EDITOR’S NOTE: “Waldport retiree finds new passion in creating ‘Retrieving Roadie,’ an animated film about  finding and retrieving rescue dog” was written by Cheryl Romano for Lincoln Chronicle, an ArtsWatch Community Partner, and published originally on June 22, 2025. ArtsWatch is republishing the piece with permission.

If current affairs have you feeling down, you might try a quick, cheery antidote — Retrieving Roadie, an animated film by a Waldport retiree.

The award-winning short officially debuted on National Rescue Dog Day last month with the telling of the uplifting story of Roadie, a young mixed-breed dog in a Texas shelter.

Roadie is based on the true story of how Craig Williams, who lives in Waldport’s Bayshore community, rescued her.

During a business trip to Dallas, Texas, in 1993, Williams’ chance visit to the shelter launched a cross-country saga — a missed plane connection, a 1,700-mile drive to New England in a snowstorm, and love.

Williams’ work is now showing on YouTube. Watch all the way through the credits for the whole story. Spoiler alert — there’s a happy ending.

“I told the story for years,” says Williams, a retired executive who spent much of his career in donor research for nonprofit organizations. “One night I was watching a terrible movie with Bernie [Bernadette, his wife]. I said, ‘I could write a movie better than that.’”

And that’s what he did.

He started writing the screenplay — his first — in early 2023 and finished it last November. Williams tinkered with reality a bit — in real life, Roadie was named Buffy, but he wanted the “R” name for alliteration in the title. And for a stronger connection to the canine world, he changed his own persona from an institutional fundraiser to a dog cookie salesman.

Those are minor details, though, in the story of how white, fluffy Buffy found her forever home. The sweet-natured pup spent 17½ years loving and being loved by Craig and Bernie Williams.

Buffy was waiting quietly

“Bernie and I had been looking for a dog for years,” Williams recalls of that Texas trip.

He stopped on impulse at a Dallas shelter and saw Buffy, quietly waiting in the last cage down the aisle; it was love at first sight. He called his wife, who said, “Go for it,” and the adventure began.

The adventure continued into 2025, when Retrieving Roadie fetched no fewer than 17 film festival nominations and awards, including Best Animated Film in the Oregon Short Film Festival, Award of Excellence from the IndieFEST Film Awards and Best Animation Short from Independent Shorts Awards.

Roadie is a story told visually. There’s lots of spritely music and “Arfs!” on the soundtrack, but no narration or dialogue. Only one word is uttered — Williams’ character is frantically searching for his dog in an airport and yells “Roadie!” in desperation. That’s Williams’ voice, recorded several times to get it just so.

“The whole process was fun,” he says. “It felt satisfying to write a short story that included a full character arc” — how a character develops through a tale.

Williams was the screenwriter and executive producer on Roadie, working with a production team he calls “some of the nicest people I’ve met.”

To bring the story to screen life, he networked with friends and family to connect with a handful of professionals. They include producer/story artist Blake Larson, along with Luke Stone, a director/producer/animator, and animators Maxine Carey-Gorey and Jackie Gorman. Stone and Carey-Gorey’s studio had a hand in the 2024 production Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames, which was part of PBS’ American Masters series.

Williams said one of the best parts of creating Roadie was seeing the film in a theater with appreciative audiences. That was “a thrill I never thought I’d experience.”

Working on more films

For most filmmakers, the not-so-fun part of bringing a story to life is raising money, but Williams self-funded his venture.

The fun part of the experience has set Williams on a new, post-retirement career path.

“This isn’t something I expected to do in retirement,” he says. “Now I’m hooked. I would still pursue filmmaking if the awards hadn’t happened. I want to make another film.”

He has a couple of other screenplays in the works, including a family drama and an international thriller. He’s also shopping around a live-action comedy called Jay vs. The Parkway. It’s another page from Williams’ own life, centered on his experiences working as a toll collector one summer on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway.

A native of Cranford, N.J. — where Roadie has been recently accepted into another film festival — Williams remembers that summer of 1978 with mixed feelings.

A performance center in a nearby town drew big names in the entertainment world, and many came driving through his toll booth — Johnny Cash, Barry Manilow, Don Rickles, and others.

“I’d pay the toll for them” (not out of his own teenaged pocket, though) “and they’d thank me.” He even met a young woman he dated that way.

On the unhappy side of that memory, though, lives a motorist who attacked Williams while he was taking a break. A motorist angry at waiting in line “jumped out of his station wagon and tackled me.”

Williams has come a long way from the toll booth.

He spent over 20 years in donor research and marketing, working for institutions like Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Linfield University in McMinnville, and Samaritan Health Services in Corvallis. Williams also spent 15 years working with his father in a firm that made tamper-evident security bags.

Today, he and Bernie, a retired hospital pharmacist, share their Bayshore home and its spectacular view of the Alsea Bay Bridge with Orbit, another fluffy, white rescue dog.

They moved to Waldport from Philomath in 2018, because “we love the ocean. The central coast is just such a nice place to live.”

As he pursues his new career, Williams has no illusions about movie fame and fortune. “I wasn’t looking to sell Roadie; I was just trying to get a story out.”

He also isn’t likely to make any serious money from the YouTube showings.

“You have to get millions of views to make any money at all,” he says. “I’m not looking to get famous or win an Oscar or get a ton of money. I just want to tell these stories.”

The cinematic story of Roadie ends with a screen declaring “Dedicated to Buffy — 1992-2010.” And a request to “Please support your local animal shelter!”

Buffy would approve.