“VACATION!” DIRECTOR ZACH CLARK

I first met Zach Clark last October when his excitingly subversive, sex-scene-less SXSW hit Modern Love Is Automatic opened Pornfilmfestival Berlin (where my own short The Story of Ramb O had its premiere). Since we barely had the chance to chat in the buzzing, jam-packed Moviemento hub, I was thrilled when I heard recently that Clark’s follow-up Vacation! (pictured above) was already on the festival circuit and would be playing theatrically at Brooklyn’s own reRun Gastropub Theater in May. Finally I had an excuse to find out what makes this offbeat yet seemingly well-adjusted director of a feature about a nurse who moonlights as a dominatrix, and now a flick about four chicks whose weekend getaway goes bizarrely awry, tick.

Vacation! plays for one week at reRun, beginning tonight, May 13.

Filmmaker: In terms of aesthetics, both Modern Love and Vacation! inevitably conjure up comparisons to John Waters and even John Hughes. But beyond these two cult directors who and what are your influences? (Obviously, the ’80s in general factors in there somewhere.)

Zach Clark: I have very clear childhood memories of being at the video store in the Outer Banks for family vacations and looking at the lurid oversized VHS boxes. The cover for Color Me Blood Red is especially burned into my brain. It’s got a girl strung up on a wood-paneled wall with her guts hanging out. Years later when I figured out that I wanted to make movies these memories stuck, and the movies I really loved at first (and still love) were what I think are best called “trash.” So for a while I only wanted to make trash. Then I went to film school and I got into the Hollywood auteur stuff from the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s and European art house stuff, etc, etc. I always come back to those three things and I think they’re all in Modern Love and Vacation! and they’ll all be in the next thing I do, too. Douglas Sirk was really important to me when I made Modern Love. ’60s beach party movies were … Read the rest

DAVID LOWERY’S “ST. NICK” OPENS AT reRUN

By Scott Macaulay

Opening today at Brooklyn’s gastropub theater, reRun, is David Lowery’s first feature, St. Nick. Here’s Alicia Van Couvering’s introduction to her interview with Lowery for Filmmaker at the film’s festival premiere:

There is almost no dialogue in the first half of David Lowery’s feature debut, St. Nick. A young boy and a girl enter an abandoned house, clean it up, build a fire, forget to open a window and fill the house with smoke, figure out a chimney and watch the embers turn into flames. They sleep, they forage for food; somehow they survive, until reality starts bearing down on them. It’s not clear why they ran away, or if anyone is looking for them. The film is stark and the house feels haunted, but you can’t stop thinking: this was my fantasy when I was a kid. This was all I wanted, to run away and survive on marshmallow sandwiches and sleep in pillow forts.

Read the interview at the link above, check out the trailer below, and see the movie this week at reRun.

ST. NICK trailer from ST NICK on Vimeo.… Read the rest

HORROR LABEL GLASS EYE PIX CELEBRATES ITS 25TH

By Scott Macaulay

Our favorite NYC-based low-budget horror mega-studio, Glass Eye Pix, celebrates its 25th anniversary with a two-week retrospective series of screenings at reRun in New York that begins today. They include founder Larry Fessenden’s first picture, No Telling, his excellent and quite movie Wendigo, and films by its roster of artists including Ti West and James McKenney, whose Satan Hates You, says Fessenden in the New York Times video below, is an “oddly serene and pious Christian scare film.”

In Fall, 2009, Filmmaker celebrated Glass Eye Pix’s 24th anniversary with an article and interview of Fessenden by Lauren Wissot. From her piece:

Whereas other production companies move up the food chain, signing union or studio deals that force them into specific production models, Glass Eye has retained the freedom to allow each film to develop in its own organic way. “We try to keep an open mind about how to shoot a film,” Fessenden says. “Habit shot over the course of 45 days. I Sell the Dead was shot over the course of eight months. Stake Land is being shot in 27 days over three months. Bitter Feast was shot in 14 days plus we owe one more.” But try to pin him on financing and you’ll get the weary, stream-of-consciousness response of, “Every film is different. Habit was self-financed. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s Antidote Films financed Wendigo and The Last Winter. The original Scareflix were financed by me, and the first ones doubled their money, so there was more in the kitty to self-perpetuate. A film like Liberty Kid was financed with equity investors, raised by my co-producer Roger Kass. Wendy and Lucy also was financed by a group of equity investors. I was the primary investor in I Sell the Dead along with one other equity partner; our recent films are financed by MPI/Dark Sky. I’ve been the primary benefactor of Glass Eye Pix over the years, which makes it an unsustainable enterprise.”

“There is no illusion that we should all carry on working this way,” Fessenden continues. “Glass Eye Pix is a fertile starting point

… Read the rest

ETIENNE! PREMIERES AT NEW YORK’S reRUN

By Scott Macaulay

I loved Jeff Mizushima’s delicate, entirely charming, and vaguely emo-ish Etienne! when I saw it last year after its CineVegas premiere. I wound up putting Jeff in our “25 New Faces” simply because the film’s sensibility seemed so different to me. I also loved its formally-bold second-half narrative shift and director Caveh Zahedi’s last-reel appearance in a scene that could have been taken from a Peter Handke novel.

The film receives its East Coast premiere at the Brooklyn gastropub theater reRun beginning tomorrow for a one-week run. You can reserve tickets here. Here’s what I wrote last year:

Writer-director Jeff Mizushima won the Filmmaker To Watch Award at CineVegas this year for Etienne!, an oddly sweet art film about loneliness, affection and loss that, as part of its ending, features the director Caveh Zahedi extolling on the workings of a pinhole camera. But if you ask Mizushima what he was trying to make, you’ll hear something very different. “I started out making it as a kids’ film,” he says, citing pics like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and The Goonies as influences. You see, the eponymous Etienne is a pet dwarf hamster, a lot like the one Mizushima brought in one day for the kids he teaches in an after-school program. “It was going to be like, ‘Hey guys, we made a film about that hamster!’”

Etienne! is a film about that hamster, and it’s probably a G-rated one too. But while Mizushumia says the film was approved for kids by Kids First! (the Coalition for Quality Children’s Media), they’re probably not his target audience anymore. Etienne! tells the story of Richard (Richard Vallejos), a quiet and serious man-child who bicycles around San Francisco with the pet hamster he’s told has only days to live. With French pop on the soundtrack and Richard’s red shorts, the film has a strange winsomeness to it, an affect that is deepened when, suddenly, the narrative introduces the film’s other main character nearly two thirds of the way through. Megan Harvey plays a woman leaving town after suffering an unspecified emotional setback, and her

… Read the rest

A VISIT TO RERUN, BROOKLYN’S LATEST MOVIE VENUE

By Eric Kohn

The history of moviegoing in New York City is quintessential to the survival of the medium. Manhattan alone provided a healthy nexus of theatrical activity at the beginning of the 20th century, and in that regard, little has changed. The city continues to host dozens of theaters, including more arthouse venues than almost anywhere else in the world. From the usual specialty releases regularly showcased at the Sunshine and the Angelika to the storied repertory programming at prestigious fixtures like Film Forum and Lincoln Center, New Yorkers have innumerable eclectic opportunities to expand their cinematic horizons.

But movies without distribution have a hard time finding a certified route to these popular establishments. That’s a gap that the new reRun Gastropub Theater, which opened in the back room of reBar in Brooklyn’s hip Dumbo neighborhood on Friday, will help fill: The venue, a 60-seat screening room that includes a full bar and elaborate snack options, aims to focus on undistributed or overlooked indies from the festival circuit. Although the bar is owned and operated by Jason Stevens, freelance critic and Greencine Daily blogger Aaron Hillis has been hired to manage the program. A good friend and colleague of yours truly, Hillis resides at the heart of Indiewood as an occasional filmmaker (his documentary “Fish Kill Flea” made the festival rounds in 2007), programmer, and journalist, and he also serves as VP of the DVD label Benten Films — a quadruple-threat that allows him to keep up with plenty of the noteworthy low budget achievements struggling to get noticed.

On Friday, I made it out to the 11:30pm screening of reRun’s opening night feature, Frank Ross’s chatty lo-fi character study “Audrey the Trainwreck.” Ross, a Chicago-based filmmaker whose movies are distinguishable by an attentiveness to overlapping dialogue and the positioning of extreme frustration as comedy, premiered “Audrey” at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March. By bringing his movie to reRun, he managed to get publicity from The New York Times, The New Yorker and several other outlets (including, well, this one). With “Audrey” playing at … Read the rest

TWO PREMIERES: reRUN and “AUDREY THE TRAIN WRECK”

By Scott Macaulay

Any new New York independent movie theater, one showing not mini-major studio moveovers but recently premiered festival films that don’t have formal distribution, is cause for celebration. But we at Filmmaker are hailing the new reRun for one other reason: it’s in our building. That’s right, after a long day solving the crises of the current indie scene, we can head downstairs and enjoy not only movies but pretzels filled with garlic mashed potatoes, popcorn with duck fat, and microbrews. That’s right, you can eat and drink inside this theater, which is down the hall from reBar. (Menu preview courtesy of Gothamist.). Aaron Hillis, of the Village Voice and GreenCine, is doing the programming, and he’s launching with Frank V. Ross’s Audrey the Train Wreck, produced by Adam Donaghey and Mike Ryan, whose “Straight Talk” on the current state of things kicked up a lot of discussion in last issue’s Filmmaker.

Here, Hillis talks to the New York Times about his programming plans:

“I hope to be able to be an indie-film hero, to be able to give week runs to films that have no distribution or poor distribution,” Mr. Hillis said. For young filmmakers in the increasingly competitive indie market — in which a proliferation of films and a dearth of gung-ho buyers have made distribution harder to achieve — reRun offers some hope.

The New Year, the debut feature of Brett Haley, 26, will play later this month. “For a film like mine to get a week run in New York is crazy,” he said. “I get reviews I’d never get, I get exposure I’d never get.”

Mr. Haley said that his film, a slice-of-life character tale made for $8,000, had been well received at festivals — it won the audience award at the Sarasota Film Festival this year — but had had no bites from distributors. “You’re told your movie’s great, but it’s not marketable,” he said. Having a New York screening, he added, helps prove the doubters wrong.

Frank Ross will be attending the Friday screening. Please check it out and … Read the rest