Rubber Hut Wraps a 1992 Rhode Island Condom Fight

Hanna Gray Organschi wrapped Rubber Hut in early July 2026 after shooting a true 1992 Rhode Island condom-kiosk story in the towns that fought the original shop. Grace Van Patten plays Emanuella DelVecchio, the ex-Pan Am flight attendant who turned a Fotomat booth into a drive-thru condom stand. Industry listings updated July 21, 2026, place the first feature in post-production, with no release date attached.

The June casting notices made it look like a star drop. The cameras had already been rolling in a Warwick parking lot, and they kept rolling into Cranston and Woonsocket.

They Rebuilt the Hut in a Warwick Lot

On June 1, 2026, a pink-and-white booth with Rubber Hut in blue letters sat in Bay Plaza on West Shore Road in Warwick, on the footprint of a former film-drop kiosk. Crews aged the shopping center back to the early 1990s, hung period store names on the plaza sign, parked older cars, and installed payphones. Stores in the plaza stayed open around the set.

The Rhode Island Film & TV Office had described a two-week Ocean State shoot in Cranston and Warwick. The actual calendar ran longer. After the Warwick lot, the company moved to a religious-feast parade, a restaurant interior, private houses in the city that held the original shop, a Woonsocket street dressed as New York, and driving plates.

WHERE THE CAMERAS WENT

1. June 1, 2026: First day at Bay Plaza in Warwick, with Van Patten at the replica window.
2. June 11, 2026: A saint’s-feast parade on Beach Avenue in Warwick, with Michael Imperioli in a priest’s collar.
3. June 12, 2026: Interiors at the China Sea restaurant on Post Road in Warwick.
4. June 22, 2026: Several days at a private house on Meshanticut Valley Parkway in Cranston, the city that hosted Condom Hut.
5. Late June 2026: More house work on High View Drive in Cranston.
6. June 30, 2026: Main Street in Woonsocket closed and dressed as New York, with Van Patten and Ariana Greenblatt rehearsing on the sidewalk, among the last days of principal photography.
7. Early July 2026: Driving scenes, then wrap.

Elizabeth Woodward, producing for Willa, said the company wanted Rhode Island because the story is a Rhode Island story. Organschi, a New England filmmaker with an NYU Tisch MFA, put it in plainer terms: she was making a movie in Rhode Island, inspired by a Rhode Island woman.

A Pink Fotomat Met a Saint’s Feast

The booth in the Warwick lot was a copy. The original opened on July 17, 1992, a Friday, in Knightsville, a heavily Italian stretch of Cranston, inside a renovated Fotomat painted pink and white. DelVecchio, then 32, already ran a nail salon in the same plaza. She had watched a New York condom boutique on television and decided the empty photo hut was her next move, selling drugstore-grade condoms plus novelties and handing out safe-sex leaflets on opening day, with HIV on the table and a drive-thru window so buyers did not have to get out of the car.

Neighbors did not wait for the first sale. Cranston Council President Frank Mastrati Jr. said he did not think it was good for the neighborhood, with young kids all over the place. Steve Burke, then director of the Office of Family Life for the Diocese of Providence, called the shop a moral outrage that promoted promiscuity, and said the moral courage of the Cranston community was being tested by allowing it. Opening week lined up with the feast of Madonna Della Civita, the city’s patron saint. Vandals had already thrown black paint on the facade and broken a window. A passerby yelled “Burn it.”

1992 SHOP, 2026 SHOOT

Daytime traffic was thin. Business picked up after dark and ran until 10:30 p.m. Glow-in-the-dark stock sold out in the first days. A reporter rang from Paris. Time magazine wrote it up. A Saturday-night account from the window had a woman hide a purchase under her coat and a carload of adults wave without stopping. The shop lasted about a year. Protests and falling sales shut it.

Who Emanuella DelVecchio Was in 1992

She called herself an adventurous entrepreneur and did not pretend the name was solemn. She also would not treat the HIV brief as a joke. That split is the part the film is buying: a woman who will laugh at the sign and still stock the window.

I’m taking it seriously, but I’m laughing with everyone else.

Emanuella DelVecchio, Condom Hut owner, 1992

When the paint and the sermons arrived, she said the attacks did not touch her, that they made her stronger, and that the hut would keep regular hours. Knightsville did not come around. A man across the street said the stand should not sit in a place with so many children, because of what it stood for. Parents fumed. Teenagers treated the window as a dare and a service. Then the cars stopped coming often enough to pay the rent on a one-room booth.

Cast listings for Rubber Hut include Marco DelVecchio in a broker part billed as Gary. A 2021 family obituary named Marco DelVecchio as Emanuella’s brother, still in Rhode Island. The film does not claim to be a documentary, and character sheets for most of the new ensemble were held back while cameras rolled. The family name in the credits is the clearest sign that the Cranston story was not treated as folklore.

The Short Film Already Fought Over Condoms

Rubber Hut is Organschi’s first feature, and it is not a cold open. She wrote and directed F*ck That Guy, a 1990s-set short about a teenager racing toward a first time with help from an older friend, supported by the Spike Lee Production Fund and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. Spike Lee, David Frankel, and Riva Marker executive produced. The short took the Grand Jury Award at Proof Film Festival and Best Live Action Short at deadCenter. Rubber Hut is the feature that short was built to unlock.

The Annenberg money was a $25,000 award from the Initiative’s Reproductive Rights Accelerator grants, created after Roe v. Wade fell, to get student films about reproductive health made. Organschi also holds a New York Women in Film & Television scholarship, the NYU Tisch Wasserman King Award, and a place on the NYU Purple List. Her other shorts include Bea, Seriously (2021) and Merci, Poppy (2024). She worked additional crew for Antonio Campos on The Devil All the Time. The through-line she names for her work is stubborn women who want control of their own lives and do not enjoy what it costs to fit in.

THE ROAD TO A FIRST FEATURE

• Annenberg award: A $25,000 Reproductive Rights Accelerator grant toward F*ck That Guy, her thesis-era short.
• Spike Lee fund: Production support on that short, with Lee among the executive producers.
• Sundance labs: Screenwriters, Directors, and Producers Labs, a full three-lab pass on Rubber Hut.
• Markets: Film Independent Fast Track, Gotham Week Project Market, and the NYU Production Lab Development Studio.

In January 2024 the 2024 Sundance Screenwriters Lab took 12 projects from more than 3,400 submissions. Rubber Hut was one of them, then went on to the Directors Lab. That is a long runway for a movie whose working title is a condom joke. The labs, the grant, and the short are the wager that a Knightsville booth can carry a feature without turning into a public-service ad.

Michael Imperioli Plays a Priest Here

Van Patten was attached on March 11, 2026. Organschi called her a high-octane heroine with a sharp wit and a straight face. Van Patten came in off Tell Me Lies and Hulu’s Amanda Knox limited series, with earlier work in Nine Perfect Strangers and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories. Will Harrison joined on June 22 as Matty, Emanuella’s husband, after a Tony nomination for Punch at Manhattan Theatre Club.

Imperioli’s collar is the casting joke that is also the plot. The 1992 fight ran through the Diocese of Providence; the 2026 film puts a Sopranos alum in the vestments and walks him through a feast-day parade on Beach Avenue. Character details for Emmy Rossum, Rosemarie DeWitt, Greenblatt, Chris Bauer, Fina Strazza, Fisher Stevens, and Ricky Staffieri were kept back when the June additions to the Rubber Hut cast landed, eight days after cameras had already started. Greenblatt was still on the Woonsocket sidewalk with Van Patten on June 30. Elle Shaheen plays a customer at the window. Carrie Adams is listed as Brenda. Local notices also logged extras, a replica booth, and a 1990s hair-and-wardrobe push that treated Cranston memory as a design brief.

Rossum is still best known for nine seasons of Shameless. DeWitt came off Untamed. Stevens came off Succession, Staffieri off The Bear, Strazza off John Proctor Is the Villain. That is a lot of television muscle for a first feature about a kiosk. It is also a tell. The bet is that audiences will follow those names into a parking lot.

Sundance Labs and a First-Feature Producing Bench

Woodward produces for Willa, the banner on The Voice of Hind Rajab and Claire Denis’s The Fence. Tara Sheffer produces for Stone Fruit Productions, the banner on A Lien. Organschi produces under Unlikeable Woman Productions. Desmar, The Godmother, Shortwave, and Madhouse Films are in association. Anne Carey (The Persian Version) and Jason Michael Berman (Highest 2 Lowest, Air) executive produce. Alex Berard is a co-producer. Casting is Matthew Glasner. Robert Leitzell is the cinematographer. Merissa Lombardo is the production designer.

Sheffer and Woodward had already made two shorts with Organschi before they took the feature. They called her a craftsman with a sense of humor and said they wanted a 1990s film that would still land. That is the other half of the bet: not only that DelVecchio’s week in July 1992 is a movie, but that a condom window still reads in a country that has spent the years since Roe arguing about bodies in public.

I couldn’t be more excited to bring Rubber Hut to life. The Sundance Labs helped me shape this world in ways I’m incredibly grateful for and I can’t wait to invite audiences in. Grace balances a razor sharp wit with striking sincerity and absolute cool. I know that in her hands, our high-octane heroine will soar.

Hanna Gray Organschi, writer-director, announcing Van Patten’s casting

Organschi’s Film Independent Fast Track program year was 2024, the same cycle as the Sundance labs. Fast Track is a finance market, not a taste prize. The producing slate around her looks like people who know how a small film gets finished and sold. Whether a drive-thru condom comedy-drama can travel on that slate is the part still in the edit.

The Shoot Wrapped; the Bet Did Not

The pink booth came down off the Warwick asphalt. Cranston houses went back to being houses. Woonsocket’s Main Street stopped pretending it was New York. What remains is a cut, a sound mix, and a festival calendar that has not claimed the film. Fan accounts spent June posting set photos of Van Patten and Organschi at the window and guessed at a 2027 bow. No date has been posted by the filmmakers.

The culture-clash logline does a lot of work on its own, which is why the title stuck in the first place. A drive-thru condom kiosk in an Italian Catholic town in 1992 is almost too clean a premise. The harder job, the one the labs and the grant were for, is getting DelVecchio on screen as a person who sold glow-in-the-dark stock and also meant the HIV pamphlets. Van Patten’s casting reads as a specific choice for that split, not a famous name parked on a poster.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The shoot: Cameras ran from June 1, 2026, in Warwick through driving scenes in early July, including Cranston and Woonsocket.
• The source: The film is drawn from Emanuella DelVecchio’s Condom Hut, which opened July 17, 1992, and closed after about a year.
• The lead: Van Patten plays Emanuella; Harrison plays her husband, Matty; Imperioli plays a priest.
• The status: Listings dated July 21, 2026, put Rubber Hut in post-production.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Release: No festival slot, distributor, or date has been announced.
• Roles: Parts for Rossum, DeWitt, Greenblatt, and most of the June ensemble have not been disclosed.
• DelVecchio: How closely the finished film follows the 1992 record, and whether she appears on camera, has not been stated.

Knightsville painted the first hut and then starved it. Thirty-four years later a crew rebuilt the booth a few towns over, walked a priest through a feast-day parade, and packed up in early July. The original shop is gone. The movie is in a cutting room, still trying to get a one-year kiosk to last longer than the thing it was based on.