Archive for April, 2004
Wednesday, April 21st, 2004
As reported in Variety today, Newmarket Films plans to release a director’s cut of Richard Kelly‘s Donnie Darko in theaters this summer.
Grossing a paltry $517,375 during its original theatrical release in late 2001-early 2002, just as the country was reeling from the attacks of 9/11, the film subsequently gained a sizeable cult audience playing midnights continuously at theaters around the country, despite having been released on DVD by 20th Century Fox, which reported sales of close to 1 million units.
The new cut, which will include 21 minutes of footage not in the original, premieres May 29 at the Seattle International Film Festival, after which Newmarket plans to release the film on up to 10 screens in that city as a test run for a wider national release.
“I want to see if we can play it in the malls and multiplexes,” Newmarket’s Bob Berney is quoted as saying, adding that the company (now flush with cash from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) plans a P&A campaign for Donnie Darko commensurate with a big-budget release.
“The re-release [of Donnie Darko],” says producer Adam Fields in Variety, “is a testament to the power of the homevideo and DVD market. We don’t get many do-overs in life. But this was such a special and unique movie. It wasn’t around long enough for people to find out what it was.”
… Read the rest
Friday, April 16th, 2004
On Tuesday, April 20 at 8:00 pm at The Signature Theater, 555 W. 42nd St., New York City, The Sundance Institute will present a screenplay reading in association with MTV Films and the Writers Guild of America, West, of UP, to be directed by Elisabeth Subrin from a screenplay by Subrin and Evan Carlson. The reading cast includes Tina Holmes, Laila Robins (currently featured in the Off-Broadway play, Frozen), Jonathan Togo, and Jennifer Subrin.
In UP, an opportunity to join the fast-paced world of a dot-com has unforeseen repercussions for a young woman when it triggers a spectacular manic-depressive cycle, causing her to “crash” just as the company collapses in the stock market fallout.
The Sundance Screenplay Readings series, which is free to the public, is part of the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program.
Elisabeth Subrin’s award-winning trilogy of experimental biographies have screened widely in the U.S. and abroad at venues including the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Channel and the Whitney Biennial. A 2002-2003 Guggenheim Fellow, Subrin is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.
Evan Carlson studied literature and fine arts at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art before receiving his MFA from the USC School of Cinema-Television. His original play Quickfire was produced and performed as part of the Institute of Contemporary Art/London‘s Young Playwright’s Festival.
To attend this reading RSVP to (212) 727-9573.
On Tuesday, April 27th at 7:30 pm at the Actors’ Gang Theater, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, the Sundance Institute presents a special screenplay reading in Los Angeles of Paper Man.
Co-written and co-directed by Kieran and Michele Mulroney, Paper Man was developed at the 2004 January Screenwriters Lab. In Paper Man, a frustrated writer spends a lonely winter on Cape Cod, where he is forced to choose between a world-weary superhero, an extinct bird, and a 16-year-old local girl in this coming-of-middle-age story.
Writers/directors Kieran and Michele Mulroney. Cast Brian Finney, Jena … Read the rest
Thursday, April 15th, 2004
Recognizing the inherent difficulties in tracking down the perfect piece of library music, the folks at Twistedtracks.com have made the search as easy as possible. The site now offers four intuitive search methods, ranging from top-down approaches (Search by End Use, Genre, or Collection) to bottom-up searches that display only those tracks matching user-selected criteria.
During implementation of the latest method, Search by End Use, tracks from the library were analyzed for their usefulness in certain real-world situations.
“We started with a huge list of potential uses, from feature film trailer soundtracks down to speaker walk-on music for a corporate event,” says Derek Frederickson, owner, “what we ended up realizing is that all the specific uses had a few things in common. Once we identified those, the tracks fell into place.”
Offering niche styles of music is the cornerstone of the Twistedtracks.com library. “Part of the reason behind the new search methods is that we offer so many niche genres that people may not have even heard of,” Frederickson continues. “We wanted to give people a way to explore the possibilities without knowing the terminology.”
In addition to new ways to find the perfect track, there are hundreds of new tracks, volumes and collections just waiting to be discovered.
“Who knew the Germans were so good a bossanova?!” remarks Frederickson.
The Twistedtracks.com library currently offers thousands of individual tracks (ranging in price from $8 to $50) and 40 genre-based volumes ($130 each) for download or delivery, and 8 multi-volume collections ($500 to $1500) available in CD or DVD-ROM format.
For more information contact Derek Frederickson via e-mail at derek@twistedmedia.com or by phone at
773-944-9510.… Read the rest
Wednesday, April 14th, 2004
Monkey Town, located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is “an ongoing culinary, music & video installation” that “discards the simple floor plan of proscenium-based film viewing and creates a boxed cinema that inaugurates multiple depths-of-field, with jump cuts made by the turn of one’s head.”
Featuring communal seating for 32 people, four screens, 5.1 surround sound (and often, live bands), and food prepared by chefs Coleman Lee Foster and John Cross, Monkey Town’s Spring 2004 calendar includes the series Monkey Town Invitational, which concludes this weekend with performances by video artists David Larcher, Torsten Zenas Burns with Darrin Martin, and MOSTRA (Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy) on Friday, April 16; and Bryan Frye, Benton Bainbridge, Devan Simunovich and Nika Offenbach, with audio by Chris Douglas and Todd Sines on Saturday, April, 17.
Monkey Town was begun in 2003 by Montgomery Knott, who constructed and designed the space. Knott is also lead vocalist in the post-rock collective Stars Like Fleas, whose first album was released last November.
“I had been thinking about a food/performance space for several years, then I started shooting video two years ago,” says Knott. “And then, quite literally, I had a cocktail-napkin moment on a flight back from San Francisco. I drew the basic layout and soon after started designing the furniture with a friend.
“As I developed the concept for Monkey Town, several friends directed me to Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD [restaurant] in the ’70s and one of our chefs turned me on to [Filippo T.] Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook. Both were very instructive as well as cautionary. (Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD space wasn’t an inspiration/impetus for me, but that history is still important.)
“The works of Janet Cardiff, Vito Acconci, Bill Viola, Claire Denis, James Turrell, and Ernie Gehr are essential to my visual vocabulary. [Andrei] Tarkovsky spoke of ‘sculpting in time,’ and I think that’s a shared outcome of all their work. They create pieces that feel very alive and tactile, like sculptures.
“Robert Ashley, Nobukazu Takemura, Terry Riley, Henry … Read the rest
Tuesday, April 13th, 2004
If you’re like me and you skim through Variety online each day and then catch up on the pile of print editions every week or so, it was easy to miss the news, buried under the headline “Lit topper books a new gig,” that the Gersh Agency’s veteran NY agent Mike Lubin has, as the pub would say “ankled the tenpercentery.” Lubin’s clients include The Woodsmen director Nicole Kassell, director Alan Taylor, screenwriter (and former Filmmaker managing editor) Mike Jones, and director Rose Troche. At Gersh, Lubin always kept his eye out for emerging new indie film talent so it will be interesting to see where he winds up. The article quotes him cryptically saying, “I will be an agent and I will stay in New York… I left [Gersh] for what I believe was a good reason.” And, oddly, the “new gig” mentioned by the mag’s headline writers wasn’t described in the piece. We’ll keep you informed.… Read the rest
Monday, April 12th, 2004
Coudal Partners lists the following link to a Web page on which Johnny Chung Lee describes how to construct an innovative poor man’s Steadicam from a drill and stationary device for approximately $14. (Those not adept at assembling machinery can simply order one directly from Lee.)
The site also includes several video clips of sequences shot with Lee’s home-made device that are quite impressive.
… Read the rest
Sunday, April 11th, 2004
Porn is an easy election-year target, and along with the $495,000 Clear Channel/Howard Stern fine that was announced by the FCC this week, the Baltimore Sun reported that the Justice Department is gearing up for a crackdown on the industry in this election year. But it may not be the ACLU and free-speech types who lead the defense this time around. The article points out that porn is a $10 billion a year business with profits that flow to many Fortune 500 companies, including Comcast, whose Hot Network channel streams porn to hotel room customers at $12 a pop. And a number of Comcast execs, including CEO Brian Roberts, are major Republican National Party contributors and organizers. “Good luck turning back that clock,” the article quotes Paul Rodriguez, a spokesman for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, as saying about Ashcroft’s latest endeavor.
Desktop computer artists have launched their own Ashcroft counteroffensive. For those over 18 waiting for his 9/11 Commission testimony this week, check out this photo mosaic of Ashcroft, made up entirely of tiny porn people. … Read the rest
Sunday, April 11th, 2004
Congrats to Filmmaker Managing Editor Matt Ross for the successful reading of his screenplay Plays Well with Others at Tom Noonan’s Paradise Theater this past Wednesday night. The reading, which featured Cynthia Nixon, Sonia Braga, Tom Gilroy, Dean Wareham and others, was the first in a series sponsored by the Hamptons International Film Festival.
When I say “successful,” though, I’m basing that on heresay. As this Indiewire piece notes, the reading was wildly overcrowded, and the dutiful Filmmaker staff who showed up — Mary Glucksman, Peter Bowen and myself — joined a sizable group (which included development folks from some major NYC companies) turned away at the door. Oh well, next time, Matt…… Read the rest
Sunday, April 11th, 2004
I’ve got no plans to jet down to Miami anytime soon, but if any of our readers happen to be down there, check out this gallery exhibition featuring artists like Sue de Beer (pictured) and Cameron Jamie, and shoot us an email about it. It sounds cool, and I’m sorry I missed it in New York.
From the press release:
“SCREAM at THE MOORE SPACE
10 artists x 10 writers x 10 scary movies
Curated by: Fernanda Arruda and Michael Clifton
April 8 – July 3, 2004
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 8, 2004, 7 – 10 pm
THE MOORE SPACE
4040 NE 2ND Avenue, 2nd floor
Miami, FL 33137
Tel: 305-438-1163
www.themoorespace.org
silvia@themoorespace.org
SCREAM addresses a diversity of horrors influencing today’s contemporary artists — from Slasher films and Halloween traditions to the howl of Black Metal.
Matt Greene, Banks Violette and Bjarne Melgaard comb the dark landscapes of Goth, Black Metal and Sadomasochism to frame present-day horrors. For David Altmejd and Dora Longo Bahia, dread resides in the reification of things past as Werewolf heads and ghostly shadows occupy sculpture and photograph. Social rituals and the ornamental kitsch of Halloween provide fodder for Cameron Jamie and Amy Sarkisian.
Several artists draw upon particular moments and filmic devices common to the horror movie genre. Sue de Beer, Banks Violette and Michael Wetzel share an interest in how these filmmakers employ lighting, special effects and/or storyline to create unease in viewers. Not unlike Slasher film directors who conjure fear through self-contradiction, Brock Enright relies on “misunderstanding of image and information” to fabricate terror in his ongoing “extreme kidnapping” project.
To offer further insight we invited 10 writers to contribute essays on the participating artists. Their texts, along with abbreviated artist biographies and artwork images supplied by the artists, accompany the exhibition in the guise of a catalog mock-up. In this respect, SCREAM exists a scab on the curatorial framework of Cream projects by Phaidon and remains a crusty, ephemeral proposal.
Lastly, instead of taking stabs at an artist’s practice by inscribing “source artist” relationships, we asked them to select scary movies as … Read the rest
Monday, April 5th, 2004
Today, we received the following e-mail from director Jonathan Robinson of When in Doubt Productions, whose film Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas is scheduled to air on the PBS series Independent Lens on April 6 at 10 p.m. and April 9 at 12:30 a.m.:
“The FCC has made some sweeping changes in the past few weeks regarding language on television. There has been a rapid transformation in policy in the wake of Bono saying “fuck” on the Golden Globes and Janet Jackson exposing her nipple during the Super Bowl. In short, language that used to be at the discretion of the broadcaster (i.e. station or network) is now at the discretion of the FCC. The FCC is now leveling fines of up to $250,000 against stations that do not comply with the new regulations approved by Congress.
“The independently-produced film Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas, scheduled to be broadcast on the national PBS series Independent Lens tomorrow night, April 6th at 10:00 p.m., is right smack in the middle of these new controversial policies. Every Child… tells the story of renowned poet, writer, educator Piri Thomas. The film includes the author reading excerpts from, as well as dramatizations of selections from his classic autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets (1967).
“The book chronicles Thomas’s coming-of-age in the 1930s, 1940s and ’50s, his experiences as a teen gang member in East Harlem, as a junkie and an armed robber, and the six years he spent in prison, before becoming an educator and activist, pioneering gang violence prevention, drug rehabilitation and educational reform efforts in New York City in the 1960s and ’70s.
“Following the issuance of the new FCC rules, PBS has been forced to edit out of Every Child is Born a Poet ‘obscene’ words like ‘fuck’ and ‘shit.’ In fact, some PBS affiliate stations are requesting that additional words… not mandated by the FCC rules, be removed as well. At the time of its publication, Down These Mean Streets was hailed for … Read the rest
