RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE

RIGHT TIME RIGHT PLACE: Future together quickly came into focus for pair

Gabe Mayhan and Kathryn Tucker were married on July 5, 2014. Gabe orchestrated a meeting between Kathryn and a mutual friend downtown so he could propose to her on the roof of the building where they first met. “We had talked about it and obviously felt strongly about each other but in that moment it was a total surprise,” says Kathryn of the proposal. “It was incredibly romantic.”
Gabe Mayhan and Kathryn Tucker were married on July 5, 2014. Gabe orchestrated a meeting between Kathryn and a mutual friend downtown so he could propose to her on the roof of the building where they first met. “We had talked about it and obviously felt strongly about each other but in that moment it was a total surprise,” says Kathryn of the proposal. “It was incredibly romantic.”

Kathryn Tucker's serendipitous meeting of fellow filmmaker Gabe Mayhan is the stuff movies are made of.

Kathryn had just finished working on an Adam Sandler movie in Los Angeles in 2010 and returned home to Little Rock for a few months of rest. She decided to do a documentary on her sister-in-law's father, Ellis "Scooter" Register, who, as new head coach of the Central High School Tigers football team, was revitalizing the program.

The first time I saw my future spouse:

She says: “I thought he was a weirdo.”

He says: “She was not what I expected. I thought she was going to be analytic and she was kind of like this bohemian-looking wildflower thing. She was wearing a long flowy dress and had kind of wild hair. It was kind of awesome.”

On our wedding day:

She says: “I was just so happy. I was tearfully happy the whole day, and it was like my smile wasn’t big enough — it couldn’t get big enough.”

He says: “It was 100 percent classic Kathryn.”

My advice for a long happy marriage is:

She says: “I need some [advice]. I really don’t have any.”

He says: “Choose wisely. I mean, we’ve only been married for three years, but that would be my advice.”

"I knew I wanted to do some sort of short film, so I had the behind-the-scenes Adam Sandler people teach me to use the camera they were using because I wanted to shoot the film myself," Kathryn says.

She needed to find that same type of camera when she got back to Little Rock.

A friend knew Gabe Mayhan, who had such a camera, and he put them in touch.

"They gave me this phone number, which was a New York number, and I was expecting someone to get on the phone who was all New Yorky and kind of persnickety, but it wasn't like that," Gabe says. "She was a very pleasant, bubbly person."

They arranged to meet in the lobby of her building downtown for the camera handoff. She found him across the street, his arm twisted over his head, phone in hand and pressed against his ear. And he was bouncing.

"He's a really quirky guy," she says. "But we met and he was perfectly nice and I had him come up to the condo so he could teach me to use the camera a little bit, and my phone rang. At the time my ringtone was the theme song from Amelie. No one had ever recognized that before, and he said, 'Is that the Amelie score? That's my favorite movie.' And I was like, 'That's my favorite movie.'"

Retrieving the camera was an adventure for Gabe.

"I could not nail her down on where she would be," he says. "I rented it to her a couple of different times and every single time I would be picking the camera up from a different place or something just weird."

He found her at her parents' house, at a bachelorette party, at her sister-in-law's house and assorted other locales.

"I was literally chasing her down," he says. "I was in the car with my friend just trying to figure out where this girl was. I mean, I was interested in her but it was so frustrating."

Kathryn left to work on another movie in Los Angeles at the end of the summer, but she told Gabe she wanted to be more involved in filmmaking in Arkansas. That winter, he called to invite her to the Oxford Film Festival in Oxford, Miss.

She flew back to Little Rock and rode with him, his friend Daniel Campbell, who directed Antiquities, and Daniel's wife, Becky.

"We had a fabulous weekend and I saw the two films [Gabe] shot, Antiquities and Pillow, and when I saw Pillow I was so impressed with his work that I think that's sort of what made me fall for him, just how committed he was to his work and everything, and it was such an insanely beautiful film," Kathryn says.

They drove back to Arkansas alone.

"We both like to stop at all kinds of places so a three-hour drive for us was like a seven-hour drive. We stopped everywhere. We like to stop and eat at local places and stop and take pictures, so we have all of that in common, and it happened to be Valentine's Day," she says. "We got back to Little Rock and we just started hanging out together all the time."

Gabe visited Kathryn in LA the next summer, joining her for road trips to Santa Barbara, Calif., and Joshua Tree National Park in Palm Springs, Calif. Kathryn would go watch him work when she was in Arkansas.

In 2013, Kathryn was having lunch with a mutual friend at Dugan's Pub in downtown Little Rock.

"Gabe showed up and I saw him from across the street at Dugan's. I said, 'What's he doing here?'" Kathryn says.

The friend, who had conspired with Gabe, said Gabe was going to show him a new lens and they were going to do some test shots from the roof of his condominium building, which happened to be the building where Gabe and Kathryn met the first time.

"We left Dugan's and got on the elevator and my friend said, 'I've got to pick up something in my condo, why don't you go on up there and I'll meet you.' Gabe was already up there on his knee with a ring," she says.

They were married on July 5, 2014, in Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock.

Gabe and Kathryn, executive director of the Arkansas Cinema Society, have a 2-year-old son, Tucker, and are expecting a daughter in February.

Gabe has since sold the equipment he rented to Kathryn, but he generally knows these days where he can find her.

"We work together all the time," she says. "He has been the cinematographer on all of the films I've produced/directed."

If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email

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photo

Special to the Democrat-Gazette

Kathryn Tucker met Gabe Mayhan in 2010 because he was the only local guy with the camera she needed for a project. The first time she saw him, he had his arm twisted over his head, cellphone pressed to his ear, and he was bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I’m sure I had to be somewhere. I was waiting on her… I’ve been waiting on her ever since,” Mayhan quips. “But it’s a good wait.”

High Profile on 10/22/2017

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