Construction: The Process of Creating and Building…Anything

Leo Gannon is a man filled with tremendous creativity. According to his professional bio, “Leo… is a perfect example of the modern equivalent of a renaissance man. His technical aptitude coupled with his creative talent and passion make spending time around Leo an enlightening experience.” This description could not be more true, and as we talk, we agree, tongue in cheek, that it is all about him. Apparently his wife, Kim Quixell, says the same thing.

Kim and Leo came to Beaufort in 1989, shortly after Leo found out that during the years his parents had spent driving from New York to Florida and back, they had stopped in this area and his father had purchased land on Callawassie. Leo inherited the land and they designed and built their first house.

With a degree in Construction Management from Oklahoma State University, Leo spent much of his life working in the residential construction business. Building homes in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Connecticut and New York’s Hudson Valley preceded his time in the Lowcountry. He has served on the Architectural Review Board of Callawassie Island, and the Spring Island Habitat Review Board. And in 1991 he became a part of the Spring Island Company’s development team overseeing and managing vertical construction.

The love of the big screen, for Leo, started here in the early 90‘s when Kim read that the production team was seeking extras for The Prince of Tides. Leo was out of town so she took his information to the set. “At five o’clock in the morning, I got a phone call asking if I was interested in being a stand-in for Nick Nolte, so I went. I just walked in, I didn’t know what to do.”  He subsequently landed small roles in Last Dance and White Squall.

In the mid-90’s, Leo took a hiatus for about five years, and the family moved back to the Hudson Valley area of New York, where Kim and Leo had grown up, so he could pursue acting as a career. “I thought, yeah, I’ll go to New York and I’ll be a big time actor. Our family was there and our daughter, Logan, had many cousins there that we wanted her to meet and spend time with.”

Leo’s interest in acting began many years before he walked onto the set of Prince of Tides. When he was 22, he took to the stage for the first time as Kenny in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders in Garrison, NY. “ I had a friend who was auditioning and he encouraged me to tag along.

The plays were staged in an aging train depot which I liked, so I tried acting. I knew what it was like to be on stage because I once was a singer in a rock ‘n roll band in high school, called The High Tides; we modeled ourselves after the Dave Clark 5. My dad and my grandmother were professional dancers and dance teachers; and my father also acted and directed in regional theater.”

While in New York, Leo landed the lead role in the film Coyotes. “The director and I had a common friend, so I received an invitation to audition, and a copy of the script. I was back in Beaufort to see old friends and I was able to get Jeff Evans to shoot a video of me performing the scene, and I got the part.

“I flew to Los Angeles from New York; the young actress who played my daughter in the film, Kirsten Carmody, flew in from Florida, and we met at the director’s house. After a few hours of discussion about the story of a down-and-out dad and his daughter, the director did something very interesting. He gave us each $50 and told us to go to Goodwill and buy our wardrobe for the film. It was a great idea as it helped us to step into character and get to know each other. The film was shot in fifteen days in Baja, Mexico. The director had shot a documentary about giant squid there, and he wrote Coyotes with that in mind. Every night the script would be revised for the next day’s shoot depending on the weather, or if we could secure permission for the locations. I really enjoyed the under the gun collaboration; it was intensive.”

Coyotes went on to win awards in the Savannah Film Festival, the Palm Springs Film Festival and the Austin Film Festival. After Coyotes, that director asked Leo to play Woodes Rogers in the television documentary, Pirate Tales, which was  filmed in Puerto Rico. Leo also co-starred in the film Lush Life as the agent of a struggling novelist. Leo recalls, “It was filmed in Brooklyn, NY, and the director was in the graduate school of NYU. At that time Brooklyn was starting its resurgence – changing from post-industrial to artsy. It was a very exciting environment.”

With a few more credits under his belt, Leo decided that acting wasn’t paying the bills. Leo received a call from his former business partner, Larry Naylor, in 2001 asking him if he was interested in coming back to Beaufort and Leo accepted. His decision to foray away from business and into acting, and back again was captured by his character’s sarcastic self realizations in Coyotes. “You know there was a time when it all made sense. You took a look around at people; what they did to get ahead, and said, ‘Forget it. Forget that game.’ And then the years fly by and you’re forty, forty-five, without a pot to piss in. I guess we showed them, didn’t we? We beat the game.”

Although Leo may not have beaten the acting game in the big city, he still has enjoyed being in several local and regional productions on stage. One of his favorite parts was playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird performed at USCB; “I always wanted to play Atticus.” Still on his wish list is to perform as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.

Happily ensconced at Habersham, Leo continues to not only work in the building business, but also enjoys running his wildly popular restaurant, the Spaghetti Club.

The Spaghetti Club is a wonderful venue for musicians and other performers. If you hit it on the right night, you may just find Leo and/or Logan performing. So once again, we find that Leo is never too far from the stage. True to his measure of a renaissance man, Leo remarks, “I find the parallel of designing and building anything – a house, a toaster, anything, is not that different from designing and building a character.”