UT alumni Aaron Brown and Lenny Barszap moved into a North Campus house for their sophomore year when they saw an unhoused man sleeping in Eastwoods Park after a heavy rainstorm.
“We saw him this one day, just wringing out every belonging that he had after a heavy Texas thunderstorm,” Barszap said.
Disturbed by the scene, the pair — along with four other roommates — invited the man to stay under their roof. He ended up living on their porch for nearly a year.
That act of kindness would inspire “Home Free,” their debut feature film, more than two decades later.
The unhoused man earned the nickname “The Professor” after claiming he had been a philosophy professor at the University, choosing to live on the streets as a form of minimalist living.
“We’re 19-year-old students who thought that was incredible,” Brown said. “It was years later when we really started thinking about, ‘Did that really happen?’ The movie addresses this, right? That’s part of the movie that we fictionalized with his backstory because, as adults, we can assume that there were circumstances in his life that led him there, that might not have been just a pure choice.”
Brown and Barszap said they met at summer camp at age 12, bonding over feeling like outsiders in a small Texas town — a theme that strongly influenced the characters and casting in “Home Free”.
“Everything that happens in the movie, for the most part, are stories of things we did in college or high school,” Barszap said. “The spirit of it is true to what we lived.”
After graduating, the duo moved to New York City, eventually collaborating on short films. Their inspiration for “Home Free” came years later during a night at the Sundance Film Festival.
“We’re hanging out with some filmmakers, talking about high school and college and how crazy things were back then, and Lenny ends up telling the story about how we let an unhoused professor live on our porch for a year,” Brown said. “I remember the look on the other people’s faces. They were like, ‘That sounds like a movie.’ We never intended to make a movie about this.”
Brown said the film was inspired by director Richard Linklater.
“‘Dazed and Confused’ … has an amazing soundtrack,” Brown said. “We didn’t have the budget to do that, so our strategy was: let’s recreate a ’90s mixtape of the types of things we were listening to, but let’s do all original music.”
Brown and Barszap turned to a college friend, Adrian Quesada, founder of the Grammy-nominated Black Pumas. They pitched him on creating a soundtrack inspired by the music they loved in the ’90s.
“What if we reached out to some of our heroes?” Brown said. “It’s so crazy, because once you get one or two that said yes, others started following suit. The soundtrack (became) this big compilation of music with Adrian and these legends and Austin bands and everything.”
Even with a deeper message of those experiencing homelessness at its core, the filmmakers were adamant that “Home Free” be entertaining.
“It needs to be a college comedy first, and then have the message kind of barely woven through,” Brown said.
Joe Hart, who plays Jack “The Professor” Harte in the film, said he was moved by the sincerity of the story.
“I think highly of them because their attempt is really authentic,” Hart said. “It’s not about becoming great, huge film directors. … But really their intent is to open up people’s understanding of situations like that and how it can happen to anybody.”
