BALTIMORE — The quirky romantic comedy “The Baltimorons” had a budget so low, according to filmmakers, that it amounted to little more than two sticks of chewing gum and pocket lint.

The film was shot locally, and in the best Charm City tradition almost everything about it was DIY.

To save money, director Jay Duplass didn’t pay for locations. He borrowed them from family and friends. Among the few site expenses were permits to film on public streets, which cost $55 apiece.

“To be safe, we bought three,” said producer David Bonnett, who grew up in East Baltimore and still lives in the city.

Because the movie was shot outdoors in December at night, a key scene on Christmas Eve cut costs by utilizing the holiday lights along Hampden’s Miracle on 34th Street display. There were no heating lamps and no actors’ trailers for breaks.

Improbably — and dare we say miraculously — it somehow all worked out.

“We were on such a compressed time schedule,” Bonnett said. “We had to film the whole thing in three weeks. There was no time for any prep. Everything had to go great. And magically, it did.”

Following its Maryland premiere Wednesday at the Senator Theatre, “The Baltimorons” will open Thursday at the Charles Theatre and at the area’s major chains: Cinemark, Landmark and AMC.

Even before most audiences have had a chance to weigh in, The Little Movie That Could already is a success by several measures.

“The Baltimorons” did well on the film festival circuit, was snapped up by a major movie supplier and will be screened in more than 200 theaters nationwide. It also has received mostly glowing reviews from local and national publications.

The film crisscrosses Baltimore from Remington to Cherry Hill to the Inner Harbor as it explores the unlikely connection between a former stand-up comic (Michael Strassner) who has quit performing to protect his newfound sobriety and a dentist (Liz Larsen) twice his age who finds herself unexpectedly alone on Christmas Eve.

“People will tell you don’t make an independent film right now, and definitely don’t make an independent film with no movie stars,” Duplass said. “We did that. We premiered it at the South by Southwest Film Festival and won the audience award. We sold the movie to a fantastic distributor. We made our money back.”

The movie has its roots in a friendship between Duplass and Strassner that sprang up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was watching a lot of comedy,” Duplass said. “Michael has a really fun Instagram account, and his sweet soul and giant body went dancing and prancing across my Internet screen. We started hanging out and he began telling me about his life.”

Duplass hadn’t made a movie in 14 years. After he and his better-known actor brother, Mark, dissolved their writing and directing partnership nearly a decade ago to pursue separate film careers, he wasn’t certain any longer that he could.

“It’s scary to make a movie for the first time without your partner,” Duplass said.

“You’re terrified you’re going to fail and everybody is going to think, ‘The other guy is the one with the special sauce.’”

But he took a leap of faith and said he “decided to go back to my roots and back the truck of independent filmmaking up into Michael’s life in Baltimore and make him the star of a movie.”

Duplass declined to reveal “The Baltimorons'” budget, but referred to his process as “The Available Materials School of Filmmaking” — with the result that the traditional cinematic blueprint got turned topsy-turvy.

For example, most movies start out with a script, and then the crew searches for venues that advance the plot. In contrast, Duplass and Strassner began by identifying places where they could film for pennies, and then crafted scenes that fit those sites.

“This is a true low-budget movie,” Strassner said, “that is based on all the locations we could get for free.”

The chief procurer of on-the-house houses was Bonnett, who is one of Strassner’s best friends.

“In Baltimore, there is just one degree of separation,” Bonnett said. “If you don’t have it, you are just one phone call away from someone who does.”

For instance, a key scene takes place at an auto impound lot. Another occurs at a gas station that becomes the location for a pop-up comedy show. Bonnett’s family owns both businesses.

“I don’t think we paid for a single location,” Duplass said. “We would have loved to have had a big theater for the comedy club, but we couldn’t afford it, so we made do.”

The movie’s girl-meets-boy takes place in a dentist’s office. While a Fells Point rowhouse was used for the exterior establishing shot, interior scenes were filmed in the Parkton practice owned by Thomas Melanson, Strassner’s former high school biology teacher.

“He was sick and tired of teaching kids like me,” Strassner joked, “so he became a dentist.”

As a consultant for the dental scenes, Melanson advised actress Larsen how to handle the tools of the trade — including a needle the actress brandishes that appeared to be at least a foot long.

“It’s only about 3 inches long,” he said. “If it looks longer, that is a trick of the camera.”

Another memorable scene takes place on the water during a middle-of-the-night crabbing expedition. Duplass wanted an authentic crab boat, and he wanted the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the background — an image that will strike Baltimoreans as especially poignant.

The film’s credits include a tribute to the six maintenance workers who died when the bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River in March 2024.

“We’re all very, very proud that ‘The Baltimorons’ was probably the last footage of the bridge to be caught on film,” Bonnett said.

A friend of a friend helped Bonnett find the crab boat, a wooden 44-foot Kinnoman deadrise named “The Naughty Girl” that belongs to Kelly Sullivan, a proud third-generation crab fisherman.

“I even put it into my wedding vows,” Sullivan said: “‘I, Kelly Sullivan, the best crabber alive…”

Not only did Sullivan turn over his floating livelihood and Essex home for the filming, he agreed to pilot his boat on a 45-minute trip by water to the Inner Harbor, though he already had put in a full day on the river.

“I was up for 48 hours straight,” he said. “But they really, really wanted that Key Bridge shot.”

The filmmakers say that when the opening credits for “The Baltimorons” start to roll on Wednesday, it will be because they were on the receiving end of a thousand small sacrifices, favors and acts of generosity from Maryland residents.

”In Baltimore,” Duplass said, “there’s a lot of weird little magic around the corner that’s waiting to happen.”

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