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CineSource Collective Narrative
Mise En Scene Feb 11 • Indies Get Hollywood Competition
Lions Gate Entertainment announced in February 11 that, in addition to its normal releases, it will start producing 10 movies a year in the less than $2 million price point. According to CEO Jon Feltheimer, it was a move to deal with a "motion picture environment facing head winds." Hence, they would be mostly comedies and horror movies, with an "urban" component—Hollywood-speak for 'black.'
Indeed, Lions Gate's 2004 horror outing "Saw," was one of the biggest achievers in that zone with $55 million domestic while last year's, "The Last Exorcism," garnered $41 million both at under $2 million to produce. The trick, according to Joe Drake, president of Lions Gate's motion picture group, is to target at a single demographic and spend only "low-to-mid-$20 million" for advertising much less than the industry average.
Paramount said it would try a similar tactic with the 2009 low-cost smash "Paranormal Activity." But Paramount Insurge switched horses and its 13 million "Justin Bieber: Never Say Never," opened Feb 15 to rave reviews in the teeny bopper press.
Obviously Lions Gate has to do something since it lost $6 million last quarter although that is an improvement from $65.3 million in the last quarter of 2009 although its revenue grew 24% to $422.9 million because of increases in home entertainment sales. Lions Gate sshares have declined 15% since corporate raider Carl Icahn halted his hostile takeover bid last year.
— D. Blair
Hollywood Set to Boom
According to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation forecast in February, the film/video economy will grow this year albeit slowly. "We're looking at an economy that is poised to start to growing again in 2011," Nancy Sidhu, LAEDC's chief economist told Alana Semuels of the LA Times (2/16/11). In fact, the motion picture/TV industry added 16,500 jobs in 2010 in LA and took the title for the fastest-growing sectors.
LA County is estimated to add 24,100 total jobs in 2011 which is a drop in the bucket considering its unemployment rate, 13% in December, is well above national and California averages. Residential building will also remain slow. "California is a little bit ahead, and in 2011, we're looking to see the improvement spread," Sidhu said.
San Jose and San Diego are leading the boom due to their tech biz but the state's unemployment rate will stay around 12% and only drop to to 11.5% next year with state budget breakdowns continuing to plague job creation. Nevertheless, it is no longer dropping like a rock and entertainment is leading the way up.
— D. Blair
Monster Surf Movie Finally Heads Up
Although the mountain sized waves failed to appear this year for the Maverick Surf contest, held two miles off Pillar Point Harbor north of Half Moon Bay, the movie version may fair better. According to Wallace Baine of the Santa Cruz Sentinel (2/15/11), "The long-rumored Hollywood film about the late Santa Cruz big-wave rider Jay Moriarity and his experiences surfing the infamous break at Maverick's got its green light last week and producer/screenwriter Brandon Hooper [Walden Media] is ready to get started."
"Mavericks" is to start shooting in October, and will done entirely on location in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. "300" star Gerard Butler is slated to star as Moriarity's surfing mentor Frosty Hesson but Moriarity himself is yet to be cast . He is the object of a big search by a prominent Hollywood casting director, according to Hooper. "Obviously he has to be really good surfer and if they don't find what they want in LA they are preparing to hit the road for Australia, New Zealand and South Africa."
Hooper said that there will be a casting in Santa Cruz for extras, if not for the lead role itself. "'Finding a kid who has the qualities of Jay, and is hopefully a strong surfer, is a tall order,'" Hooper, the film's co-screenwriter, admitted.
The script focuses on the year Moriarity took training to prep for Maverick's monster waves. Moriarity was only 16 in 1994 when Santa Cruz surf photographer Bob Barbour caught him wiping out off an Everest-like 25-foot wave, eventually one of surfing's most famous shots and gracing the cover of Surfer magazine and making him famous.
Moriarity died in 2001, at 23, diving alone in the Maldives. He has been remembered for his hot dog moved and meditative spirit which spawned "Live Like Jay" bumper stickers and renaming the surf contest "The Jay at Maverick's." in Moriarity's memory.
Lake Tahoe and East Bay-native Hooper first heard of Moriarity while surfing with his producing partner Jim Meenaghan who once bought a wetsuit from Jay. He went to Maverick's last winter to test cameras and lenses and crack the code of shooting monster waves. Director Curtis Hanson, "L.A. Confidential" (1997) and "8 Mile," (2002) noted he would not sign on until that trick had been solved.
"'He felt that if we're not able to create 'Mavericks' to the point in which (Maverick's veterans) Jeff Clark or Grant Washburn can turn to their significant others during the film and say, 'This is exactly what it's like to surf Maverick's,' then he didn't want any part of it,'" said Hooper who evidently was ablte to convince Hanson since he signed on recently. Hooper's ambition is to equal other important sports films like "Hoosiers," "Breaking Away" and "Chariots of Fire," because of the "relationships between the characters."
— D. Blair
States Hustling Incentives
In Santa Fe, a city grant is going to assist small businesses in New Mexico how to work with the film industry with a series of workshops. They will focus on a wide variety of industries, including construction, plant nurseries, landscapers, hair and make-up professionals, caterers, hardware and building suppliers, clothing and costumes as well as tryin get companies to commit to buying local.
This effort will keep dollars circulating in the local tax base up to four times more than buying at out-of-state chains, according to the Business Alliance that is mounting the workshop in partnership with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 480 on March 28. The event will feature Holly Roach with Green Production Resource.
Meanwhile in Hawaii, no less a lobbyist then Bill Clinton shilled for a studio tax credit bill. Recruited by giants Relativity Media LLC and Shangri-La Industries, Clinton pushed for tax credits for studios on Maui and Oahu, even though he is being met with jeers of just helping the “the rich get richer.”
Clinton who is involved with both companies (as is old dem buddy James Carville), sent a letter on February 11 to lawmakers noting "The Shangri-La/Relativity commitment to build the most environmentally friendly stages in existence, coupled with the economic benefits of this bill and Hawaii's timeless appeal, will make Hawaii the most attractive place in the world to shoot a film."
The legislation would cost the state an estimated $46 million in lost taxes. Hawaii film production also benefits from hotel room tax exemptions, if their productions require more than one month of filming and rebates from training programs.Relativity CEO Ryan Kavanaugh claims Hawaii will get big benefits from the bill, estimating some 20 additional productions will be filmed there.
Of course this is small change for Kavanaugh's Relativity Media which made $2 billion last year, four to five times greater than in 2009. films like “The Fighter,” $320 million domestic gross thus far, and “Robin Hood,” $311 million, Clinton may become a film star himself beginning with a cameo appearance in the upcoming Relativity Media comedy “The Hangover: Part 2.”
Besides being featured on the big screen, the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation has been a beneficiary of multi-million contributions from motion picture giants, including Shangri-La founder Steve Bing, who contributed between $10 million and $25 million. Clinton serves on the Shangri-La advisory board.
Alas, Lowell Kalapa, president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, isn’t shocked or awed by the film giants’ proposals or celebrity players. He says many studies show that tax credits don’t pay for themselves, rather a handful of people “walk off with the bacon,” while stealing money from social service programs. While the film industry claims to provide jobs, they are just temporary ones without long term gain for the economy.
“This is not a beneficial mechanism to attract economic development,” Kalapa says. “Instead of getting ga-ga and awed because stars are involved, we need to step back and see what this proposal means for Hawaii’s resources.” The key to attracting more business is not subsidies, rather it is a stronger business climate that is more friendly for all businesses.
Kalapa thinking is favored in Michigan, where they are set to strikefilm tax breaks, and renounce their position as the US’s third busiest film center after Hollywood and New York. Governor Rick Snyder claims that the incentives are "like writing a check to the filmmakers," and "after hundreds of millions in outlays... the return is only 18 cents on the dollar," which is a low. His plans to curtail it while retaining some incentives to transition to more profitable if less filmmaking.
All very confusing but simply put: Neither Michigan nor Hawaii has the film history and broad industry trickle down of California—making it comparable to comparing apples or pineapples, as it were, to oranges.
— D. Blair
Mise En Scene Jan 11 • Oakland Filmmakers Salute Police Victim Oscar Grant
Yak Films, whose video went viral in 2010, receiveing more than 2 million views on YouTube, have done it again with another collaboration with the dance troupe Turf Feinz. This time it is to honor Oscar Grant, the young father fatally shot by a BART police officer New Year’s Day 2009 in Oakland. The previous video, “RIP Rich D," was for a young man killed by a hit and run driver in East Oakland.
The Turf Feinz performers are shot from across the street with traffic interceding and in the rain lent it particular poignancy. Turf Feinz is a group of young men from Oakland who “turf dance,” a form of movement born in Oakland that stands for “taking up room on the floor.”
“Oscar Grant’s death was a tragedy that affected a lot of people in Oakland, especially youth,” said Kash Gaines, the co-founder of Yak Films who filmed the video. “The video is meant to be a message to everyone in Oakland about the injustices here and how we use artistic expression to deal with it," San Francisco BayView National Black newspaper (1/1/11) Indeed, during the turmoil surrounding the trial and sentencing of BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle, Youth UpRising promoted messages of peace and unity. They made this art as a reminder of the fragility of young lives in Oakland, Calif. – and an artistic celebration of the beauty of youth expression and possibility.
“Two dancers in this new video had been bringing up that we’ve made R.I.P. videos for the deaths of close friends, but there’s bigger incidents that affect us,” Gaines continued. “A lot of people in Oakland need healing. Our dance crew, Turf Feinz, always promote dance as a peaceful expression. We’re showing this is how we deal with the situation.”
Gaines began collaborating with Yoram Savion, co-founder and director of Yak Films, and a hot creative shooter himself, on dance films at Youth UpRising, where Gaines is a photography teacher and multimedia producer, an Oakland-based youth leadership program frequented by the young adults in the dance crew. Youth UpRising grew out a1997 after racial incident at Castlemont High School, a cinderblock palace in East Oakland that looks if not always on lockdown. The young people identified problems including poor educational resources, few employment opportunities, the absence of positive things to do, and lack of community and personal safety. Yak is now a leader in the street-based documentation of the global dance movement.
— D. Blair
San Franciscan's Inside Job
One of the top film industry-awarded documentaries of 2010, and still in theaters now, is 'Inside Job' by San Francisco's own Charles Fergusen. It got a stellar 97% RottenTomatoes.com critics rating, 87% by their audience, and numerous awards from film industry organizations like Writer's Guild and New York Film Critics. Narrated by Matt Damon and distributed by Sony Classics, it is an exhaustive investigation of the Great Recession—the trailer jokes of a budget of $20 trillion due to the financial collapse without which the film could not be made.
Unlike Michael Moore, who likes to crack wise and innuendo, Fergusen gives us just the facts and well illustrated. While overwhelming at times, it is excellently done and makes its points magnificiently. Fergusen also did "No End in Sight," (2007) about the Bush Administration's Iraq War, and "Between Earth and Sky" (2009) about three young Iraqi refugees. In "Inside," Fergusen severely skewers Obama's financial team but also rehabilitates Eliot Spitzer as a Wall Street crime fightier.
A graduate of Lowell High School, Fergusen got BA in mathematics at Berekely and political science Ph.D. at M.I.T. Although he studied with the famous Noam Chomsky, he also went on to consulting to the White House and Department of Defense for Bush Pere. He started Vermeer Technologies, an early Internet software companies, which created the first WYSIWYG Web layout program, FrontPage, but sold in 1996 to Microsoft, for $133 million, whereupon he returned to research, writing and visiting scholaring.
After also studying film ad hoc for over 20 years and attending film festivals, he leapt into the fray himself in 2005, after realizing that there was no major doc planned addressing US policy in Iraq. He soon started Representational Pictures and began what was to become "No End In Sight."
— D. Blair
Bowden's Full Picture Comes Out on DVD
With his deal with Netflix finally finalized, Jon Bowden's quirky rom-com about love, sex, family and mommy troubles in San Francisco is now available—please add it to your queue! As you may know, the more adds, the better his deal.
"The Full Picture" (2010) is a "proven festival crowd pleaser" according to "Variety" and had a very successful run at the Roxie followed by a sold out screening at The Rafael. The reviews were also favorable The Guardian, The Chronicle and an editor's pick from SF Weekly.
Recently, "The Full Picture" was picked up by Gravitas Ventures, a leader in the VOD market, which is scheduling it for release on February 1st through select cable providers.
— D. Blair
Video on Demand Gets Demanding
Independent film producers are following their audience into cyberspace, reported the "Wall Street Journal” recently (1/11/11). Evidently, only 19 percent of 2010’s box office receipts was represented by attendance at theaters screening independent films, while nine years ago that figure was 33 percent, according to a study by Nash Information Services. Nevertheless, while the box office has shrunk significantly, spending on video-on-demand has risen to 1.8 billion for 2010 – an increase of 21 percent from 2009.
Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Films is releasing approximately 12 films a year on VOD prior to their theatrical releases. The company’s “All Good Things” grossed $367,000 during its theatrical fun, but received $4 million from VOD. The Independent Film Channel’s “The Other Woman” starring Natalie Portman was released on VOD a month prior to its theatrical run. Cable’s Starz channel, a quarter of which is owned by The Weinstein Co., is considering releasing some films exclusively on VOD.
Apparently, we indie lovers will soon be required to upgrade our hardware, software, and connections in order to enjoy the riches of the independent film world—and to correspondingly enrich that world—but so be it. At least the variety of material now available through the new mediums is correspondingly immense.
— D. Schwartz
Kodachrome Film Processing to Stop Soon
According to The Associated Press on January 9, 2011a southeast Kansas business will be the last place in the world to process Kodachrome 25 Kodachrome processers world wide, the rich redded stock developed in the 1950s. Indeed, it has been inundated with the color-reversal film as it prepares to halt processing it.
Grant Steinle who runs Dwayne's Photo, the Parsons, Kansas business his father founded in 1956, said he received "a tsunami of film" after announcing they would stop processing Kodachrome at the end of 2010, requiring the stop date for processing the film has been postponed to Monday or Tuesday at the earliest, even though processing went on 24 hours a day, seven days a week due to shipments from as far away as China, Japan and Australia. One Arkansas railroad worker who photographed trains recently picked up 1,580 rolls from Dwayne's to the tune o $15,798.
Kodachrome enjoyed its mass-market heyday in the 1960s and '70s before being eclipsed by video and easy-to-process color negative films, the kind that prints are made from. It garnered its share of spectacular images, none more iconic than Abraham Zapruder's reel of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.
Kodak gave longtime National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry the last roll after announcing in 2009 that it was discontinuing the slide and motion-picture film. But the distinction of shooting the last roll to be processed will go to Dwayne Steinle, the founder of Dwayne's Photo. with shots of him and his 60 employees. Their T-shirts tout Kodachrome's history but towards the right of the frame say "We developed the last roll."
— H. Johnson
Other State Tax Credits Are Hard at Work
The Associated Press on the last day of the year that the Alaska State tax credit program, which was boosted to 44% in 2008, "helped draw film productions large and small to Alaska in 2010." The biggest of the year was "Everybody Loves Whales," starring Drew Barrymore, which had about eleven weeks of shooting around Anchorage.
Alaska Film Office noted that about 30 productions have pre-qualified for the tax credit, from the TV show "Ice Road Truckers," which spent $1.1 million in Alaska, and received $393,000 in tax credits, to Season One of "Alaska State Troopers," which received more than $30,000, and Season 6 of "Deadliest Catch" which pulled in $584,000. Meanwhile, Grand Rapids Business Journal reports that Michigan is also doing quite well with its regimen of tax breaks.
— D. Blair
Gamers Outgun Hollywood
Computer gaming is gaining on but has not quite eclipsed the film industry. Just last year, "Call of Duty: Black Ops" not only cracked the US$1 billion mark in a mere six weeks after its November release in the US and the UK but it broke the first-day sales world record for any film, book as well as other game. Developed by Treyarch and published by Activision is for PCs using Microsoft, PlayStation 3, Wii and Nintendo DS consoles.
The "Black Ops" shroud of secrecy has both stimulated the imaginations of gamers and developers. The US military has developed a curious synergy with the gamers, even using some off-the-shelf war games to train military personnel and endorsing some products although last year, it banned "Medal of Honour" because of the role played by Taliban characters. The trailer for "Call of Duty: Black Ops" has a businesswoman carrying a handbag and a gun across a very realistic but devastated battleground which gradually fills with other gamers.
Most gamers are male, according to any idiot's observation and a study by the Stanford University School of Medicine. Stanford found that the "reward centres" in male brains were more activated than those in female brains; that there were more "computer widows"—women complaining about their partners colossal wasting of time; and that young professional males sometimes loose their jobs as a result.
Another interest factoid, it is not just teens or out-of-work twenty-somethings since the game costs about $60, and despite the hefty price tag most customers pay in full price rather than take the risk of uploading a corrupted ware.
"Americans spend a lot of time playing games… All generations spend about seven hours a week playing PC games," according to Reineke Reitsma, an analyst with Forrester Research. "But younger consumers top this up with playing games on consoles, handhelds and mobile phones [Meaning] Generation Y [young adults to 35-year-olds] spends close to 20 hours a week." Gamer demographic is one of its greatest strengths and differs drastically with movie-goers.
With the advent of television, Hollywood sought niche markets notably teenagers since they came to compose the bulk of moviegoers. Since they are very prone to leave a house controlled by their parents and indulge in a two hour fantasies, led by males, in gendered packs or leading their girlfriends, Hollywood naturally turned to making action block busters
Alas, they have been sidestepped by A) movie on demand and B) the interactive narrative of games that taps into the primoridal hunt and hide systems that boys so love. Thus has been a blow to the narrative developement, which girls prefer, causing the US film industry loose money except for its occasional achievement of an utterly immersive spectacle.
— D. Blair
S.F. Political Consultant's Debut with Bhutto Doc
In the fall of 2007, a simple inquiry changed Duane Baughman life made him become a filmmaker; made him fly around the world to Pakistan and explore the life of a Muslim woman. A San Francisco political consultant, Baughman was approached by a Washington political advisor to work on the campaign of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistan prime minister when she returned from exile to run for her old position. Weeks later, Bhutto was assassinated, terminating Baughman's initial assignment but leading his switching careers on a whim and starting the documentary "Bhutto," which is opened theatrically in San Francisco and Berkeley in January.
Well-made and researched, and highly acclaimed ("thorough and involving" said the Los Angeles Times), "Bhutto" cost 2.5 million and provides a dramatic window into Bhutto's life as well as Pakistan's history. For years, Baughman had been a cinephile, annually attending the Sundance festival and soaking in all the documentaries there. But he had never picked up a professional video camera before making Bhutto, which he also produced. Although he hired a co-director and writer, Johnny O'Hara, but Bhutto is his vision.
"I would go to Sundance every year, and all I would do is see documentaries," he says. "I would completely overload on documentaries -- me and my nephew. To me, documentaries are so much more accessible, so much closer to an audience, than feature films. The first year I went, I said, 'Those films are amazing. They really speak to me. These issues are important.' The second year I went, I said, 'These are great, but last year was better.' And the third year I went, I said, 'I could do that.' "
"Ninety percent of life for those who choose to live it the way I do is about having opportunities to do something that nobody else can do," Baughman, 47, says in an interview. "The opportunity rolled up to my feet to make this film." He raised money through his company, a designer of mail campaigns for candidates like Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. Mark Siegel, a partner at a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm that worked for Pakistan in the late 1980s contacted Baughman an SF resident in the fall of 2007 to bring his election-style razzmatazz to Pakistan from sky-writing to decaling buses.
Bhutto a beauty as well was the first woman prime minister to lead a Muslim country and Harvard- and Oxford-educated always faced long odds in her nearly failed nativer state riven by deadly rivalries and dieties. But if nothing else it was a story that demanded to be told on film. "It wasn't whether or not I'd ever held a camera before; it was whether or not I could get to the people (like Bhutto's family members) that no other Westerner could get to," Baughman says. "That was 95 percent of the struggle."
The struggle was aided by Siegel, one of Bhutto's closest U.S. confidanta and a former deputy assistant to President Jimmy Carter and ghost author of Bhutto's book "Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West," and last but not least co-producer of Bhutto. Within weeks of Bhutto's murder, Baughman and his crew were in Dubai interviewing Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and his two daughters with Benazir, Bakhtawar and Asifai—insights that drive "Bhutto" from beginning to end. The film had its challenges and dangers. Bhutto features an exclusive interview with former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, whose lack of security for Bhutto contributed to her death, according to the United Nations says.
In September of 2008, two days after leaving Islamabad, militants bombed the hotel where Baughman was staying, killing scores of people, many of them employees that Baughman had filmed. "It was one of my major fears and one of my major goals to be able to tell a story that was respectful of Islam, that was respectful of a country I had never lived in, that I really had no business making a movie about," he notes. "It drove me to work ten times as hard to distill the facts." The films has already been released in more than 30 countries (including Pakistan) and 60 cities around the United States, opened early January in the Bay Area.
— J. Curiel
China Ontrack to Become Second Biggest Market
Chinese filmmaker rack in 10 billion Yuan although that is only 1.5 billion dollars, not that much for a population over three times the US. "Avatar" is it biggest success thus far albeit taking only about 200 mill US. But other more esoteric fare is in the running like Christopher Nolan's "Inception" which hit 75 million.
Domestic blockbusters, like Feng Xiaogang's "Aftershock" and "Under the Hawthorn Tree," by Zhang Yimou arguably the greates living Chines Director who took international audiences by storm in 1988 with his "Red Sorugum," a saucy tale about arranged marriages where the old fart dies before the young women can be litter-borne home, the former raking in $100 million and the latter only 15million, according to Tang Yuankai of BejingReview.com.cn.
Indeed in 2010, China's film distribution started to change and Beijing-based BONA Film became the first film company listed on the NASDAQ in NY. Since then Chinese filmmakers have developed a strong marketing sense and it has become common for new movies to be promoted with dynamic advertising campaigns.
The number of movie theaters has also increased. The total number of screens in China now exceeds 6,000, with almost three new 450-seat theaters being constructed every day. However, even such rapid construction can only ensure that there is one screen for every 200,000 people, far less than the ratio of one screen per 9,000 people here and a huge market is yet to be tapped. The number of domestic feature films had reached 530 by the end of 2010; at the same time, the number of animated cartoons, documentary films and films of other genres has increased sharply over previous years. Indeed, the Central Government has carried out new policies, which help to stimulate the domestic market at first.
The so-called "New Year movie" demonstrates the heated film market. This phenomenon started in 1997 with Feng's "Dream Factory," a low-budget comedy ($895,522) that grossed $5.37 million. This year over 50 films are competing for box office grandeur in the New Year season from December to February. No wonder, in China's overheated economy, film has become a new investment arena with the number of companies climbing to 1,100 almost double just two years ago
— D. Blair
Mise En Scene Dec 10 •
Oakland actor Jerry McDaniel plays a carpenter who moonlights as a clown, in Bradshaw's 'Everything Strange and New,' but it doesn't make him happy. photo: F. Bradshaw
Spirit Awards Names Bradshaw
After taking the International Critics Award at the 2009 SF International, Oakland's own Fradzer Bradshaw has garnered another notable accolade for his "Everything Strange and New" (2009): nomination for the American Film Institute's Spirit Award for first-time director. Hosted by Joel McHale, the Spirit Awards will unfold on the Santa Monica beach on February 26 at 2:00pm. "Everything Strange and New" also stars Oaklander Jerry McDaniel, who I see around town at openings (and swear looks vaguely familiar—'Oh, yeah, weren't you in that famous movie?'), Beth Lisick, as his character's long suffering wife, and the talented Luis Saguar, in the tricky role of Manny.
It is especially nice to see "Everything Strange and New," distributed by Indiepix, kicking a little LA butt since it is a classic Bay Area—even Oakland—film. It is the former because it is about the personal soul journey and the latter in that it transpires in an epiphany—orgasm even—of "nondescriptionism," Oakland as a stand in for nowhere. Moreover, and also very Oakland, it evolves slowly, but with full motivation, from drab post -modern and -marriage angst into a delirium of sex, drugs and if not rock and roll then the amped-up marching band music of its sound track (by Dan Plonsey and Kent Sparling). For the Spirit Award, "Everything Strange and New" is up against "Tiny Furniture," by Lena Dunham, an equally quirky and introspective but bigger budgeted freshman film.
The poster from Jeff Piccinini's 'Spirit of the Road.' photo: J. Piccinini
Spirits of the Road Shows
The feature "Spirit of the Road" has been showing around, notably at the Culver Cinema Complex in LA, and is scheduled to show at the New York International Film Festival in March. Directed and produced by Jeff Piccinini, a director of photography out of Petaluma, Sonoma County, and written James M. Mallon, it is wild road trip featuring a desperate woman, a meandering mobster, a dubious detectives, and bevy of careening cars.
"The 'B' film format is a necessary evil to get credibility to eventually make a movie with name actors," Puccinini told me.
Produced by Piccinini's Purple Motion Pictures, "Spirit of the Road" clocked in at 55K, plus another five in promo, which he was able to muster by being "clever, thrifty and efficient." PLUS he cashed all his favors: notably, dragooning his half brother to play the Mafia Don.
"Spirit" was picked up for representation, and worldwide sales and distribution, by ITN which seems to specialize in ghost stories, mysteries and the ever-beloved vampire. Perhaps no shocker here, Puccinini is currently working on a vampire film and a Caribbean Thriller, "No Toads in Heaven." For more info: Spirit of the Road. He is a hard working cinematographer and has proposed "Spirits" as television series with Bay Area talent. Jeff also plays guitar with the local gigging band The Revenant (original) and S'Cream (Cream/Clapton tribute), both of which are playing New Year's Eve at the Presidio Yacht Club at Fort Mason.
John Leslie/Nuzzo at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in 2007. photo: J. Leslie
Porn Pioneer Leslie Passes
John Nuzzo, who changed his name to Leslie and appeared in over 300 pornos, died in Mill Valley at 65 of a stroke December 8, according to Scott Tady of the Beaver County Times—no double entendre: Nuzzo hailed from Beaver County, Pennsylvania. A famously friendly guy, who started as an artist in New York, he later applied those skills in film, acting in hundreds of X rated movies, like "Talk Dirty to Me” (1980) which established him as the one of the leading men of the so-called Golden Age of Porn (the 1970s and 80s). Nuzzo went on to direct, get married in 1987 and settle down in Marin County.
“I guess you could say he was a free spirit,” said Nuzzo’s older brother, Andy, according to Tady, but “He never forgot his roots.” “He was a generous, outgoing Italian guy,” added high school chum, Bob Dominici. “If you went out to a restaurant with him, you were guaranteed to get the best table because he knew everyone. Quite often, he’d pick up the check.”
But Nuzzo was not only about a hard body or parts thereof. Indeed, he was a dedicated artist who studied at the Art Students League in New York, earned a living as an illustrator of romance novel covers, and was an excellent singer and harmonica player. The band he started, after moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, once opened for Jimi Hendrix.
Although another art form crowned him with success (and porn, dating from the 25,000 year-old Venus of Willendorf, is certainly one of the seven major forms), when he moved to the Bay Area, his previous art experience helped him transition to directing. He excelled at art direction, handling actors, and wrangling a project to completion. “He knew exactly what he wanted the camera to see, and his films always had superb continuity,” noted Steve Nelson, editor-in-chief of Adult Industry News.
“There’s nothing he didn’t know,” continued his friend Dominici. “He was very passionate about any subject he spoke of—politics, filmmaking, art or Italian food and cooking.” John Nuzzo is survived by Kathleen, his wife of 23 years.
Crescendo! Welcomes Swell Music
Swell Music, with its large stock music library, customizable tracks and original composition capabilities, has joined forces with the fifteen year-old, downtown San Francisco, audio-post shop Crescendo! Studios. Although the two companies remain independent, they are synergizing to offer a wider range of audio services under one roof.
Headed by lead composer Elad Marish, Swell Music recently relocated from Los Angeles, where they produced a wide variety of projects ranging from commercial work with the likes of Pepsi and AT&T, original music for movie trailers including "The Hoax" (Richard Gere), and "Easy Money" (Forrest Whitaker, Jay Mohr). They also scored and sound designed music videos for the likes of P Diddy, Ne-yo, and Fefe Dobson as well as promos for sports team Miami Heat and Fox Sports MLB Baseball.
Crescendo!, in turn, is helmed by Craig Helmholz and located on Battery Street, in the heart of the old Barbary Coast, where they've done work for McCann-Erikson, Microsoft, Nintendo, KAYAK, Doritos, Kashi, Esurance.com, and many others. D. Blair Dec 13, 2010
Mise En Scene Nov 10 • Chinese American Film: Ancient to Avant
With the Chinese American Film Festival running through November 23rd at the 4 Star in San Francisco—a wild ride ranging from Donnie Yen's new martial arts hit, "Ip Man 2," to the masterful Chow Yun-Fat in "Confucius"— and the release of a four-disc set of documentaries by Arthur Dong (the release party opened the fest), it is the month of the tiger for Chinese film.
Of course, Chinese filmmakers have long been hard at work in Northern California. Indeed, Dong unearthed the forgotten 1916 silent "The Curse of Quon Gwon" made by two Oakland sisters. Now considered both the earliest Asian American film and one of the earliest by women directors, "The Curse” screened November 13 at CAFF with a score by Judy Rosenberg, the Mills College director of music, and attendance by Mabel and Violet Wong, descendents of the filmmakers. Another Dong doc is "Forbidden City, U.S.A.," 1989, about a smoking hot, WWII-era, Chinese nightclub on Sutter Street.
"There's all this culturally rich material that hasn't been seen, really," Dong told SF Gate (11/11/10). "The places it documents (are) part of a larger history, and San Francisco is very much a part of this." But Dong is not only about archival material. his “Hollywood Chinese" tells of more typical as well as recent film scene successes like Joan Chen, Nancy Kwan, B.D. Wong.
Japanese Film
Not to be outdone in the film showcasing department, Japantown now sports VIZ Cinema on Post Street directly across from the Kabuki. While the latter is Japanese in name only, the VIZ focuses on Japan from the latest releases to Kurosawa classics, anime, docs and more.
Claiming to be the only venue of this kind in the country, the VIZ theatre is both expansive and underground—literally, it has 143 seats and is downstairs. But it features above ground tech: premier HD digital projection and a THX sound system.
Get a mindful of Mishima, one of the most iconoclastic authors ever to burst out of Japan, in a retrospective starting the day after Thanksgiving. Not only does it feature the masterful “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” by “Taxi Driver” author Paul Schrader, but Yokio Mishima himself playing a young yakuza in the New Wave cult film “Afraid to Die,” an ironic title considering his own ritual suicide.
San Francisco Film Society Keeps Expanding
The Film Society’s second annual Cinema by the Bay fest at the Roxie frolicked earlier this month through a bunch of good local films and a half a dozen honorees. The latter, who made an “indelible mark on the Bay Area's progressively evolving filmmaking community,” according to the website, included Les Blank, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gail Silva and Marlon Rigs.
The series kicked off with “Fanny, Annie & Danny,” Chris Brown’s lauded and awarded piece about a dysfunctional trio of twenty-something siblings, which premiered at the Mill Valley. It also included “Babnik” by another talented director/writer/cinematographer, Alejandro Adams. His third outing, “Babnik” is about a San Francisco-based Russian sex-trafficking ring but, considering Adam’s writing and philosophizing on film and his previous work, it is undoubtedly undergirded by provocative ideas and “B-to-A” film transcendence.
If you’re a local filmmaker, look to August 2011 to get you paperwork into Cinema by the Bay, and a little earlier for the Mill Valley Fest, which featured over two dozen local features this year.
Glover Does Insurance Company Short
San Francisco’s own Danny Glover, with 119 films listed on IMDB, is not only one of the hardest working men in film showbiz but the most varied. In addition to his mainstream work, over a dozen Hollywood films already this year, last year Glover did “The Harimaya Bridge” (see CS article), a multileveled Black-Japanese love story by freshman Aaron Woolfolk. In 2007, he starred in “Namibia, The Struggle for Liberation,” an ambitious epic partially financed by the Namibian government but directed by the visionary Charles Burnett, who did the acclaimed but little known “Killer of Sheep,” (1977).
Glover goes the other way, in length, content and audience, in his latest, a pair of six and half minute pieces for Liberty Mutual to promote a new campaign and the slogan "Responsibility. What's your policy?" Liberty’s execs are laudably artistic as well as identity-minded considering their Spike Lee theme—“doing the right thing.”
"Second Line" follows an angry San Franciscan businessman whose car won't start one morning and, after a meltdown, finally stops to smell the coffee (organic and shade-grown). Glover stars and directs and it costars Felicity Huffman, who is white, as the wife, in traditional San Fran ecumenicalism.
Cutting and Drugging Film Hit at American Indian Festival
19 year-old writer and filmmaker Janessa Starkey, of the United Auburn Indian Community in the Sierra foothills, showed her film, "Behind the Door of a Secret Girl," at the recent American Indian Film Festival. A “cutter” herself, when she lived with her meth addicted mom and her mother’s gangster boyfriend, Starkey began the screen play when she was 14 by writing a three-page story and handing it to Jack Kohler, the film teacher at the tribal school.
Also Indian, Kohler got into acting and traditional Indian singing and drumming while at Stanford University. Abandoning his engineering career to become an actor and producer in San Francisco, Kohler produced and narrated the documentary "River of Renewal," now airing on PBS. It concerns water and land rights along the Klamath River, his ancestral land.
There are not many mainstream media stories of the "generations of pain" among American Indians, despite it being built into the psyche of the nation. "I hadn't really seen a film about a depressed teenage girl who cuts herself," Starkey told reporter Jesse Hamlin (SF Chronicle, 10/29/2010) by phone from the United Auburn Indian Community Tribal School, where she now teaches.
"It needed to be told," said Kohler about Starkey’s story, which he spent three years helping Starkey hone. "We talked about how to create more tension and conflict, how to develop character."
"Jack gave me something to work toward," said Starkey, who had written poetry but felt listless until she fell in love with filmmaking. "He made me sit down and rewrite the script. He helped me through the process."
"I did cut myself," admitted Starkey, who explained it was a way to release her depression and angst. She also told Hamlin she hadn’t talked about it much. "I wanted to find a better way of dealing with my depression, so instead of hurting myself, I decided to write this film."
The American Indian Film Festival, produced by San Francisco's American Indian Film Institute, is the oldest and best known Native American film festival in the country (much as the SF Jewish and SF International are the oldest in their sectors). Running through Nov. 13, it screened 120 features, documentaries, animated shorts and music videos.
Ex’pression Students Garner Awards
Ex’pression College, the most artistically designed of the Bay Area’s two dozen film/video schools and departments—check out its colorful postmodern architecture next time you are in Emeryville (hard right off of 80E at the Ashby Exit)—just had some motion graphics students take top prizes at the national competition future@motion competition in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jon Corriveau, Brady Lowery, Sam McCann, and Daamun Mohseni placed first with an entry entitled “Scalpel Ad,” and Lydia Baillergeau and Karen Wong took third for “Text First Talk Second” (see vimeo). The latter was part of nationwide competition for PSAs called “Safe America.”
“The closer I get to graduation, the more I want to take advantage of every opportunity to network with the industry,” remarked Mohseni. "Attending motion provided me with two solid days of industry-related information, while meeting potential employers and colleagues." “We are proud of our students,” added Yael Braha, Ex’pression’s program director for motion design. “Placing in four of the top five spots is an incredible achievement.”
One of the few schools that focuses on motion arts and app development, Ex’pression was founded in 1999 by the late Dutch entrepreneur Eckart Wintzen and has grads at Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, and elsewhere across the industry.
Bay Area Casting Director Starts Screenplay Competition
Writer, author and Bay Area Casting director, Hester Schell, has announced a screenplay competition (deadline 4/30/2011) to commemorate the opening of the Devil’s Slide Tunnel south of Pacifica, with local indie producer Debbie Brubaker as one of the panelists. The Devil’s Slide Tunnel Vision Writers’ Project will also award other writing (poetry, short story, short novel, and one act play or musical) and will feature performances of the winners. “It’s all about tunnels, tunnel vision, light at the end of the tunnel—however this metaphor speaks to you as a writer,” said Schell.
SFAI Laid Off Teachers Still Struggling
Over a year ago, CineSource reported on SFAI’s dismissal of the teachers Janis Crystal Lipzin, Charles Boone, Stephanie Ellis, Pat Klein, Suzanne Olmsted, John Rapko and Jon Lang in defiance of their contracts. “It is nothing less than a criminal act against contemporary culture,” claimed Grahame Weinbren, the editor of the Millennium Film Journal.
Since then more than 1215 people signed the petition to reinstate these teachers who formed an important part of the school’s liberal arts as well as film program. Alas, the school hired some labor-busting lawyers, delayed the start of arbitration and ran up the teacher’s legal fees to unprecedented proportions. They have gotten some help, however, and more can be provided by donating generously to the FUSFAI legal fund.
D. Blair Nov 13, 2010
Mise En Scene Oct 10 • Theater Heaven No More
"Left In The Dark: Portraits Of San Francisco Movie Theatres" is a lovely coffee table book about a sad situation: the closing of the City's cinema palaces. If filmmaking will be with us for next millennia, we have to assume that theaters—those communal dream yoga centers—will carry on somehow. But today’s plastic mutliplexes covered with celebrity blowups can’t compare to the bejeweled image oases of yore. Celebs may be the religion of light’s saints but the old theaters were its paradises, literally, replete with the couches, food, and youth (on the screen) described in the Koran. They were also quite Islamic, oddly enough, in their graphics, arches, Arab romanticism, and names, like the Alhambra.
The Bay Area’s movie houses will live on, at any rate, in "Left In The Dark," which was written by Julie Lindow, who came up slinging popcorn at the Castro, poetically enough. The photos are by R.A. McBride, who has taken large images of blight but in this case got a grant for urban beauty from the SF Arts Commission. The book includes tasty details from architecture to projectors.
You can catch the "Left In The Dark" slide-show presentation October 30 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. There is also a film being made on the subject by a grantee of the San Francisco Film Society.
A few cinema chapels survive, fortunately, including the Grand Lake in Oakland, and the Castro in San Francisco. The latter features an organist before evening weekend shows and ownership by the Nassers, an Egyptian family, who took over in 2001. Fittingly, the Castro just hosted the fifteenth annual Arab Film Festival, one of the area’s premier festivals, and this year’s opener was the masterful “Masquarade” by the Algerian director Lyes Salem, who also starred.
Bulldozing our movie palaces will surely seem insane to future film worshippers, especially as religious place preservation becomes ever more fanatic. But hope springs eternal, especially in films like “Masquarade,” an archetype-filled comedy that proves, right from its long “Touch of Evil” opening shot, the transformative power of film. If filmmakers can keep producing stories that eclipse the 2000 year-old monotheist narratives, if only for the two hours the diverse audiences sit together in the dark, perhaps the last of those twentieth century cinema palaces can be enshrined and preserved for future devotees.
In Oregon Incentives Show Results
Oregon’s high desert is not good for much besides wild horses and movies. Indeed, film starts leapt up after the state completed their incentive program in 2009. Oregon offers 20% rebate on goods and services, a cash payment of up to 16% of wages to production personnel, and no sales tax.
"Oregon's in-state film and video industry has been growing steadily," noted the modest Vince Porter, the director of Oregon’s film office in Portland, according to John Anderson, of The Bulletin (Read more: 'Films bring money to Oregon').
The recent filming of "Meek's Cutoff" east of Bend is a good example. The feature, which debuted last month at festivals in Venice, Italy, and Toronto, stars Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, and Will Patton, and was directed by Ms. Kelly Reichardt, a nice gender change for a western about a lost in the wilderness wagon train.
More than 300 major motion pictures have been made in Oregon, beginning with "The Fisherman's Bride" in 1908, although the most famous remains Buster Keaton's "The General," (1927). Shot near Cottage Grove, it included the spectacular—non-special-effected—bridge collapse and five hundred extras from the Oregon National Guard in Civil War uniforms.
“The wrecked locomotive became a minor tourist attraction until the metal of the train was salvaged for scrap during World War II," noted Anderson, an excellent example of how film feeds tourism even after the crews have gone.
More recent Oregon films include "Maverick," the 2000 flick about riverboat gamblers starring Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and James Garner; "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" (1993), with Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves; and "The Postman Rings Twice" (1997), with Kevin Costner and Will Patton. All of this film history—and much, much more—is at the Oregon Film Museum in Astoria, 70 miles North-West of Portland.
The well-known director Gus Van Sant lives in Portland, the streets of which appear in his "Mala Noche" (1985), "Drugstore Cowboy" (1989), "My Own Private Idaho" (1991), "Elephant" (2003), and "Paranoid Park" (2007). Portland is also the setting for "Leverage," a TNT television series starring Timothy Hutton, which maintains its soundstage in Clackamas. According to Porter, "Out-of-state dollars are spread throughout the business communities [including] lumber yards, hardware stores, office supplies, antique stores, retail shops and wages to Oregonians."
SF Film Society Keeps the FAF Faith
The San Francisco Film Society, which took over and expanded some of the filmmaking services provided by the old Film Arts Foundation in 2009, gets high marks from Eric Escobar. No wonder: he just got word he is a finalist for the $35,000 Kenneth Rainin Foundation screenwriting grant from SFFS for “East County,” his project about an indebted sheriff who finds three abandoned children while moonlighting for his brother’s eviction agency.
“I am pleased and happy just to be in the game,” Escobar blogged recently. “There are remarkable things happening at the Film Society, and it's been underway for the last few years. If you're a Bay Area filmmaker, get involved and get noticed by the folks in the organization. Join up, take a class, sign up for free studio.” Indeed, he concluded, rather passionately, “If you're a San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker, then this is YOUR film society! [my emphasis] It really is.”
Followers of his advice are the other cineastes up for a Rainin: Debbie Brubaker for “504,” about an SF health office sit-in and the birth of the disability rights movement; Mark Decena’s “Speak to Me, also about disability, a debilitating stutter this time; Mohammad Gorjestani’s “Suitcase for Tomorrow,” which explores the tragedy of human trafficking; Mike Ott’s “Teenage Wasteland,” about an illegal immigrant; Lynn Hershman Leeson for her “Killer App,” covering a visionary doctor in a fertility clinic; Christopher Johnson’s “Skirt” about an idealistic campaign worker; Britta Sjogren’s “Beyond Redemption” following a ex-Black Panther and a younger, white psychologist; and—last but not least—Morgan Wise’s seriously local “Western Addition,” about six African Americans in a San Francisco building over a 1970s’ weekend.
Fidelman Shows LA
Cheryl Fidelman, an actress and spoken word artist out of New York, lived in Oakland for almost a decade. But then she starred as a young woman turned serial killer in “Fell” (2010) and decided she was tough enough to tackle LA. Directed by Christopher Rusins, “Fell” featured dramatic cinematography, subtle acting, and a sophisticated script, despite its low budget. Indeed, "Fidelman has enough quirkiness and good looks to take over the kind of roles Jennifer Jason Leigh used to play so effectively when she was younger," remarked John Marcher, “A Beast in a Jungle.”
Things were tough at first but Fidelman took to LA and was beginning to get some calls. Now she’s decided to notch up with a four-walling of “Fell” at the Downtown Independent (Wed, Oct 27, 8:00pm, 251 S. Main Street, LA). See 'Fell' trailer, or buy tickets. With her striking show flyer, even those who don’t see “Fell” get a taste of how ballsy Fidelman is, not only to play a serial killer, but to go the distance for the film and herself.
More Oakland Filmmakers in LA
Oakland-born LA director Ryan Fleck is releasing his third commercial feature, “It's Kind of a Funny Story,” which will undoubtedly expand his rep as a great hybrider of art and industry. With the help of his Boston-raised partner and wife Anna Boden (they met in NY, she writes), they broke in with the quirky, penetrating, and highly acclaimed “Half Nelson” (2006). Starring Ryan Gosling, it’s about an idealistic inner city high school teacher who is also a crack head—talk about reverse psychology!
Their latest, “It's Kind of a Funny Story,” follows a 16 year-old boy who works with adult psychiatric patients. It stars flavor of the week, cool funnyman Zach Galifianakis and the talented pop phenom Emma Roberts, who was smitten with Ned Vizzini’s novel of the same name and sought out the filmmakers for their famously idiosyncratic expertise. If it has the subtlety and trust in the viewer (to fill-in the blanks) of “Half Nelson,” it should be another art house-cross over hit.
Fleck, who has also done documentaries and the 2008 sports drama "Sugar," had some concerns dealing with the new movie’s mental illness. But he felt he could rely on Vizzini's autobiographical novel, "That balanced the humor and the drama," he said. "It never condescended the characters, who were all based on people Ned had met in the hospital. We decided to treat everyone with respect and dignity so that while these are serious situations, there is humor that comes out of serious situations and this is no exception."
More Oakland Breakthroughs in Break Dancing
Yoram Savian, whose blurry-background, colorful-cinematography in "Golly the Rainmaker" was a highlight of this summer’s Oakland Underground Film Festival, recently had a video go viral (1,374,000 hits as of Oct 20 see it here. It’s of four homies dancing on a street corner in the rain and between the cars. Indeed, its mix of acrobatics, ballet, and Michael Jackson moonwalking by the Oakland group, Turf Feinz, is astounding. Their Facebook page says they organize “dance battles to provide a safe space for entertainment and to continue the advancement of turf dancing."
The music video was produced by Sovian’s YAK Films, the YouTube channel of which features a whopping 109 videos, mostly of Oakland dancers. In addition to hot shooting, the pieces feature skilled editing—indeed this one includes manipulated film speeds to highlight the dancers' movements. YAK Films is a youth-led company dedicated giving voice to resistance in general as well to the mainstream media in particular. Savion, 25, also teaches at the Oakland non-prof Youth UpRising.
Military School for Sacramento Filmmakers
“Listen UP, cine maggots! Compared to Bogey and Bergman (either one), you are the scum of the earth!” is how Larry Meistrich should have started his recent open house for his boot camp at the Art Institute of Sacramento, co-sponsored with the Capital Film Arts Alliance. Although known for his no-holds-barred approach, he was pleasant and polite. Moreover, Meistrich’s seminars offer a more generic industry insight not the specific tough love some Northern Californian cineastes need (I would be happy to provide a drill sergeant’s outfit, a banner charting Nor Cal’s 20 film sectors, and some talking points if he wants to get specific).
That evening was titled “Successful Filmmaking in the 21st Century” and was open free to the public. Although the three-day seminar, which covers film or television production from beginning to end, costs around $400, it drops to $150 for students and veterans.
The producer of more than 100 films, commercials and music videos, including the Oscar winning “Sling Blade” (1996) and Cannes 1998 screenplay winner “Croupier,” Meistrich designed his boot camp “for all who want to know how to position themselves for success,” according to his website. He also reveals “secrets to a successful production [from] financing [to] packaging and marketing.” On of his themes is to look for “fundamental niche marketing, community and branding."
Meistrich’s Nehst Studios is a financing, production AND distribution company that also integrates cutting-edge tech (meaning Twilms or Fwitter?). With offices across the country, Nehst headquarters production in Cleveland, perhaps to save money and feel the Middle American pulse. Currently, it has several films in development from scripting to distro.
Although boot camps are a minor item in Nehst’s income stream, Meistrich likes doing them to scout talent on the cheap. Indeed, they have netted finds like Michael and Daniel Carberry, 19, whose reel was strong enough to be hired to direct Nehst's Mountain Dew campaign, or Kevin Kerwin and Kate O'Neil who got to create the feature doc "Running America," which Nehst now distributing.
Cinema Cuisine in Sonoma County
Francis Ford Coppola—director, screenwriter, and entertainment mogul extraordinaire—is now also a vintner and restaurateur, having just debuted his Rustic Restaurant in Geyserville, northern Sonoma County. Rustic is part of his Rubicon winery, which has been growing and advertising for a while but just opened its tasting room in July. It is reasonably priced with entrees around $15 and a long list of pizzas.
Still under construction is the full resort, including two swimming pools, private cabanas, four bocce ball courts (for extreme Italianophiles), and a outdoor theatrical stage. Inspired by Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, Coppola strove for an entertainment experience for the whole family. Perhaps not coincidentally, family is a traditional theme in his films, both script and crew, and an attribute carried on by daughter Sofia, who posed with her father in the beautifully shot Rubicon wine ads.
The Rustic also integrates cinema, of course. There is movie memorabilia everywhere and vintages include Director's Cut, with lighter wines under the Sofia label. Desks, autos and other items from the “Godfather”s and other films abound or are for sale in the gift shop. There are also books and DVDs and the impeccable wait staff and employees well-versed in cinema minutia.
Although it may seem odd that a director who once shook up the film business is now an esteemed Nor Cal restaurateur, it also reflects the multicultural leveling of Northern California. While Sonoma is home be some of the most elite farmers in the world, and second home to Bay Area celebs like Robin Williams, just north of Coppola’s Rustic Restaurant is Mendocino County and its massive marijuana industry.
Indeed, the Emerald Triangle would be a great topic for an updated mafia-flick, especially if tackled by Coppola-generations: Sofia for the youth-slant, cousin Nick Cage for the actor known for his addict portrayals perspective, and Francis, for the script angle, doing for hippie narrative what the “Godfather” did for mafia pot—no pun intended—boilers.
Sure, Sonoma is a long way from Oakland but Oakland is not far from Sonoma, only about an hour. One of the greatest gifts Northern California could give Hollywood North, and vice versa, would be egalitarianism. While New York is beloved by celebs, because they’re not gawked at or fawned over, Nor Cal could reproduce that by universalizing hipster independence. If you're already living large, there’s no need to do it vicariously through celebs. Hollywood North could respond in kind by including more of the Bay Area’s twenty film sectors in its affairs—say hosting Oakland’s Underground Film Awards at the Rustic Restaurant or some such craziness.
Afghanistan: A Land Without Art? In the difficult debate about Afghanistan, neither the right nor the left is mentioning one critical subject: art. Admittedly, Afghanistan is plagued by a host of more pressing problems, from the brutal U.S. invasion to even more murderous Taliban, from the multi-million dollar opium business to the grinding poverty. But, as difficult and double-jeapordizing as these threats are, are they as dangerous as the Taliban’s proposition to have a society without art, music and film?
The bombing of the monumental Buddha statues in 2001 exemplified the Taliban’s opposition to art but figurative paintings were also destroyed, theaters closed, films burned, music outlawed, musicians maimed and television and music radio forbidden. Despite some “liberal” pronouncements against dismembering civilians and burning schools, Taliban anti-artism has not been eased or even discussed much. It continues to symbolize a sad first for humanity as well as Afghanistan, which historically had great music and art.
Even more ironically, if the Taliban retake Afghanistan, they will trumpet their achievements on the Internet using video, representative images and art, which they now allow, albeit only for news or military purposes. Alas, radical Islamists aren’t the only ones around obsessed with the destruction of symbols – or their creation.
“Artists are historical and cultural in our country. Artists have been around a long time,” said Lima Sahar, a young singer from Kandahar, which is the heart of Taliban country. Despite dozens of death threats, she become a finalist in the talent show “Afghan Star,” 2008. Although all artists are known to be a tenacious bunch, determination is especially common among filmmakers who often risk fiscal, emotional or even physical ruin for their art.
No wonder the Taliban were also counterattacked by a phalanx of filmmakers led by the Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose “Kandahar,” 2001, was a veritable visual hand grenade lobbed into their midst. Partially shot in Afghanistan, where he secretly researched the film, it tells a vicious and surreal story in a series of loosely connected vignettes, using the "string of pearls" system favored by Iranian and other Asian filmmakers, rather then Western three act construction.
Based on a true story, “Kandahar” follows a Canadian Afghan woman trying to get back to that city to stop her sister from committing suicide, due to the Taliban’s extreme abuse of women. The film was originally titled “The Sun Behind the Moon,” in the poetic Iranian tradition and with obvious gender references, but also because she intended to kill herself during the last solar eclipse of the millennia. Neglected until September 12, 2001, “Kandahar” soon opened from Paris, where it won the Fellini Unesco Prize, to New York, where I saw it a month later at the Lincoln Center Theater, in a full house, alongside a fairly stunned audience.
"Kandahar's" lead was played by Nelofer Pazira, the actual woman who returned to Afghanistan to rescue a friend, not a sister. Pazira is a fascinating journalist and filmmaker herself – she has won prizes and plaudits for documentaries and activism – but she isn’t that captivating as an actress. Although “Kandihar” doesn’t quite gel as a masterpiece, many of its scenes truly are. It stands as a devastating critique of the Taliban, told entirely in local terms: kids screaming their prayers to AK-47s; a black American Muslim “doctor” dispensing pharmaceuticals to impoverished Afghans; amputees hopping after prosthetic limbs tossed from a foreign aid airplane.
Makhmalbaf was the perfect filmmaker for the job, considering he grew up poor in Tehran and become a radical Islamist himself as a teen. Jailed under the Shah for attacking a policeman, he educated himself in prison and eshewed violence for aggressive culture. After an early release, due to the Islamic revolution, Makhmalbaf became a filmmaker. He went on to write dozens of screenplays and direct 18 features and numerous shorts, often about the individual against the society and in a variety of styles, from sur- to neo- realist.
Unlike the Sunnis, the Shi’a have always supported the visual arts, from Persian “minature” paintings to portraits and then the building-size face banners currently used by religious, political and film figures. Add poetry, music and ancient culture and no wonder Iran became a world cinema power. Even more surprising, this transpired largely since the Islamic revolution. Although the Ayatollahs often ban films internally, and Makhmalbaf films were banned five times, they are not so stupid or unartistic to stop their cineastes from earning prizes and money abroad.
Although not as acclaimed as titans of Iranian film, like Kiarostami and Majidi, Makhmalbaf is immensely talented – a veritable one man cultural movement, who is also a prolific published author, educator, and producer. Finally leaving Tehran for Paris, after the election of the hayseed and Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad in 2005, Makhmalbaf now lives in Kabul, where he helps build schools and hospitals as well as produce films. Makhmalbaf is leading nothing less then a full force film invasion of Afghanistan by his phalanx, which also includes his entire family.
Marzieh, his wife, started as a cinematographer but went on to direct “The Day I Became a Women,” which Makhmalbaf wrote and produced. It won 13 prizes internationally. Makhmalbaf set up a film school in Iran in 1996 and later a primary school program for Afghan refugee children. Two graduates of his film school were his daughters Samira and Hena.
Samira’s debut feature, “At Five in the Afternoon,” after the Garcia Lorca poem about firing squads, was the first film shot entirely in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion. About a young woman who dreams of becoming president, and rebels in little ways – like getting her photo taken without her veil or buying some high heels – it won the Jury Prize at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, despite being a little rough around the edges.
Younger sister Hena was only 14 when she made the "Joy of Madness," the making of “At Five,” using a small video camera, which was said to be rather intimate and startling. Hena went on to do her own feature just a few years later – both sisters working with dad’s close assistance, of course. Her “Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame” also follows a girl, who is impoverished and living in the shadow of the Buddhas, as she braves war, machismo, prejudice and primitivism in order to go to school. Like “At Five,” it was criticized by American reviewers for being a tad too political and didactic, but the use of powerful symbols or references, like the Buddhas, or desperate quests, like the female striver, is standard to the local cinema vocabulary.
Next came “Osama” by Siddiq Barmak, an Afghan protegeee of Makhmalbaf, who learned his craft in Russia. Makhmalbaf provided encouragement, much of the financing and his own Arriflex 35mm camera. The results are striking. “Osama,” which I saw, looks great, accomplished and more “western,” with subplots and crosscutting, as well as a strong actress as the central character, Osama. Playing off the cachet of the world’s most famous Osama, she is a female gogetter – yet again – but this time pretending to be a boy, both a classic Shakesperian and Iranian cinema trope.
“Osama” took the 2004 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film as well as the Fellini Unesco Prize, now a virtual province of Makhmalbaf and his phalanx. Barmak also directs the Afghan Children Education Movement yet another school founded by Makhmalbaf. “Osama,” was colorful and well shot, with beautiful crowd scenes of women blossoming like blue flowers in their neon-blue but full-covering chadors, but it doesn’t pull punches. There’s even a desperate male character rationalizing male oppression – three-quarters through a movie about terribly abused woman and her absurdly difficult struggle. Indeed, this is precisely what the Afghan story has to offer the evolution of the human narrative: conflict, chaos and seeming irresolvable problems.
Which brings us to “The Kite Runner.” It started as the 2003 worldwide bestseller by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan doctor living in the Oakland suburbs Fremont, and tackles Afghanistan’s toughest issues: oppression of the poor, hidden love, vicious bullies, and extreme fanaticism. Although very believable, it also uses highly symbolic characters who endure unbelievable horror in acceptable twists of dramaturge. The 2007 film, directed by the Swiss director Marc Forster didn’t quite capture that elusive quality, but remains a testament to the narrative power and tragedy of Afghanistan.
Filmmaking continues expanding today. In addition to Makhmalbaf’s phalanx and school there is even the Afghan Film Organization. It includes the directors Horace Shansab, Yassamin Maleknasr and Abolfazl Jalili and a school for actors as well as directors which led to “Zolykha's Secret,” 2007, by Shansab. A powerful and lyrical tragedy, it played to packed houses at major festivals world-wide. Talented actors have emerged, including Amina Jafari, Marina Gulbahari and Saba Sahar, the sister of the singer, as well as a monthly magazine, Theme, published by the Afghan Cinema Club.
Similarly hard at work are native documentarians like Mithaq Kazimi, who did “16 Days in Afghanistan,” and Wazhmah Osman, of “Postcards from Tora Bora” fame. A French organization Ateliers de Varan runs a documentary program, which will hopefully continue despite the killing of one of its directors, Severin Blanchet, by a Taliban suicide car bomber on February 26, 2010. PBS’s Frontline aired on March 7th an amazing doc, “Embedded with the Taliban,” by the award-winning journalist, Najibullah Quraishi. It shows the stark normality of the Taliban fighters, just regular folk who grow up with out women, art, or film – although you can hear them sneaking some music on the truck radio.
All this filmmaking, art making and culture making would be drastically diminished, if not utterly obliterated, if the Taliban retakes power. As devastating as the war by the United States is, it has comparatively low casualties, and nothing can be as devastating as depriving a society of its own culture, its native mechanism for reflecting on its unique issues.
As Mohsen Makhmalbaf symbolizes in his evolution from radical Islamist to filmmaker, and then school maker, the only way for Afghanistan to solve its host of pressing problems is by educating its citizens, first in school and then in advanced culture. Only then can a society informed by its own ideas, issues and culture, unravel its own Gordian knots and solve some of its problems. D. Blair Mar 22, 2010
The Problem of Making Films About Hipsters
We have been discussing the problem of hipster films for some months now – since the annual August exodus of media workers to Burning Man, to be exact [see article: "Burning Man: What Story Should Be Told?"]. The problem is how to make them meaningful without being narcissistic, narcoleptic or nauseating.
We looked at the innovative “The Burning Opera – How to Survive the Apocalypse” at the Teatro Zinzani in October (produced by Dana Harrison, libretto Eric Davis, music by Mark Nichols); we talked to indie filmmaker Rob Nilsson, who finally went to his first Burn, at age 69 (he loved it), to research a film to be co-produced with Lauren Le Gal; and in the December issue of CineSource, writer/director James Dalessandro takes up the topic of books and movies about his friend Ken Kesey.
Hipster films are perennially problematic. If San Franciscans could crack the code, we'd make a mint exporting them alongside the music. From Brazil to Bucharest, California symbolizes a certain romantic longing, and hippies the height of it, which films can show rather than tell. But the really good films on the subject can be counted on one hand, or even one finger: “Easy Rider,” written and directed by Dennis Hopper and starring same, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson – his first acclaimed film (after ten years of B pictures).
Enter “Humboldt County,” a 2008 film that is finally getting to theaters, perhaps tailored to the inebriated Christmas season audience. By newcomers Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs, both of whom wrote, directed and acted, “Humboldt” is about a disillusioned medical student in LA who wakes up on a drive with his distraught girlfriend to discover she has taken him home to her family in, you guessed, Humboldt County. (Since it could be anywhere in Northern California and in light of the business's 17 billion dollars-a-year revenue, perhaps it should have been titled “The California Green Rush.”)
I saw the “Humboldt County” trailer at the theater last week and it seemed interesting enough but judging long dramas from a series of snippits is of course absurd. Fortunately, I met some folks from the northern agricultural realms who had seen the film, in a limited local release evidently, so I asked them about it.
“The protagonist didn’t capture my attention, I didn’t want to watch him,” said the diminutive Lynsey Moore, a budding actress and experienced sommelier, no relation to the oversized doc maker. “I know it’s sort of mean but he was not attractive. I need something more in my leading men. He doesn’t have to be heroic, or hot, he just has to have some ‘je ne sais quoi.’”
“I liked the mom, she was sweet,” granted Lynsey, a self-admitted chick flick addict who loved “Knocked Up” and “Juno.” “But I was never invested in the characters at all. No attachment. When that guy went off the cliff, I was like: ‘whatever.’”
Lynsey's friend X also chimed in. (He doesn’t want his first OR last name used for the obvious reason that a first name cross referenced with Lynsey would identify him).
“It was weak and non-representive. They are showing the ganga [marijuana] under the redwoods, with not enough light. The directors seemed like growers and the movie was supposed to explain how the herb thing goes down but the details were not realistic. This one guy, Bill, from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ he goes into this rant: 'We are real people, not greedy, just mom and pop, with less then 25 plants, who are trying to save the forest or buy some land instead of growing hundreds of plants to make a bunch of money to go to Mexico for the winter.' I thought that was commendable. But it seemed like a B-movie.”
“What stories would you prefer to see from that scene?” I asked them.
“One of my biggest distresses in the situation,” said Moore, “Is a lot times [the police] know where the meth houses are – there is so much meth up there – but, when they bust on the meth, they suddenly have a super fund site on their hands, which needs millions of dollars. But when they bust on the herb, everyone is all chill, and there is money and weed that the cops probably sell. Naturally, they bust on that and it makes me mad.”
“I was at a bust,” Moore continued fearlessly, probably because she now works as a sommelier. “The police had all this money and the higher-up cop said on his cell, ‘Is it OK if I just say there were five bags of cash?’ They declared 70,000 but we know there was 150,000.”
“Did anything happen to those arrested?” I asked.
“Nothing of any consequence,” Moore said. “That night they were in jail and there was a warrant but nothing came of it. A lawyer made a bunch-a money, they had to go to the court house a bunch-a times. But all the trimmers – there were Israelis and an Australian – got to leave the scene [and not get arrested].”
“So what would your movie be about?”
“A movie should be made about the cops and their views and corruption. I like Sheriff [Thomas] Almond – have served him wine a few times and the growers all voted for him – but he says one thing and does another. He says, ‘We are not going after the small growers,' but they busted tons on indoor – right on my street! – for having more than six mature marihuana plants on any given property, which is the new interpretation of the law. They harshified it.”
“Official corruption, OK, anything else?”
“Kids having all this money, all these souped-up trucks and [the town’s] streets are all fucked up because no one is putting money into where they are from. They are going to India, Costa Rica (she smiled at the girl next to her), Bali, or what-have-you. But they are not paying their taxes.”
The girl at whom she smiled, “Y,” agreed: “On ‘The Ridge’ [Grass Valley] people are starting hemp stores, something for people like us, from the community, but you don’t see that [up north]. They lack that.”
X, the young man, agreed, “They assume you are taking your money somewhere else.”
“Anything else?”
Y: “I have been complaining about the whole vibe is just to get fucked up and hooked up. I was talking about it happening at that ‘decompression’ [After Burning Man] party on the skunk train.”
Moore: “You need to decompress because you wish you could always live like that, on ‘the playa’ [Burning Man], but now you have to go to the grocery store and if you can’t handle that you might not be able to get your groceries.”
“So cop corruption, hippies out to make it rich, and problems with the 'up' culture – fucked up/hook up? These narratives would be more interesting to you?”
“Yeah.”D. Blair Nov 27, 2009
Film Movements: Why Bother? With the SF Film Society starting an “international film center” and indie filmmaker Rob Nilsson calling for a film movement (see related articles, Nov09 CS), I got to wondering: Could the Bay Area support a film movement, what would be involved, and is it of any value, even?
There have been many film movements, from Film Noire, which adapted America to the forbidding post-war period, to Italian Westerns, which did the same in reverse, using copious amounts of Spanish sunlight. But they were thematic not geographical, although some were nationally localized like Italian Neo-Realism or Swedish Realism.
The most remarkable movement, for a film writer certainly, was the French New Wave, started by the writers for the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. LIke Zues birthing Athena from his head, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and friends fabricated a full blown film movement right out of their pages of scholarly criticism, although Truffaut had a leg up, having married into a film distribution family (French Jews, they hid in the south of France).
The movement most applicable to the Bay Area, however, is Cinema Novo, out of Brazil, or Cine Novisimo, its younger hipper version, from Salvador, Bahia. Indeed, “bahia” also means “bay” and Bahia is Brazil's San Francisco, a laid back place of hippies, music and alternative arts – notably the Tropicalia movement, led by musician poets Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and the jam banders, Novos Baianos and Cor do Som.
While San Paulo and Rio started making movies soon after the Lumiére brothers sent camera teams around the world in 1898, Bahia remained a five-hundred year-old backwater. Although known for poets and painters, as well as musicians, film didn't get made much up there until Glauber Rocha and Cine Novisimo.
I fell in love with Bahia shortly after arriving in 1978, on Day One of Carnival. It was a teeming town, reeking of industrial-strength mold and African-dende cooking oil, its streets lined with decayed houses, and packed full of singing, dancing and drunk citizens. I stood on a corner in semi-shock, still carrying my backpack, exhausted from the 30 hour bus ride from Rio.
The revelers were often in uniform “togas” identifying their “escola da samba,” or samba school. They lumbered after trucks loaded with lights and speakers and topped by “Trio Electricos,” the Bahian version of roots rock. Everywhere were beer shacks, with small colorful tables, doing a land office business.
As it happened, I had an address and decided to look it up, despite it being out of town on the beach. After negotiating the detoured and jammed buses and random house numbers, I announced myself before a modest residence. A small bearded guy ambled out, but when I tried to introduce myself, he gestured: "Wait!"
A Ducati-style roadster was bumping down the dirt road towards us and he disappeared into the house with its well-dressed drivers. A half an hour later, he reappeared, welcoming me and saying I could stay if I could convince his wife. But Eva was a Dane who lived in New York, my home town – hence, no problem.
I had landed in a den of cineastes, as it turned out. My host, Mario Cravo Neto, was a noted photographer/cinematographer, and son of Mario Cravo Junior, Bahia’s most famous sculptor. Other house guests included soundman Jorge Saldanha and his brother, Carlos, a director, both from Rio.
After a fabulous Carnaval, I went on to crew on two films with Mario and make one of my own, “Cancer in the Tropics,” a take-off of the Henry Miller book title, a coincidence that came full circle twenty years later.
Mario didn’t have much time to help with "Cancer" but he did put in a good word for me at the municipal library. They had Arriflex cameras and Nagra tape recorders, donated by a local industrialist, and lent them free to local filmmakers, which I came to be considered after a year residence.
It was Mario who noted, "You are a Bahiano now." After I protested, not from modesty but the sheer technicality of it, he said, "Look at you arguing with me, not only in pretty good Portuguese but a Bahian accent."
At that point my trajectory intersected with Cinema Novo. Not only did I begin borrowing some of the same equipment they had used but I inadvertently picked up their themes, as I discovered when I started seeing selections from their oeuvre at the library and elsewhere.
One of its principle exponents was Rocha, who was notorious for saying, "I am Cinema Novo." Born in the Bahian hinterlands but raised in Salvador, he is best know for, “O Dragão da Maldade Contra o Santo Guerreiro,” or “The Dragon of Evil Against the Saint Warrior “(1969), which took Best Director at Cannes. "O Dragon," also called "Antonio das Mortes," after its colorful anti-hero, is about a bounty hunter returning to work after a long break to corral a character who was more Moses then outlaw.
Bahia also has a folk hero Lampion, their Jesse James, and lauded endlessly in local songs. In Rocha's film, the outlaw saint is leading a hunger march of impoverished Bahianos, black and white, as they do magic and search for food.
I also viewed various lower-rent Cinema Novo films. They were characterized by their political, mystical and folkloric perspectives, as well as style and, of course, sex. I recall one, its name and director now lost in the mists of time but its opening scene still vivid: a sail boat drifts out of the fog, sleeping on deck is a blond woman covered in white feathers, a black man rows up…
Another Bahian film, penned by the famous Bahian novelist, Jorge Amado, was a veritable anthropological survey of African magic, or Condomble, wrapped in a story of flashy black “milandro,” or hustler. While the latter erred on the side over-the-top side, what characterized Cine Novo, as it was called for short, was its modern international sensibilities and its tackling of local, even esoteric, issues with panache and aplomb.
Could this be a formula for a film movement? Certainly, Oakland with its high murder rate, multiculturalism, hip-hop and Burning Man artists living side-by-side, has similarly striking and contradictory stories that might interest viewers in Paris, London and Sydney. Indeed, Oakland could be considered the poster child for a structurally ambiguous California, which had to remain delicately balanced between collapse and chaos, fine wine and food and massive incarceration, film, computer and biotech centers and massive unemployment, simply to avoid attracting even more then its regular half a million immigrants.
Perhaps we need local libraries like San Francisco's worldclass exemplar to stock cameras so our kids can tell their stories. This is already happening to a degree with Youth Radio, which now has a video program, and, at a higher level, at the SF Film Society’s FilmHouse, which sponsors suitable applicants for higher film education and equipment access. But could it coalesce into a film movement?
Rob Nilsson, noted above, is already leading a movement of semi-improvised, lower-budget features based on his patented style of forming improv-acting troupes and often addressing the angst of those left behind by California: the outcast or recently fallen like cab drivers, homeless, unemployed, questing hippies. These are themes he developed at his decade-long Tenderloin Y Group improv-acting-cinema class.
There aren’t a lot of films incorporating what Oakland has in spades and building off of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing?” and John Singleton’s "Boyz ’n the Hood." But to be uniquely Oakland, they would have address its realities of multicultural ghettos with gangbangers and tribal punks, city lakes and beautiful parks. It's pas de deux of opposites, or what Oakland filmmaker Mateen Kemet called, “Genius and disgusting at the same time. On one hand, Oakland is incredibly poor, uneducated and brutal, on the other, you have pockets of beauty and refinement. All that should be reflected in stories that take place in Oakland. If you told Oakland's story, you'd be talking about a schizophrenic character."
If someone captured this ephemeral mix and got some play, it would spur others to attempt it and compete with each other, as in the development of musical styles, until, out of default, there would be a movement. This same thing could also happen among the large Burning Man population, which has already made a number of films, like Laurent Le Gal’s “Journey to Utopia,” or "Dust and Illusions," by Olivier Bonin. In addition, there's ample material for bedroom farces in Marin or dystopian sci-fi in the cyber-campuses of Palo Alto.
Whether any of these coalesce into a movement it is hard to say but if they do we will be certain to stay abreast of it at CineSource.
And what about Salvador Bahia: Oakland should send in its sister city application papers as soon as possible. In the last two decades it has swerved from third world poverty to a booming middleclass with a Ford plant and new freeway, was well as plethora of dance studios, nightclubs and a new museum, while retaining its artistic soul. When I was recently, the landlady of my B&B told me to sleep in her bed (because she was booked up for the first night of my reservation) and on the nightstand I noticed a book: Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn." Moreover, Bahia is ready for a next round of Cinema Novo – how 'bout a doc on the Carnaval, "Tropical Woodstock," or the Ford factory, the lowest paid in world and excoriated by Noam Chomsky but beloved by Bahians. Nov 4, 2009 by D. Blair
Mill Valley Film Festival Finalizes I just received reports from various sources summarizing this year's just-completed Mill Valley Film Festival. It was quite a cornocopio of cinema intrigues and you may be interested in noting some of the titles for future reference:
The California Film Institute wrapped its 32nd Mill Valley Film Festival (October 8-18, 2009) after a very successful 11-day run in Marin theatres. Even with a tighter Festival and a reduced number of screenings, this year exceeded expectation with more than 90 sold out screenings and events, a 7.5 percent increase in box office totals and admissions of approximately 40,000. “We were proud to offer another very successful year of not only the most highly anticipated films of the awards season, but incredible independent features, documentaries, and a strong representation of locally produced films. The major issues of our time have not abated, and clearly great storytelling is still what resonates with our audiences,” commented Mark Fishkin, MVFF founder and director.
Award-winners aplenty Now in their fifth year, the Audience Awards were closer than ever with immense participation from the community, a reflection of the undeniable strength of this year's programming. After the ballots were counted, the Audience Award for favorite US feature went to Lee Daniels' Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. The award for favorite world feature ended in a tie and awarded to both Lone Scherfig's An Education (UK) and Jann Turner's White Wedding (South Africa). Rick Goldsmith and Judy Ehrlich's The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers garnered the award for favorite documentary feature and Stella and the Star of the Orient, directed by Erna Schmidt, won favorite children's feature. Michelle Esrick's Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie and Ruedi Gerber's Breath Made Visible were awarded Special Mentions in the documentary category.
BAFTA/LA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts/Los Angeles) annually presents an award to an exceptional short film in collaboration with the Mill Valley Film Festival. Thanks to support from Barbro Osher's ProSuecia Foundation, Swedish director Andreas Tibblin flew in from Sweden to accept the award for his film Good Advice, part of the shorts program 5@5: The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get. Certificates of Excellence go to Bragi Schut Jr.'s Charlie Thistle, Ilan Amit's Broken Time, and Morning Echo directed by Hope Dickson Leach.
Festival closes with style; lots of buzz for fest selections The 32nd Mill Valley Film Festival wrapped with style as the closing night films, Looking for Eric and The Young Victoria created a buzz among Marin film-goers. At the Smith Rafael Film Center critically acclaimed actress Emily Blunt introduced a packed house to her latest film The Young Victoria, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. She kindly introduced an additional screening that followed and attended the exciting Closing Night party aboard the California Hornblower for a San Francisco Bay Cruise with her friends and fiancé, John Krasinski.
There was strong audience buzz for many titles throughout the festival. In addition to the audience award winners, much of the program received raves, including many films without distributors. Soundtrack for a Revolution, The Red Machine, Red Cliff, The Swimsuit Issue, Hellsinki, The Strength of Water, and Skin-as well as Up In the Air, The Messenger, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and The Missing Person were among the talk of the festival.
Is Polanski Above the Law? With cinema the only place some of us sit in communion with each other and contemplate truth through art, our star actors and directors can seem sacred and untouchable.
Although not in films, Michael Jackson got a lot of grief for his fondness for boys, allegedly platonic, but he never did any hard time. Conversely, some had it hard. Fatty Arbuckle, the 1920s star who mentored Chaplin and discovered Keaton, was accused in San Francisco of murder, as well as rape. He was tried three times, bankrupted and ostracized before being acquitted and sent a letter of apology.
Samantha Geimer (formerly Gailey), Roman Polanski’s 13 year-old victim, now 44, has expressed what passes as something similar in this case: forgiveness and the desire to move on from the 1978 crime. But victim testimony is not the last word in a rape case, the most falsely accused AND underreported of all crimes. Rape breaks social code, violates matriarchal as well as patriarchal tradition, and breachs sexual selection, which Darwin proved is a natural law.
In the Polanski’s case, there’s little doubt he gave Ms. Gailey, then 13, a Quaalude, the standard 70s “panty-dropper,” over at Jack Nicholson’s (where else?), and cornered her naked in a hot tub – hardly the narrative you’d expect from the director of “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Chinatown” and “The Pianist.” Despite her protests, he penetrated her multiple times, including anally. There is also little doubt that Samantha’s mother was a LA-striver trying to jump-start her daughter’s career, that she drove Samantha to Nicholson’s, and that Sam posed topless there for a photo shoot, voluntarily.
“I don't believe it was rape-rape,” says Whoopy Goldberg, perhaps thinking of someone crawling in a window and grabbing a grandmother. Indeed, Goldberg is seconded by many others from the industry, from Scorcese and Wenders to Allen, Lynch, and Almodovar, although the last three may not be the most unbiased, in light of their subject matter or sexual taste. Debra Winger summarized the Hollywood zeitgeist saying, “We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece."
Evidently, Polanski thought he was going to get Arbuckled: “This guy's [the judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, who was also accused of judicial misbehavior in the case, as was one of the prosecuters] going to give me 100 years in jail. I'm not staying.” Getting out on bail, after 41 days, due to admission to the crime, Polanski fled for France, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US (surprise, surprise, and which is where Roman was born). Sentenced in abstentia, Polanski has been pursued by prosecutors every decade since, halfheartedly, it is said, although he decided not to go to Canada in the 80s for fear of arrest.
With thousands of men sitting prison, some for life, for a similar crime, why shouldn’t Polanski be extradited from Switzerland (which has a treaty) where he is now imprisoned? The only extenuating circumstances seem to be that Gailey’s mother delivered her daughter into Roman’s grasp, and Polanski himself suffered two extreme assaults, reducible to two words: Auschwitz and Manson.
Does one get any free passes for having their parents die in concentration camps (albeit only his mother in Auschwitz – Polanski himself went on the lamb at age 12 and survived by “Painted Bird”-ing it across the Polish countryside)? Does living in the spotlight (and adoration of many women) raise a man’s libido, self-esteem and entitlement, like Bill Clinton with Monica Lewinsky? Could having your pregnant wife and unborn child butchered by the dark minions of Charles Manson, now mixing in with the Holocaust nightmares, unhinge someone? Yes, no and maybe but it doesn’t seem to give you an automatic ”Get Out of Jail Free” card.
How about the other great artists who have committed crimes: Lord Byron (incest), Richard Wagner (zoological anti-Semitism), Arthur Rimbaud (slave dealing), Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Nazi-supporter), Ezra Pound (Mussolini-supporter), Emil Nolde (Nazi), James Brown (PCP freak and pistol whipper) or Chet Baker (scam artist/junkie)? Should we disavow their work or, better yet, burn it. Or have living artist criminals arrested to prevent the production of further work? Do we want our children to absorb culture created by troubled geniuses, like Vincent Van Gogh? Or how about Jack Abbott, the career criminal but brilliant writer, freed in a campaign led by Norman Mailer, but who killed again – within weeks of his release?
"I don't really have any hard feelings toward him, or any sympathy, either,” says Samantha about Polanski, rather astutely, when “The Pianist” was up for an Oscar a few years back. “He is a stranger to me… Mr. Polanski and his film should be honored according to the quality of the work… It has nothing to do with me or what he did to me."
Certainly, if we were to lock up every artist, musician and filmmaker that used drugs, practiced sodomy or took some things that weren’t theirs – fortunately, there hasn’t been much murder, except in the rap artist community (but we can't go there now) – we would vastly deplete our creative ranks, especially of rebels and edge-cutters. Perhaps the most telling precedent in the court of public opinion is the case of Huddle William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly.
Cursed by a violent temper, Lead Belly did his first time on a concealed weapons rap in a Texas chain gang, no picnic for a black man in 1917. Although he somehow escaped, he was back in the slammer inside of a year for smoking his cousin, Will Stafford, over a woman. But he was pardoned, after seven years, the minimum sentence, after writing and performing a song with religious motifs that appealed for his freedom to Governor Pat Neff. Indeed, the warden and guards, as well as his fellow prisoners, were already Lead Belly fans simply because he was so damn entertaining.
A pioneer of the twelve string guitar, Lead Belly also played the piano, harmonica, violin, and accordion and eventually compiled a well know songbook of folk standards, including “Midnight Special,” the famous get out of jail song, the themes of which he apparently knew well.
Alas, Belly was back in prison five years later, Louisiana this time, for knifing if not killing a white man in a fight. After recording hundreds of his songs for the Library of Congress on portable equipment in the notorious Angola Prison Farm, the musicologists John Lomax and his young son, Alan, carried his next supplication for freedom to the Louisiana governor adhered to the back of a record of Lead Belly’s signature song, the delicate and romantic "Goodnight Irene."
Although prison officials and his family claimed his singing had nothing to do with his release, it makes a good story. It illustrates that even in the brutally racist Jim Crow south, the creation of beauty can mitigate – somewhat – the creation of pain. This places Roman Polanski, if not above the law, alongside it.
Oct 1, 2009 by D. Blair
Burning Man: What Story Should Be Told? The end of August is when the Bay Area media and arts community divides into three: those bereft because their buddies all left for Burning Man, the art/lifestyle festival held annually in the Nevada desert, those who wouldn’t go if you paid them, and the majority – those going to Burning Man!
We at CineSource, in the first category, would be totally jealous of our friends Rob Nilsson and Laurent Le Gall, in the third, except that they’re going to shoot a feature and that is one tough gig. In addition to the extreme heat and dust, how do you properly portray Burning Man’s experiment in organized anarchy?
That’s what confronted Dana Harrison, an ex-BM organizer and ex-corporate banker turned artist housing and opera empresario, when she joined with composer Mark Nichols and librettist Erik Davis three years ago. “Do we tell the story of how much fun it is, or how difficult, or its internal conflicts, or its possible meaning to a the wider world?” wondered Harrison, also a close personal friend, also going to BM, her thirteenth – lucky her!
In the end, “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” the opera, deftly dovetails all four themes in a striking collection of songs and stories, the central drama hinging between those wanting to keep BM small and edgy and those wanting to open it up to the world. I saw its impressive preview last year and the full spectacle is going up in October, at Teatro ZinZanni, on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, October 5 - 7 and 12 - 14. See A Burning Opera – but soon, it’s selling out.
A bunch of burning movies have been made, even though some “burners” prefer not to have their frolics filmed. Professionals must get official permission and anyone shooting anything must get personal permission from those whose light they’ve captured. Indeed, one of the few rules on the “playa,” as burners fondly call their desolate stretch of Nevada desert, is “Ask first.”
One of the best films is Laurent Le Gall’s documentary "Burning Man: Voyage in Utopia.” It tells two tales: the festival’s history, which started with a small man burn on a San Francisco beach 23 years ago by Marin sculptor David Best, who is interviewed extensively and built many of BM’s most beautiful temples, and Laurent’s. A garrulous French immigrant, he was surprised to find out about BM – “Why were they hiding this,” he asks, in his self-reflective doc – and even more so when he got to Black Rock City, another name for the festival, which becomes the third biggest town in Nevada for a week.
That Laurent is now filming his second BM feature, with Rob Nilsson, is something CS can claim a small part in. After we covered his film “Voyage" in our Aug 08 article, “Hot Docs,” he attended CineSource’s annual November party, where he met Rob Nilsson, an old friend of CS, who occasionally writes for, or is covered by, the mag. Since Rob is the uncontested indie master, it was a match made in heaven, not only for Laurent, who wanted to move from doc to narrative, but for his preferred subject, BM – one vast improvisation.
Nilsson’s film journey, also detailed in Aug08 CS, “ Independent Master,” went from winning Cannes with a traditional narrative, “Northern Lights,” in 1979, to developing a sophisticated system for making largely improvised features, a craft he teaches at his film workshops in Berkeley, see Direct Action Workshops or 510 527-7217.
Now 69, but fit as a fiddle, he’s had over forty years experience working with collectives and alternative films, where the balance between “letting’er rip” and stepping in, like typical film director, is the difference between indulgent garbage and jazz-like, free-blowing brilliance. We don’t know what angle they’ll take – “We’ll tell you when we get back,” Laurent retorted – but tune in to the October CS to find out.
In his new film “Taking Woodstock,” Ang Lee, who has tackled many extreme realities, from being a gay cowboy in Utah to undercover sex work in WWII, decided to observe the oversized event from the sidelines. This is understandable, since watching others have extreme fun can be annoying, if you don't know why, and art about the hippie experience has been dogged by camp, romantic panegyrics or dystopian nightmares. Some reviewers take Ang to task for dodging the full monty of mud, acid, and music, but others, like the East Bay Express’s Kelly Vance, praise “Taking Woodstock” highly. But have things changed from Woodstock to Western Nevada or is there nothing new under the sun, no matter how boiling?
“Radical self-reliance and radical self-expression,” is what characterize BM, according to Will Roger, a BM organizer as well as CineSource West Oakland neighbor, who split for the desert around seven weeks ago to get it all going. (Will kindly comped me a ticket when I finally went for the first time three years ago.) While Woodstock’s self-reliance meant making it happen, with out money or anyone getting killed, and the environmental pressure was the rain, at BM you have to bring your own shelter, food, water – a stupendous 1.5 gallons to drink daily – and the environment spits out vicious dust storms as well as blistering heat.
BM also has good live music, with appearances by the Mermen, Albino and other regular, wild-enough, bands, and it is know for its trance sound, with well-known rave-DJs sometimes flying in from London (literally, they have an airstrip, often with over 100 planes and Will himself is a pilot). BM's principle art, however, is sculpture. Last year, the New York Times finally recognized it as the West Coast’s best sculpture garden, with a front page color photo and article. Indeed, the mile-wide central playa-plaza had dozens of lovely multi-ton pieces, from Dan Dos Mann’s oversized praying people to a nine-story I-beamed-building, called “Babylon,” and various temples, included the two-story center piece of recycled filigrees and dangly bits, eventually covered with confessional notes and pictures of loved ones.
Another obvious BM theme is the performance and lifestyle art, which highlights humanity’s gallop into an uncertain tech, gender and relationship future. This can include dressing up or living naked, doing theater, dance, or swinging your fist, as long as it stops short of your neighbor’s nose. Unless, of course, they’re S&Mers, of which there are plenty at BM, and you ask first. The latter express themselves, rather spectacularly, at the Thunderdome, beating each other with foam bats while hanging from bungies – some on hooks into their flesh!
A lot of BM has to be seen to be believed, as I can attest. I lived among burners for years in West Oakland but preferred camping by cool sierra streams; and why art only about fire (I'm a watercolorist); or what about Burning Woman? When I finally attended, three years ago, I found that fire is not a negligible metaphor for human evolution and that women do emerge, rather empowered, and that the adverse environment is a powerful statement, in and of itself. When you’re caught on the playa in a pea-soup dust storm, that could choke you if you didn’t have your number one piece of equipment – a painter’s mask or respirator, you are highly likely to conclude: “Damn, this desert could kill me!”
While dust storms hit you physically, it is the fire theme that pulls Burning Man together, symbolically. At first, the pyromania seemed largely about Buddhist impermanence but the implications kept coming. The sculpture of the man, often over 100 feet high, is incinerated in a wild party atmosphere on Saturday night but the central temple is torched, in quiet meditative way, on Sunday night. Evidently, we’ll re-invent religion even when ostentatiously free and even demon worshipping. Moreover, in addition to the objects being burnt, there’s the liquid gasoline.
Perhaps this is why the New York Times was so slow to recognize BM: New Yorkers often don’t drive, work on cars or know that the West was won by eight cylinders not six shooters. Celebrating the internal combustion engine might seem strange when we are trying to flee fossil fuels as fast as we can and, of course, BM is well-represented with photo voltaics, water recyclers and other green ideas, enthusiasts and industry reps – all of whom drove up there. But, as Marcel Duchamp pointed out, when he hung a urinal in a New York gallery in 1917, different contexts help us make sense of things.
A radical new perspective is what I found on my first stroll across the playa, with its friendly and festively dressed/undressed people, large sculptures and many “Art Cars” – all the more spectacular, as well as comfortable, by night. Riding around on an art car one night, standing on its second story, listening to a kid from Peoria (literally, his brother sent him a ticket) tell me, “This was the best day of my life,” and surveying the vast expanse of Black Rock City, speckled with a thousand flames, neon lights and video screens, I had an epiphany about the evolution of fire.
Some Art Cars are funky little VWs covered with geegaws, a la Harrod Blank’s collection (son of Berkeley filmmaker, Les Blank). Others are eighteen wheelers tricked out like pirate ships or silver sphinxes, rigged with sound systems and wet bars, and carrying a conspicuous elite, often ruled by women who like to strut around, sometimes naked, playing mind games but also making the whole thing run, “a clean ride." Indeed, that was the explanation Mistress M of Santa Monica gave me, as she booted me off, right after my fire vision, which I am glad I didn't tell her about.
BM is radically egalitarian, as well as self-reliant and self-expressive, but only on the public playa. Inside art cars, as well as compounds and trailers, it’s utterly private and elitist, like any hipster scene. This is an odd, considering the anarchic cri de coeur, alas inevitable, given the universal “Man’s Home is his Castle” rule and the tendency, among folks to follow leaders or rock stars. In any event, someone must step up and help us control the elements as well as our lesser selves and brethren.
A daring fire master, Prometheus, must have been how we harnessed fire some million years ago – a full nine hundred thousand years before grammatical language – and why it is so imbedded biologically – we can stare at it for hours (the first TV)? Only at Burning Man can you easily observe fire’s evolution from cook fires to car culture and, of late, the video pixels firing in the increasingly frequent and large screens burners are bringing up.
Speaking of evolution, Darwin’s theory is the theme of this year’s BM, honoring the 200th year of his birth and 150th of the “Origin of the Species through Natural Selection.” But burners focus not into the survival of the fittest expounded in that book, as much as the communication, cooperation and sex of Darwin’s second, lesser known, theory: sexual selection. This is not because they were taught sexual selection’s radical take – indeed it’s uncommon even in scientific circles, and there are lots of scientists at BM, including a contingent that comes annually from Antarctica (speaking of scientific evolution, this year BM has cell phone and wireless service). Rather, burners practice sexual selection simply because that is how life evolved and functional anarchy inevitably brings us back to the basic tao of life.
Another basic life force is gift giving, which emerges at Black Rock City since since there's no money use allowed inside, except at the central café. BM gift culture ranges from folks instantly offering a helping hand or plate of food to setting up full nightclubs, roller skating rinks or iced frappuccino stands in the middle of the steaming desert – totally free.
There's also a the sexual giving, with BJs much in vogue, as well as pole dancing as women take off politically correctness as well as clothes and indulge inevitable fantasies, as well as trade for services barter system. When some strong men are needed to stake down the tent in gale-force winds or build shade structures or haul water, women are archetypally inspired to reciprocate.
OK, so BM is a fantastic event everyone should have the honor of enjoying at least once, if not ten times, in a lifetime. After about ten trips to Black Rock, it seems, all but the most hardcore find they have learned enough, but BM is not dying out. Au contraire, it's flourishing, over 50,000 participants, up from 5,000 in the 90s, with burners flocking from across the globe, including many from New York City.
BM is also expanding its scope, exporting art and ideas, notably its massive public sculpture, through its Black Rock Foundation, a non-profit run in part by Crimson Rose, another CS friend from West Oakland, who is doing a fantastic job apportioning an annual purse that now tops ten million. Not only do they fund projects on the playa but public art all over the States and now overseas (where small burns are emerging).
But, aside from pure art of the sculptures, performances and music, and the obvious Woodstock message – have fun, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and enlightenment – what are the deeper stories we can communicate or learn through the Burning Man experience?
We have enumerated a few here – nature bats last, gender relations are evolving rapidly, freedom breeds generosity and religion. Hopefully, the Le Gall-Nilsson team will uncover a few more, which we'll report in Oct CS, and you can view an excellent operatic summary if you go see, “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” at the Teatro ZinZanni in October.
Either way, we have to harness the fire of narrative, in order to enjoy BM, not just for decisive moment but eternity of culture. After all, from the invention of fire on, which was used to illuminate caves for paintings or clan gatherings for storytelling, that’s what humans do.
Aug 31, 2009 by D. Blair
Studios Booming / Indie Houses Bombing The fiftieth anniversary of Shadows, John Cassavetes’s groundbreaking 1959 film, has passed without so much as a “Boo!” Meanwhile, the big studios are booming and the indie houses are bombing.
About interracial relations among Manhattan beatniks — could it be more timely — Shadows was one of the earliest indies and it took the 1960 Venice Film Festival by storm, earning the Critic’s Award. The same year in Cannes, François Trufaut's 400 Blows dominate. To fund Shadows, Cassavetes corralled friends, family, and listeners to a late-night, New York talk show, "Night People," an innovative idea that deserves reexamination. Unfortunately, Shadows only snuck back into the US as an import from European distributors and garnered negligible box office numbers.
Fifty years later, the independent distributers who might be bringing us a new Shadows have largely closed up, from Warner Independent to New Line and the Wienstiens, while the studios are doing a stratospheric business, with tickets sales headed for 11.2 billion, 16% over last year and the greatest film year in history! And they are achieving this largely without megastar blockbusters, many of which, like Eddie Murphy's Imagine That did poorly or much worse then expected.
But all is not lost, according to Kevin Brown, of Likewise Media, a DVD manufacturing plant in El Cerrito, CA. “Songs you can listen to ten, even hundreds of times, but movies — like what, once or twice maximum for most people,” Brown told me in an interview at CineSource, West Oakland. “So you need lots of movies, especially for those specialty audiences who are not otherwise well served.”
Brown focuses on the African American market, as does Lawrence Holliday, see Holliday Entertainment, who has produced the sexy Big Things Happen In The Bay, starring Kat Willaims, and Asphalt Graffiti, a doc about the Oakland automotive art form called ” “Sideshows.” Also known as making “donuts,” it involves braking and accelerating while twisting the wheel, and it leaves those circular skids you may have seen across intersections. To see another cute little doc on it: Street Muscle: Oakland Car Clubs.
CineSource writer, Gus Manos, doubles down on Brown and Holliday in "Finding Financing," his upcoming article for CineSource (Sep09), with a companion piece "Thinking Like Funders" only on the web, in CineSource’s brand new “C Stories,” coming this week. Certainly, if less then rich African Americans can do it, cash can be found for other large niche audiences. Following the Cassavetes system, Manos notes, “(f)inancing usually requires cobbling together funds from several sources… and many indie producer/directors simply take it upon themselves, soaking friends and relatives or running up credit card debt, simply to get something to show.”
“You can talk all day long and hand people scripts,” indie director/producer Julie Rubio told CineSource in her Apr08 interview, “But if the people investing in you can’t see it, it’s not tangible. And they don’t know your angle on the story, the look of the film… make it real and you’re halfway there.” Rubio has just reedited her freshman outing, the sexy and stylish Six Sex Scenes and a Murder, with Steve Mirkovich, an A-List L.A. editor of The Passion of the Christ and Darkness Falls, among others. And she starting her second feature, Mass Pleasures, next month, with Oakland standing in for Hawaii in many scenes.
To get actual funding, “real money,” Manos recommends classes from the Producers Guild, the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS), which recommends “Think like a funders” the inspiration for his upcoming "C Stories" piece, or the Institute for International Film Financing (IIFF). According to Thomas Trenker, the founder and director, the institute holds seminars from LA to Lucerne and their events target both filmmakers and financiers alike, operating on the premise that both sides stand to benefit from a better understanding of each other’s needs.
But making the flick is not enough, you have to promote and sell it. This requires enough ink and action in the real world to trigger DVD sales. Nowadays, many floggers say cut back on expensive ads in old media and focus on direct personal contact as well as the internet.
Indeed, the soon to be released Age of Stupid is an epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. Stupid stars Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as the sole survivor in climate catastrophied 2055, looking at footage from 2008 and wondering: Why were we so damned stupid? New ideas are often considered crank until accepted hence they invariably need new modes of financing. Stupid was done with 228 shareholders raising a total of $748,000. Similarly, it will open alternatively, with a 400-theater single-night event, which features an appearance by Radiohead. Moreover, in England you can download it, pay a license fee and show it on your 42” flat for your own profit. It’s a whole new world out there, so we may as well be getting used to it.
Empire Film Group out of Malibu, an indie distribution company, emerging to take the place of the fallen giants, says seven theatrical releases will drive a record quarter of their video sales for 2010, estimated at over 50 million. Those DVDs include "War Eagle, Arkansas," a family drama now in theatres, as well as "The Secret of Kells," an acclaimed animated feature, and "Thru The Moebius Strip," a $16 million, animated 3D sci-fi. "The acquisition and release of completed film and video properties has proven to be an especially wise business model for Empire," said Dean Hamilton-Bornstein, Empire CEO, which is pretty surprising since the studios say DVD sales have fallen.
Meanwhile, Animazoo announced it is starting Chechnya’s first motion capture system, using an IGS-190 full body motion capture suit, at a new Ministry of Culture initiative near Chechnya’s capital Grozny, which was left in ruins not once but twice in the last fifteen years by the Russian Army. According to obviously romantic Magomed Elgarayev, the current studio head, it has ‘no rivals’ in Russia, a situation abetted by its bilingual French, Spanish and Italian support staff.
So farm it out or make it underground, the indie feature, narrative, doc or anime, will always have a place in the cinema firament. If only it could be shot up there instead of laboriously Everest-assaulted, rope in teeth.
Aug 18, 2009 by D. Blair
Advancing the Arts in Oakland and America Impresario Rocco Landesman has been named head of the National Endowment for the Arts while, in West Oakland, a film-video professional group struggles for both existence and to build Oakland's media business, two ends of the all-important American art advancement project.
Rocco (what a name) is another brilliant Barack move, perfectly designed to endear American arts and his admin with:
• The Hayseeds (Rocco has southern roots and an interest in baseball and country music)
• The Jews (he’s a Missouri — pronounced “misery” — Jew)
• The New Yorkers (he owns the third biggest Broadway chain, Jujamcyn, with five theatres), and, last but not least
• The Berkeley Activists (he’s been called ''a wild man,” who’s militantly pro-art and says what ever is on his mind).
Some of the same could be said of Sean House. An ex-Navy NCO, House fulfilled his dream of getting into film by bartending across the street from ILM, getting to know some employees and eventually joining the massive model-making (and blowing-up) department — now split off as Kerner Optical, which seems to be defying the economic doldrums and doing well this summer. House is leading the charge for the Oakland Film Center, a group of some 30 filmmakers and below-the-line workers, which turned “swords into plowshares” by artifying the old Oakland army base.
In addition to House’s own company, Outhouse Productions (what a name), which specializes in props, models, creatures, weapons and blowing things up, of course, the Oakland Film Center includes:
• Freyer Lighting and Grip Trucks
• Ranahan Productions, with full gear, PAs and communication capacity
• Debbie Brubaker, an esteemed local producer, who did “La Mission,” “All About Evil,” and "The Darwin Awards," among many others, as well as counseled Oakland’s own Carmen Madden
• David Hakim, who used to executive edit CineSource and is an assistant director and all around man-about-set
• John Behrens, Robert Fujioka, Jonh McLeod and about fifteen others (see Oakland Film Center).
Speaking of Carmen Madden, she completed “Every Day Blackman,” her very pro and personal feature in May. She is premiering it at the Atlanta Peachtree Fest, in September, and she is finally doing her first private Oakland screening in ten days (shoot me a line if you want an invite). In fact, not only will the showing, at the Fantasy Building in Berkeley, include “Every Day Blackman,” about a seemingly average small businessman caught between the bankers, the Black Muslim Bakery extortionists and his own past, but a promo for "Shadow Fight," her next feature, which will start principle photography next June, in 2010. Evidently, Ms. Madden's CLM Productions is becoming studio and doing a film a year, right here in the East Bay, as reported in a long article or the Madden interview, both in CineSource's April 09 issue.
Now back to our other Oakland story, the Oakland Film Center, together with Ami Zinn and the Oakland Film Office, as well as CineSource (I might humbly add) is actively promoting and attracting film to Oakland. The Oakland Port killed the Wayan Brothers 2007 plan to turn the army base into a full blown studio by stating that port trucking had to continue unimpeded. Indeed, the Wayans could expect shipping containers stacked ten high around their property — an absurdity since they rarely go above five, traffic could have been shunted to the large 7th street freeway entrance and, hey, couldn’t we make just a little sacrifice for a @#*%$ film studio and the millions of dollars of incomes and taxes it would provide? Nevertheless, the city/port agreed to allow the Oakland Film Center to survive and it is carrying forth boldly.
After getting kicked out nicer warehouses on the base, the OFC moved to the funky but still serviceable buildings on the corner of Maritime (easily viewable from the West Oakland exit, first exit over the Bay Bridge). “We would be happy to put some money into refurbishing these spaces,” notes House, “If we had some security.”
A clause remains for the continued existence of OFC, after House and his buds attended a special Oakland City Council meeting, on July 28th, where the Council was deciding between the California Commercial Group or the Federal Oakland Associates. The Council went with the former, headed by Phil “The Great” Tagami, a small time Oakland developer who grew to head the Port, redo the Fox Theater, build the Oakland Rotunda Building, and much more. Tagami wants to put in a trucking hub, with an all night gas station — you may know the type from Little America, Wyoming.
Having the OFC in West Oakland is critical, according to House, because: “We are not the big fish — those would be the TV and film producers — we are the bait. We provide the one-stop shop for all your below-the-line needs. And we are centrally located, which is very convenient and can save your grip, soundperson or producer 20 or 30 minutes sleep in the morning,” (indeed, crews often rise at 5:30 to be set up to shoot by 7:30).
“The Oakland Film Center is a city treasure,” the City Council agreed, after House and his associates finished explaining. It remains in the Tagami development plan, with continue residence on the army base until spring 2010. Although trucking is naturally big in port town, film can be pretty damn lucrative — "The Matrix" brought in some ten million dollars and a bunch of permanent jobs. Indeed, the hardworking Oakland councilwoman Nancy Nadel is pushing as hard as she can to keep or grow as many jobs as possible, following her neighborhood’s marketing slogan, “West Oakland Works,” see the West Oakland Chamber of Commerce (webmastered, oddly enough, by CineSource’s production house, A Media).
“Art Works,” coincidentally, is Rocco Landesman’s non-Rococo (meaning ornate, 18th century, French) new slogan. It's a definite improvement over the Bush-era NEA’s, “A great nation needs great art.” If anyone can light a fire under bureaucracy’s posteriors, it is Mr. Landesman, who produced Tony Kushner's ''Angels in America,'' and brought Paul Simon's ''The Beauty Queen of Leenane'' to Broadway, both arty extravaganzas, the latter flopped miserably, but it couldn't happen to a nicer guy, according to Rocco.
Meanwhile, House is a good candidate to shake things up here. With his knowledge of blowing-up some things, like models, and building-up other things, like community organizations, he is helping keep film viable not only in Oakland but the whole Bay Area. Well aware of how Canadian tax incentives sucked the life out of Bay Area film a decade ago, now that California has finally instituted its own tax incentives, House wants to attract production back. To do this, “We need to build the teams and facilities able to do it.”
Tim Ranahan, also part of the Oakland Film Center, proposed the Production Assistant University to train local underserved kids and, thereby, help rebuild the IATSE teams, PA minions and below-the-line pros that a revived Bay Area film industry would need. Incidentally, the Production Assistant University plan is a bit like the Cultural Connections Institute, suggested for West Oakland by A Media in 1995, and mentioned in last week’s B Roll from Aug 4 09.
Perhaps, such a fantastic academic, media and business center would be more appropriate not in the Army base, especially after the massive truck stop goes in, but five blocks down West Grand at the even larger Pacific Steel site, owned by another film impresario, San Francisco's own esteemed Maurice Kanbar. While the vast, funky warehouse was recently rented to Dan Das Mann, of monumental Burning Man sculpture fame, there are plenty of other lots left in West Oakland where Das Mann could erect his seventy-foot wrought-iron female figures. Near the corner of West Grand and facing the lovely re-landscaped Mandela Parkway, on the other hand, is a perfect place for 30 film companies, the Production Assistant University, the Cultural Connections Institute, and a couple of cafes and clubs. Indeed, it could anchor for the avenue’s rebirth as a newer, hipper version of Emeryville. Oh please god, pretty please (I live down the street and need a place for morning cappuccino).
Aug 10, 2009 by D. Blair
Bay Area Emissaries in Korea and Iran Breaking News: Bill Clinton just secured the release of the Bay Area filmmakers, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, from North Korea where they supposedly crossed the border into that country. We are so thankful for the safety of the daring ladies and the political success of Bill. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the actual Secretary of State, is saddled with appealing to an Iran -- that is blaming the West for meddling in its elections -- for the two East Bayers and one Oregonian apprehended two days ago on its border with Kurdistan.
People-to-people diplomacy is alive and well in the Bay Area. Another good example is Roberto Miguel, or “Miguel from Oakland,” a local musician who made a name for himself troubadoring around Mexico, where he caught the eye of Mexican doc maker Ricardo Silva. Miguel, whose last name is Reyes, came up with local musical activist Andres Soto studying jazz but soon busted out in the fertile Oakland scene, from hiphop to rock. See also the east Bay Express article: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/music/oakland_s_troubadour/Content?oid=1164080.
Hopefully to play the Oakland Film Festival, “Miguel from Oakland” is a Spanish language film, more at http://www.myspace.com/miguelfromoakland, and typifies what should be a booming business here. Instead of sending out the endless emissaries, for which we are so famous, we also need bring in crews from France, Holland and China, as well as Mexico, say, to document the cultural cauldron that is the Bay Area and especially the East Bay. While the Bay Area is well integrated with people from all over, it is only in the East Bay, notably Oakland, that communities are also class integrated.
Indeed, Oakland would be a perfect place for Cultural Connections Institute, a free-standing media community center and school that did three things: A) taught media, narrative and journalism skills, B) helped individuals of different communities connect with each other C) stimulated the construction of CCIs elsewhere around the world: Jerusalem, Amsterdam, Sudan, Baghdad, etc. As the most multicultural city in the United States, therefore the world, this is an essential asset that should not go untapped. How do we all love together – not only black and white but Arab and Jew, Indian and cowboy (Miguel from Oakland features music by Miguel of course but also Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson) and many others – is a secret we need to share, indeed market.
Meanwhile, the work is carried forth by individuals, like those recently arrested in Iraq. Sarah Shourd, of Oakland, is a teacher-activist-journalist who was studying Arabic in Damascus and writing about Iraqi refugees. Her boyfriend, Shane Bauer of Emeryville, is a peace and conflict resolution grad from Berkeley who wrote a recent article about US Special Ops for The Nation. Typical Cali-kids, they loved hiking and thought to avail themselves of the beautiful mountains of Kurdistan, despite the fuzzy borders and guerilla groups known to exist in the area. Enjoying themselves to the end, Kurdish authorities said their abandoned camp included notebooks and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
It is not known whether Shourd, Bauer and their friend, Josua Fattal of Oregon, actually were violating Iran’s sovereignty. As with the reporters Euna Lee and Laura Ling, from Al Gore's Current TV, who were arrested along the Chinese-North Korean border in March and sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor (although they were being housed in guest houses), they may have been grabbed from the safe side by aggressive border patrols. What is known is: we might be better served if they were back home teaching a CCI class on how to successfully research a foreign country without getting caught or by more artistic emissaries like Miguel of Oakland.
Aug 4, 2009 by D. Blair
Great Japanese Animator Miyazaki, and Funky W. Oakland Film Fest
As if he wasn’t busy enough directing animation at Disney, as well as Pixar, John Lasseter recently facilitated a mini-tour for Hayao Miyazaki, the great Japanese animator, part of which graced the East Bay. The reclusive Miyazaki was a bit reluctant until Lasseter said he would be there every step of the way, which he was, at least up until San Diego, where he interviewed Miyazaki at Comic-Con, Friday, July 24.
Before we get to Miyazaki, we want to note the 15th Annual Brainwash Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival (see brainwashm.com), is coming to West Oakland, home to Pixar Studios (well, Emeryville) as well as CineSource MagWeb. It will be held on Fri, July 31 -Sat, Aug 1, 9:00 pm, American Steel Building (recently purchased by Dan Das Mann, of Burning Man massive sculpture fame),1960 Mandela Parkway, Oakland (cross W. Grand, first exit over Bay Bridge). The Brainwash Fest always features striking shorts, some of which become instant classics.
Miyazaki, meanwhile, was here to promote a feature, “Ponyo," his latest, undoubtedly also to become an instant classic. Done on cell animation, in his dreamy style, it is about a boy and his mermaid girlfriend and their mythical perigrinations. In the course of Comic-Con, Miyazaki sometimes fielded his old friend Lasseter’s queries with a little tongue-in-cheek, for example: “My process is thinking, thinking, and thinking about my stories for a long time.”
But, the next day, at Zellerbach Auditorium, where he received the 2009 Berkeley Japan Prize, Miyazaki was a bit more forthcoming, if only slightly (see transcript below). Conducted by Roland Kelts, the author of “JapanAmerica," “It was a spirited cat and mouse exchange,” noted CineSource's observer, Russell Merritt, a Univ of Cal Berkeley film/animation professor.
“Miyazaki was a delight, usually beginning an answer with a rumbling growl that turned into a child-like giggle… and his answers were rich in self-effacing irony,” continued Merrit. “For all the talk of Miyazaki's bluntness and temper, he was utterly unflappable, turning away questions that he plainly feels deeply about, such as the future of cell animation, the corrosive effects of TV on children, with a light hand.”
"What advice he would give a young animator?" Kelts queried. “Sketch what you see with your own eyes, and find a teacher who won't coddle you." Why are there so few evil characters in his films? "It is not pleasant to draw evil characters, so I don't draw them." Overcoming creative blocks? “You have to smell blood,” in your brain.
In the course of forty-eight years, Miyazaki visionary, meticulous and emotionally rich films turned him into an animator’s animator outside Japan. Inside, he is beloved by artists, children and critics alike.
Miyazaki started his own animation studio, Studio Ghibli, in Koganei City on the outskirts of Tokyo, in 1985, after the success of his second big feature “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” a proto-environmentalist piece that takes place 1000 years after the earth’s destruction. Although the studio is headed by Miyazaki, who storyboards each film, he gets some help from long time associate, Isao Takahata, as well as Disney.
Although Ghibli films are distributed in Japan by the noted Toho company, Disney soon got involved for the worldwide rights, notably for the acclaimed "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away," the 2002 masterpiece, which won the Cartoon Oscar, the first for a Japanese film. Roger Ebert called it, "The best animated film of recent years...” and Miyazaki, “The Japanese master who is a god to the Disney animators."
The most acclaimed film from Ghibli, "Grave of the Fireflies," was helmed by Takahata, and focuses on two war orphans during the Second World War — touchy material terrifically handled. Among other Ghibli films are: "My Neighbor Totoro" (1988);" Kiki's Delivery Service" (1989); "Princess Mononoke" (1997); "Spirited Away" (2001; Oscar winner); and "Howl's Moving Castle" (2004; Oscar nominee).
Below is a partial transcript of the Zellerback Interview with Ronald Kelts, who started with a rumination: Realism is in service of the imagination and imagination is in service of?
Miyazaki: Animate means to breathe into; to bring to life. Many young people live in virtual worlds, i.e. video games, television. There is a danger that they might lose imagination.
K: The subtext of many of your films is the apocalyptic theme. In “Ponyo” there is a great Tsunami.
M: Nature is included inside people, nature is not outside people. The tsunami is a cleansing for people, for their town. I use my imagination about an apocalypse, a disaster. Disasters make people behave better, they look after each other. For me, natural disaster is not equated with bad, evil. Evil characters, I don't like to draw evil figures. So, they're not in my films.
K: Ponyo was a fish, yet it's a girl, what's going on?
M: Ponyo started out to be a red tin toy frog, but I couldn't make a story from it. Main character is a goldfish but it doesn't look like a goldfish. Nature is beyond understanding. The eyes in Totorro, you can't tell where they're looking or what the character is thinking. He said he told his animators to draw the eyes looking somewhere else.
K: You use a lot of fantasy in your work.
M: “Spirited Away” has an entry point into a fantasy world. I am always looking for one and it was the tunnel.
K: There are female protagonists in your films?
M: Studio Ghibli has 22 new animators and of these only four are male. Our school has 22 animator students and only 1 is male. The women are very good. Films roles of boys and girls are different. In my films there is a need to fulfill promises made. This is very important.
K: In Anime feature films are usually based on Manga. But your films are not Manga based. Why?
M: I enjoy Manga by just reading it. Better if you do not make it into animation. Manga and film have very different time and space. Manga can become very boring if animated. Condensation of time is a salient feature of Manga. We draw time in animation.
K: You do storyboards yourself. Why?
M: In Japan it is normal for the director to draw the storyboard. It is a condition to become a director. A director who can't draw a storyboard is not considered a director completely.
K: How do you get your ideas?
M: Like me, I tell staff that they have to struggle hard, ‘til they find it's useless or impossible and then, they'll find something. You have to smell blood.
We have to find the best ending or the best ending finds us. We want characters to become happy. When I make a film, I just manage to get through it. I don't want to see it again. I try to forget about it.
K: What about the challenges of finding and keeping young talent?
M: It is difficult to keep animators. We are sending work to China and Korea. We keep drawing with a pencil. We want to keep jobs in Japan.
K: There are virtues in Miyazaki films but you may be a row boat amongst speed boats when we look at computer animation and your studio.
M: Yes, drawing by hand represents a lot of drudge work. But we hired a computer specialist artist and we found our hand drawing was faster. We're free-er in hand drawing. It's easier to get emotions than by computers. I encourage many of my colleagues to draw by hand. We're training animators who want to draw by hand.
K: What about making films for the international audience?
Miyazaki: Japanese audience supports us. We make our films for that audience.
Questions from the audience: What is important advice to students of animation
M: Sketch what you see and seek strict criticism.
Audience: What advice for creative block?
M: Think hard. I smell blood deep in my notes. Something might come to me. Three regions of our brain: the surface, the subconscious, and a deeper place. The deep place is the most difficult to get to and that's where I smell blood.
A: What is your goal in your films?
M: Give children the power to dream. My direction hasn't changed. These are not my films, they are our films. I'm thinking of my early years in the animation business and my colleagues, i.e., directors, animators, ink painters, others, when we wanted to make better films- not trashy films. Now we're making OUR films.
A: What is the concept of true love in “Ponyo.”
M: That's what life is. To deal with difficulties. When we overcome them, that is true love.
A: What about students or artists struggling to make animation in the face of hardships -or something like that?
M: Those who want to make films – should be making films!
A: Which artists have influenced you?
M: I've been influenced by many artists and I've gotten ideas from them. I'm in the business of making entertainment. I like Lasseter of Pixar and Aardman studios.
A: Would you like to make live action films?
M: Landscape has changed in 50 years. Roads, buildings have changed. Even people's faces are different.
A: Which of your films do you like best?
M: you can't differentiate in your children, you love them all. All my films are precious.
D. Blair July 28, 2009
The Power of Black Comedy Sasha Baron Cohen is back at the top of the box office — well, fourth place — beating out hometown hero “Up” by more then half last weekend's revenue. “Brüno,” Baron Cohen’s new comedy, is a bit more distasteful then "Borat," since he’s not gay, his touch is insufficiently surgical and anti-queerness is one of the last accepted prejudices.
But Cohen’s genius is hard to deny. He’s a damn good actor, his radical new filmmaking form, the narrative-documentary, can deliver brilliant versimilitude, and he tackles the forbidden Jewish question.
Many people don’t quite get it, seeing “Borat” as crass, in poor taste, over-the-top, even stimulating anti-Semitism. Such is the power of irony. It enters the brain as A but leaves as B, obliging the viewer to make the synaptical leap.
Among Iran's many movie lovers, who form the base of the freedom fighters we saw in the streets of Tehran last week, it is easy to imagine some of them viewing a pirated copy of “Borat” and arguing, “Borat is pro anti-Semite!” “No, he is making fun of anti-Semites.”
Certainly, having a bar full of Alabamans singing along to Baron Cohen playing “Throw the Jew Down the Well,” is masterful irony, as Terry Gross noted. That famous "Fresh Air" arbiter of left-leaning taste called the scene, “One of the funniest comedy pieces I have ever seen.”
Basically, “Borat” is the first full-on black humor, Jewish Question film. Of course, the very term “black humor” is another oddly racist-tinged descriptor, but it still works if we look at the fact that black in this context is a positive.
Indeed, going into the dark, difficult side of a story for humor is one of the best ways to analyze and heal it — the tendentious joke, as Freud termed it. It is a way of dealing with pain and contradiction that makes black humor a central part of black comedy, from Richard Pryor to Chris Rock.
And now the Jews have their own epic black humor advocate, Baron Cohen. Similar tendentious humor is explored in “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” by Adam Sandler, which openly ironizes the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and a script that A Media, CineSource’s parent company, is developing, called “What Is It With Israel?”
“What Is It With Israel?” concerns two brothers, one smart, one stupid, named Israel and Moses respectively. Although from a religious New York Jewish family, they are your typical friendly, stoner, gamer twenty-somethings living in San Francisco. The only caveat is that Moses, the dumb one, is trying to get a job at a bank, “Because the Jews control them,” and Israel, his more go-getter, architect brother, although a nice guy, is constantly getting into arguments about Israel.
Izzy thinks that in California — a state seized from the Indians, whom they exterminated, and the Spanish, whom they drove out, solely for the purpose of gathering gold — no one has the right to lecture him about the evils of Israel. Throw in the brother’s cousin, Diana, a comely comedienne a la Sarah Silverman, who refuses to discuss the Middle East, “I do comedy, not trajedy,” and then Ariel al-Hafas, the Palestinian writer and Rhodes Scholar, Israel falls in love with, and you have a mad cap comedy that will make you cringe all the way until your sides split.
Whether or not “What Is It With Israel?” is your cup of tea, intense black humor will be the order of the millennium, as we can see from the writers of Saturday Night Live to Sasha Baron Cohen. Perhaps, all we need in the Middle East to break the Israel-Palestine deadlock is not a new diplomatic initiative but a Dr. Strangelove-level comedy.
D. Blair July 20, 2009
Tour of the East Apologies all around, about the delay in this month’s gala issue getting up on the web, but we were on a whirlwind tour of the East Coast. We discovered that business is back on track in New York City, booming in South Carolina and ending in Florida and Massachusetts.
Although corperate industrial shoots have plummeted in New York, especially the banks and brokerage houses (go figure!), lots of little productions are stepping into take their place, if not at the same revenue level than increased content attraction. A bit of the latter is also up in South Carolina, where some young indies were recently busted for filming what appeared to be "fellating or simulating fellatio." The movie was titled Beach Week, a comedy about spring break, understandable then, although the filmmakers claimed "There was nothing going on."
What with their governor, Mark Sanford, getting actual action from a female member of the famously romantic South American tribe, the Argentines, you think they wouldn’t be worried. But this is still the ultra old-fashioned neck of the swampy South, and its residents have a bunch of moral ambiguities to sort.
Ex-New York filmmaker, Nick Lindsay, and Jackie, his actress-wife, say that things have gotten pretty busy. Charleston has become a cultural hub, with a lovely downtown and lots of concerts and galleries. And in this setting, filmmaking has jumped a notch, from local commercials to indie features. Lindsay is working on a doc about a doomsday prophet in New York and a feature starring Amy Koehler, although he was too busy to tell me much more about it.
Elsewhere in the East, Representative Joe de Minico, of Florida, is claiming that all the tax breaks they give filmmakers don’t really pay for itself, with increased jobs, etc. What, with all those MTV spots and Miami serials being filmed there? But that is what he claims, adding that the 43 states offering breaks are often forced to compete against each other and all loose in the process. Evidently, the complaint is falling on sympathetic ears in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, originally Puritan and Quaker states so perhaps more comprehensible than Florida.
Oh, well. Let them cancel the tax abatement and send more productions back to California where we just passed new tax breaks laws. Despite the fiscal crisis, they probably won’t be repealing them anytime soon. Indeed, on July 1, the California Film Commission, began accepting application and has received about 100 million worth from 60 productions, the majority being indie features. Of course, big studios are also eligible.
Re: Big studio production, a local producer emailed to complain that, contrary to our reports in the April Oakland issue, the television pilot "Parenthood" did get picked up, but is not shooting in Oakland, except for some scenics. Although she titled her email "irresponsible journalism," and noted "Check your facts. It is unfortunate, but true," the actual facts are even sadder. Parenthood has been cancelled entirely due to the undisclosed illness of its putative star Maura Tierney. Hope you all get better: Tierney, Oakland filmmaking and responsible journalists.
D. Blair July 10, 2009
Cinema Came on Strong this Weekend Cinema came on strong this weekend, from Coppola’s Tetro to the cultural influences of the new Iranian revolution. Obama’s new approach to the Islamic world, while being derided by petit-brained right wingers, is bearing fanstastic fruit in the Iranian election-stealing protest. These are people who want an accountable government, better relations to the outside and in-kind response to Obama’s balanced American offerings.
Perhaps more importantly, the ground for these protests was laid by Iran’s great film movement and immense artists like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbah, as noted by A. O. Scott in the June 20th NY Times. Like Dostoevski and Tolstoy behind the Russian revolution, Iranian culture creates the context for free thinking, helping your neighbor and liberalism. Sure, it hearkens back to Rumi and Hafez, as well as the oppressed and innovative Shi’a, but it is the great cinema of Iran, which started in the 1970’s and eventually led to the production of almost as many movies as the entire rest of the Muslim world combined, that has spurred creative thought among the people of in Iran.
Often highly allegorical and build on self-contained string of pearls scenes – also followed by the Japanese master Ozu and leading some to call it an Asian style – Persian cinema is deep, provocative and lush. Considering Tehran’s painters, rock and rollers, and writers like Azar Nafisi, whose Reading Lolita in Tehran is simply brilliant, the conflicts there and the wider Middle East, come down to a game of chicken between the intellectuals and the fascists. Not unlike in Germany in the early 30s and thrilling to watch, if the outcome were not so damn dangerous.
Speaking of allegory, Coppola’s Tetro has it in spades: the evil father, the lost older brother, the suitcases full of backwards writing, the younger brother’s clandestine attempt to decipher it all. It’s pretty stirring stuff, both archetypal and modern, with cell phones in use but taking place in romantic Argentina. The artistry is heightened to an almost unbearable level by the B/W photography of the Romanian cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. I don’t think chiarascuro has been used to such effect since Caravaggio – the deep sea blacks and diamond sparkling whites of the Andes Mountains speaking volumes as the two brothers drive in triumph and a test of wills and unexamined pasts to the Patagonia Artist festival.
While some will quibble with a few lines, Tetro is one exciting emotional and artistic adventure. You never know where the narrative will turn and Coppola, in this self-written script, gets your heart racing without any real violence, although there are some car crashes and an available gun and ax, contravening Chekhov’s Law. Vincent Gallo is great as the barely sympatico older brother, Maribel Verdú lovely as his loving girl friend, while new comer Alden Ehrenreich does a descent job as the teenager becoming a man, artistically, sexually and mystically. When finding hidden knowledge that is almost impossible to absorb be ready to man up and his de-virginizing scene great and believable.
With Tetro, Coppola is back on track on what he calls his second career, which started with the lackluster World without Youth, a ponderous and pontificating piece about the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade. Back in the new world, but with the best the old has to offer, including the Romanians behind the camera not infront, Coppola is bridging his many worlds but with an emphasis on passion, exploration and going deeper. I can’t await outing three.
CineSource had a little blog melt down as well loss of its front page over the last week, we still can’t figure out why. Perhaps one of our competitors is hacking us, but that is absurd. But we will keep at it – hits now exceeding 20,000 a month – despite any hackers and the advertisers deserting us. Look for the Jul/Aug double issue, in color, with great articles and interviews from Pixar to Mexican Cinema to how to get indie film financing.
D. Blair June 22, 2009
In LA, dropping off CineSources and taking the temperature We just got back from LA, dropping off CineSources – they’re becoming popular at rental houses like HD Camera on Jefferson and T-Stop on Melrose – and taking the temperature. They don’t seem to be suffering that much, save in the mid-level industrial zone. Commercial features are doing great. Although “Hangover,” a typical LA romantic comedy, edged out our team’s more melancholic Pixar hit, “Up,” box office revenue is booming – projected to be up 10% or more from last year, a phenomenal increase.
The indie cineastes we talked to in Venice also seemed undeterred and dreaming big. Driving up the coast was a needed meditation for our own big picture, especially with a hot bath at Esalon – designed by Mickey Muenig, green architect extrodinaire and friend, with some great Big Sur locations.
The beauty was suddenly shattered, however, by a radio report that Bay Area filmmakers Euna Lee and Laura Ling had gotten 12 years hard labor in North Korea’s notorious labor camps. In – @#%* – sane!!! We’ll be covering their tragic story in the big double summer issue of CineSource – also featuring our production survey, still open for filing, by the way.
This can be called California’s structural ambiguity, beautiful nature and sad human reality, side by side. Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, were sentenced for the "grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing," according to the (North) Korean Central News Agency.
“Working with Euna, the little time I did, and being such a sweet heart and a mom, I just can’t imagine her doing anything they say she did,” said Julie Rubio, a filmmaker whose yoga video was late-night edited and essentially saved by Lee. “Sometimes when you work intimately and hardcore on a film you see sides of their personality you don’t even see in friends.”
Indeed, that is the sort of teary-eyed, film-family stuff we feel at CineSource, when we aren’t playing hard bitten journalists. Kidding aside, the Lee/Ling case is insanely serious, protests are in order, films, emails, anything. Please contact us if you know Ling or Lee and can contribute quotes or photos. And look for the article Jul/Aug CS.
D. Blair June 12, 2009
Things are booming all over the Bay Although film/video companies are in retreat across the Bay Area, East Bay Titan Pixar, essentially the new Disney, is number one with “Up” at the box office. Aside from opening Cannes, a first for an animated feature, it is earning record revenues almost triple its closest competitor, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, with 68 million last week. And no wonder: “Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever, the gorgeously rendered, high-flying adventure Up is a tidy 90-minute distillation of all the signature touches that came before it,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Indeed, things are booming all over the Bay. This year’s SF International Film Festival enjoyed a banner year: “Tickets sales are up… Audiences have been expanding continually over the last four years… membership has gone from 1,500 in 2005 to 4,000 today” according to Graham Leggat, the festival’s executive director. Content-wise, the festival was also impressive, according to CineSource’s June issue. Reporter Roger Rose covered the glitzy side, including the smoking sendoff party, and Tony Reveaux, looked at the more arty offerings of documentaries and shorts.
Best of all, Oakland indie, Frazer Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New won the coveted International Film Critics Award at the SFIFF. Considering he made ESAN on a shoe string it’s doubtful he will be deterred in producing his next project – once he shepherds this one through the festival hijinks and to a distributor – by any local fears of funding or film adventurousness. Speaking of festival insanity, Bradshaw may do a column for CS on negotiating the arcane world of where and when to open your film in order to get the best bang for your world-premier buck as well as other festival intricacies.
Heck, things are even booming for CineSource:
• Our Web hits hopped from 4,000 in January to a whopping 20,000 in May (see chart http://www.cinesourcemagazine.com)
• Our Production Survey postponed one month due to sex spam bots which seized our site, is now all set and open to be filled out until June 20 (see home page)
• Our First Annual Flaherty Documentary Award, a proposal contest for the prize of a two day/two person crew, is now due July 15 (see home page)
• Our The Loop column is three times the size it was just last month
Things are starting to move in Northern California media making and all we need to do is wait until everyone gets the news.
D. Blair June 2, 2009
Challenges to the Rating System and Closeted Gay Politicians The ratings system of the Motion Picture Association as well as closeted gay politicians have come under challenge by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick in his new film Outrage (see outragethemovie.com). While the MPA has long been comfortable with female nudity and hetero sex, gay sex is still thought to be subversive. “I couldn’t get anyone in the film business to speak about it,” said
Dick, so he went on to reveal the names of the rating members as well as the hypocritical gay politicians, who often vote against gay issues.
Not gay himself, Dick is a civil rights aficionado who did Twist of Faith, about a man abused by a priest, which won the 2004 jury prize at Sundance, as well as Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997), his best know piece. “I try to take a complex subject, and make it comprehensible,” said Dick. “I am very interested in psychology, like these politicians who lead double lives. I have been lucky to work with passionate people, [because these films] are labors of love.”
Another labor of love is showing old restored films. One avid advocate is Martin Scorsese who took the time at the Cannes Film Festival recently to announce his new website, theauteurs.com,. It will carry old films, many free, from the esoteric 1936 Turkish offering, Dry Summer to more well known material like the 1948 British film, Red Shoes.
Another amazing advocate is our own Speakeasy Master Scott who shows 16 mm films from his fantastic collection at the Vortex Room, 1082 Howard (see MYSPACE.COM/THEVORTEXROOM). Next week, on Thursday 21st experience the explosive thrills and chills of the nourish Kiss Me Deadly (1955) at 9:00pm and the sci-fi Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) at 11.
D. Blair May 19, 2009
Sophie Does NAB Sophie staggered by spouting on NAB. We are both wasted, me from 36 hour no sleeping putting out the May CineSource now at your local outlet she by being our intrepid reporter at the Vegas broadcasters event, which always throws her schedule and back out of whack.
Everything is the same old format discussion, Sophie complained. They have been having for years. But boys will always talk about their tools, no? In the case each brand new ways of crunching the digits has a slightly different effect. We like things that make images look different, like John Chater is quote in Sophies article, which will be up soon.
We also just got an email from Pixar. Whereas last year the big studios were writing us saying, Please stop sending us your magazine or calling us about the hot tub party, we are famous people with a lot better to do then read some measley production rag OK I made up that last part. This time the letter said, I was interested in the email subscription, not the print version.
Of course, we are already all on line, although we were thinking of doing a partial subscription, you pay for some special parts, whatever that means. But some one has to figure out how to monitize the web. YouTube is loosing a half billion a year.
We are loosing much less then that. Actually we are gaining immensely. CineSource Productions, which we formed in March and advertised in April is starting on some projects, and as noted above, the studios are already starting to email. D. Blair April 28, 2009
April out like a lamb, a drunk one Sophie staggered by spouting on NAB. We are both wasted, me from 36 hour no sleep, putting out the May CineSource (now at your local outlet) – she by being our intrepid reporter at the Vegas broadcaster’s event, which always throws her schedule and back out of whack.
Everything is the same old format discussion, Sophie complained. They have been having for years. But boys will always talk about their tools, no? In the case each brand new ways of crunching the digits has a slightly different effect. We like things that make images look different, like John Chater is quote in Sophie’s article, which will be up soon.
We also just got an email from Pixar. Whereas last year the big studios were writing us saying, “Please stop sending us your magazine or calling us about the hot tub party, we are famous people with a lot better to do then read some measley production rag…” OK I made up that last part. This time the letter said, “I was interested in the email subscription, not the print version.”
Of course, we are already all on line, although we were thinking of doing a partial subscription, you pay for some “special” parts, whatever that means. But some one has to figure out how to monitize the web. YouTube is loosing a half billion a year.
We are loosing much less then that. Actually we are gaining immensely. CineSource Productions, which we formed in March and advertised in April is starting on some projects, and as noted above, the studios are already starting to email.