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Funding Cuts, Oakland Occupy and Lots of Film by CineSource
This just in: Oakland's in crisis and worse than ever—shocking, isn't it!?!? As if the state's cuts of 28 million dollars in redevelopment was not enough to eviscerate the city, the Oakland Occupy is back on the streets while the "artless" city mothers and fathers are ignoring or stiffing the artists, gallery owners and many, multifaceted filmmakers!
Fortunately they are Nietzschesque: getting stronger and stronger. I only wish the latter were making a film about it, but, oh well a classic Oaklandish cine-outing for your delectation: Short Erotic Bike Films.
We will get to tragedies later—first the good news. One group doing amazing work is Youth Uprising in East Oakland. I've been hearing about them since they opened six years ago and am determined to get out, as soon as I can raise the bus fair, but I just talked to director Rafael Flores on the phone and it sounds fantastic.
Since opening in 2005, YU has gone from a barebones operation to a bustling, 25,000-square-foot and high-tech school and development center. With an ever-expanding membership of over 4000, mostly youth of color from East Oakland, they provided innovative classes on performing arts, remedial education, career development and Health and Wellness.
"Investments in young adults will result in the social and economic transformation of all residents," notes Flores. "We can create social change by harnessing the leadership of young people." See http://www.youthuprising.org
As if YU were not enough, Flores also runs Green Eyed Media a production company founded that creates music, movie reviews, photography, documentaries and narrative films. It’s goal is to promote artists in the Latino, African-American and indigenous communities around the world, albeit not exclusively, so that those voices can be heard in the US entertainment community.
Dedicated to the spirit of activism and organized as a collective, Green Eyed Media was started by Flores and Cameron Austin in Seattle but soon expanded to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Their website, http://www.greeneyedmedia.com, serves as a selling space for the independent artists who provide a wide array of freelance services for private companies or public institutions.
This is not unusual in Oakland where the Film Center was started in the old Army base seven and half years ago by Tim Oranahan, Sean House and Amy Zins, the old film commissioner, who helped squeeze out a break on the rent.
"The great experiment is still going strong," House recently told me. "It has actually become a model across the US when you start up studios or wish to gather around a film infrastructure."
"People said it wasn't going to work initially. What is the sense of putting two or three grip and electric companies in the same area? But it is like a great restaurant. If you have a lot of great restaurants, like up on Telegraph at Tamescal it becomes a destination. It is more 'co-opetition.' Everyone has their own flavor."
"There was enough articles written over the last eight years—including in your magazine, so that if you have a Google Alert showing Film Center, it is going to pop up," House continued. "The regional film commissioners, they talk about it and promote it. It is something they can show their local governments, that they are bringing funds in."
Next door to the Film Center, in West Oakland, Gregg Golding is shooting his second feature, “Illuminati Puppet” in April. “This film chronicles Sam Wright, a [fictional] conspiracy theorist author whose books concern the Illuminati, and who controls world finances, politics and pop culture," Golding told me.
"Meanwhile his old friend, Leon, is a health department worker who is investigating Madonna's, a fast food restaurant, which has both a kids playland, and an 'adult playland' which he suspects is a cover for drug use and prostitution."
Whoa?!?! As if this were not ambitious enough, when Sam stops over in the Bay Area, Leon, jealous of Sam's womanizing ends up dating a Illuminati drone infected with a government created STD that will kill him in three days. With the clock ticking, Leon and Sam dive down into the underbelly of conspiracy fighting replete with reptile-men, grey aliens, orangutan prostitutes and a fast food clown mascot.
This is Golding's second feature after "Struggled Reagan's”, an experimental comedy filled with adlibbed dialogue, trippy effects, and candy colored costumes that are equal parts Dali and power rangers, Japanese sci-fi and French New Wave. In it a squad of young people get super powers from their past traumas.
“I had the option of going more naturalistic with my 2nd feature” says Gregg, who is poking fun at Conspiracy Obsessers. “But the VFX heavy workflow of 'Struggled Reagans' inspired me to make another film that shows dreams and nightmares at least a bit.” “Illuminati Puppet” will be shot on the Red Scarlet by LA DP Yuki Noguchi who shot the TV series "Funny Man". The look will be somewhere between "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and "Phantom of the Paradise".
Meanwhile down the block from CineSource, it looks like Pixar is going anime—not that they'd ever dean to tell their beloved neighbor a mile away where rifle fire is heard nightly but the police still diligently stake out the stop signs for rolling stops. An ad on Craigslist indicated that they were looking for a Native Japanese speaking Maya Animator who can create gestures and expressions for three-dimensional characters (Full time, month of February, 2012).
Other then that, we have dozens of story leads which we hope to get to in our annual Oakland issue coming up in two months, if of course we can just get our keyboard fixed to type in so much information.
Some stuff we missed from last year was that after an international search, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival picked Oakland filmmaker Lexi Leban, who did the widely heralded doc "Girl Trouble" (2006) to helm the S.F. Jewish Film Festival, She takes over after the eight year run of Peter Stein. Currently working on a film about marriage equality, Leban is also collective minded and, since 2004, has been poart of a cooperative distribution company, New Day Films.
Vincent Cortez, and his Oakland-based production company, Mitchell Street Pictures, got a great mention for his stylish, vicious and idiosyncratic noir, "The Hush", produced for under ten gs, from Will Viharo in examiner.com.
"'The Hush' has the look and feel not only of classic film noir but also a graphic novel, with a muted color scheme and soft focus photography giving it a seductively dreamlike quality... could be anyone’s nightmare in Anyplace, USA... the unpredictable action, enhancing the eerie, ethereal effect[s]... Cortez even composed the outstanding Ry Cooder-type music... an absorbing ride through dark territory, with violence exploding around every corner..."
To bad Cortez isn't filmming the Oakland Occupy. They plan to take over buildings, close the port and shut down the 1%, or whatever little of its business passes through Oakland, a noir scenario.
The General Assembly also voted to boycott Israel, citing the inspiration of the incredible Arab Spring, even though Israel itself had a large Occupy—people camping in a Tel Aviv median strip starting two months before Occupy Wall Street—and the Palestinians nada. Their tiny Occupy protested the Israelis instead of their own dysfunctional leadership.
The Oakland Occupy took to the streets on Saturday, January 28, with a march of about 2000 people, including families and children, and the police responded with tear gas and arresting some 400. Together, they wasted more precious resources on top of the four million dollars the previously beloved Occupy has already cost us.
Unfortunately, the police are, well, the police—by definition more conservative and violent—and the radicals, well, to actually be radicals, they have to be truly innovative—at least move on a little more than the 50 year-old '60s strategies.
They didn't heed this writer's advice to start the "West Oakland Capitalmune" by hybriding the best of social activism and entrepreneurism and joining with the artists and green businesses. Surely some lefty landowner would have given us a building or five.
Some Occupiers did come to West Oakland, setting up tents, serving food and proving that the peaceful ideas of the Black Panthers can be reinvented for the 21st century (time to get them a statue in DeFremmery Park).
Instead, they marched to Kaiser Convention Center and attempted to liberate it, on the way clamoring through the popular YMCA and the City Hall, where they burnt a flag and broke a model of the city.
While the Oakland Police are the world's most inept demonstration wranglers, the Oakland administration hasn't the feintest idea how to Tai-Chi radicals and support Oakland's burgeoning art and film movement. Indeed, they stiffed CineSource on its ad bills and forced our parent company, A Media, to pay punishing insurance fees, even as we keep promoting Oakland film and art. Posted on Feb 07, 2012 - 08:55 AM