Tom Ferreira, portrayed by Tim Blake Nelson, was a mechanic who found himself the subject of an effort to remove him by way of a 2009 seizure of vehicles and equipment from his property. Neighbors’ complaints and East Hampton Town’s litter committee were the catalyst, then-town board members said. Code enforcement officers had asserted that the debris and combustible materials on the property could ignite.
Ferreira, who died in September 2024, held New York State and town licenses to operate an automotive repair business on his ramshackle property, in an area where zoning was upgraded from commercial-industrial to residential in 1983. Neighbors, however, had long complained that the numerous vehicles and assorted debris were both unsightly and posed a safety hazard. With the rezoning potentially prohibiting the continued operation of his business, he filed a $55 million civil rights action.
In 2016, the town board settled the lawsuit, its unanimous vote authorizing the town attorney’s office to pay Ferreira $150,000 as well as half of a $20,000 lien imposed on the property. A town building inspector ultimately ruled that his business was a pre-existing, nonconforming use.
Ferreira’s dilemma was covered extensively in the pages of The Star by the late reporter and author Russell Drumm.
As a 20-year-old student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Selinger and a crew were scouting locations for “Deuce and a Quarter,” his junior thesis film, when they drove down Navy Road and saw Ferreira, his head under the hood of a car. “We rolled down the window,” Selinger recalled last year, “and my friend and production designer said, ‘Hey, do you know a place we could shoot an auto repair shop?’ ”An initial conversation turned into an unlikely friendship, and Ferreira offered his backyard.
Ferreira “would often say, ‘You should make a documentary about my struggle with the town, they’re trying to screw me,’ ” Selinger said last year. When The New York Times published an account of the dispute in 2016, “I started seeing, if I could get my head around the intricacies of East Hampton Town law, that maybe there’s a story here.”
Ferreira’s relationship with Catherine Tobin, or “Freckles,” who lived with him for the last eight years of her life, became a focus of “On the End.” Tobin, portrayed by Mireille Enos, died early in 2017, after which Selinger and Ferreira drew close. They held daily telephone conversations during the Covid-19 pandemic, and Selinger developed the screenplay.
As the story begins in 2008, Selinger said last week, “I would imagine it brings to mind many memories of old Montauk that, today, are few and far between.”
“I think it’s really special that HamptonsFilm is doing it, that Gurney’s is,” he said. “I haven’t gotten more support for this anywhere than out here. It’s also really special to honor Tom, somebody who probably never stepped foot in Gurney’s. He’s been gone for a bit now, but this only supports him as a Montauk folk hero. That was always my desire, to use this guy as emblematic of Montauk, and he lived in the center of the storm as it was changing.”
“On the End” will see theatrical release late this year or in the first half of 2027, Selinger said, with the hope that it will open in New York City before appearing in cinemas on the South Fork.
“It’s a dream to be released theatrically by Submarine,” he said. “The fact of the matter is this tiny little story will play across the country and, eventually, across the world. You never know,” he reflected, his voice trailing off. “This small guy that I met in 2011, just a tiny little seed in a giant ocean. Everybody is going to know about Tom Ferreira. That gives me chills.”
Tickets for the reception and screening next Thursday at Gurney’s are $50. For the reception, screening, and after-party, the cost is $100. Tickets are at bit.ly/4xep7C3.
