The film project began as a love story between a man and a woman and ended as a story about a different kind of relationship—a love for what some might consider an unusual career filled with literal ups and downs.

Eddie Portoghese is a stuntman, the Hollywood kind, who jumps out of things and off of things, always getting back up. The Mayfair resident is now making a film in Denver with editor and director Mike Mazzanti, who lives in Central Park.

“We had always wanted to make a film together because I’m just infatuated with the stunt industry,” Mazzanti said. “I think it’s the coolest thing ever. These guys are in the background, but they take such a beating, and they do their job well if they aren’t noticed in films.  I wanted to do something that puts the light on Eddie.”

The film, titled Hold Fast, is a collaboration that  began when Portoghese was working on the project with a friend, Sheila Ivy Traister, who was well known in the Colorado film industry as an actor, writer, director, and head of SAG-AFTRA Colorado Local.

Traister had written a script, words that Portoghese called “a running dialog in the head of a woman thinking about her life.” He said Traister was contemplating life while facing her death. She died of cancer in July 2025.

“Now that I look back and read her words, there’s a lot of herself in this character that she was writing about. She was going to portray the role, and I didn’t give her any specifics about who I wanted it to be. I just picked her, and so she just wrote this backstory,” Portoghese remembered fondly.

After Traister’s death, Portoghese knew it would be a “daunting task” to replace her in the film. When Mazzanti read what Traister wrote, he advised Portoghese to try a different idea. “This is a love story between you and the film business. This is more about your life than this unknown couple,” Mazzanti told Portoghese.

Portoghese went along with the idea as long as the script would give life to other people’s ambitions. “I think the way we’re putting it together, it will be an inspirational tale for anyone who wants to pursue a dream,” he said.

Portoghese’s own dream began when he was 12 years old. In the summer of 1978, the movie Hooper was in theaters, with Burt Reynolds portraying the world’s greatest stuntman. “I was just at that prime age to want to dream, and that became my dream,” he recalled.

From that time on, stunt work was what he wanted to do. Portoghese spent a year in college in New York pursuing a degree in physical education, but his heart wasn’t into it, so he went to California, promising his parents he’d return to school.

There he answered an ad for “athletically inclined people wanted for stunt training.” That was in the mid-1980s, and he spent time with a group performing stunts on a backyard set.

One thing led to another. Life got in the way at times, but Portoghese stuck with it. Over the years, he continued to pursue stunt work in whatever way he could.

Hold Fast has plenty of clips from Portoghese’s stunts—he films everything, he admitted.

“I have all this footage of me crashing, what I call backyard shenanigans. I built a horse once because I had to do a horse fall: two blocks of wood built up, and then a pad, and a fall over that,” he said.

Portoghese has also worked as a physical education teacher in Aurora schools to pay the bills. It has all been part of following his dream and not giving up, he said.

“I’d rather chase a dream and get kicked in the face and have to get back up and do it again, no pun intended. I’d rather fight because you feel most alive when you are passionately chasing something that is in your heart rather than just doing something for the sake of doing it.”

He and Mazzanti are hoping to get the film into festivals and share their passion for Hold Fast.

The title comes from “Dreams,” a poem by Langston Hughes. The poem’s first line speaks to their passion project:

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Watch for updates on the film and screenings at frontporchne.com.