PRODUCTION UPDATE



 

Wild Style-director Charlie Ahearn racks up a quixotic take on supernatural phenomena, garage bands and pot-smoking Christian youth in his tale of lost twins, Fear of Fiction.

Melissa Leo stars as Sigrid Anderssen, a hot New York novelist so stumped trying to write her new book she impulsively takes a ride with 21-year-old Red Hopkins (Childhood's End's Sam Trammell) across Canada to her family's abandoned lakeside cottage. The erotic tension and coincidences start mounting early on in a series of startling encounters involving twins and lost children. "The film's about the dead twin we all have and my personal reality of twinning as the natural state," says Ahearn, who happens to be an identical twin. "We live in a society where individuality is paramount. Twinning threatens that directly because twins' ego boundaries are so amorphous."

Ahearn rocked the world with 1982's Wild Style, the original hip hop movie. He has since written numerous scripts and made ten videos exploring the working process of artists like Kiki Smith, Jane Dickson, Simon Verity and sculptor John Ahearn, his own twin. He and fellow producer Gerry Kagan raised Fiction's $400,000 shooting budget privately and signed cinematographer John Foster (Sunday) to shoot in 35mm and unit manager Jake Myers (Cop Land) to line produce.

Fiction shot 25 days in bucolic Binghamton, N.Y., Ahearn's home town, following a nine-day shoot across Canada. Ahearn recreated East Village night spot Fez in Binghamton for an opening scene in which Sigrid gives a reading from the new book she can't finish and got Reno to play the event's M.C. Also featured is Penn Jillette as an obsessive garage rock maniac Tom gets a ride from hell with. Lounge Lizard Evan Lurie and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo are composing music as the film's fictional garage band, the Fabulous Failures. All rights are available.

Cast: Melissa Leo, Sam Trammell, Penn Jillette, Reno, Irma St. Paule, David Wheir, Linda Larkin. Crew: Producers, Charlie Ahearn, Gerry Kagan; Line Producer, Jake Meyers; Screenwriter/Director, Ahearn; Cinematographer, John Foster; Editor, Kristina Boden; Music, Evan Lurie, Lee Ranaldo; Casting, Judy Hendersen, Robyn Knoll. Contact: Charlie Ahearn, Fear of Fiction, 17 Hubert Street, New York, NY 10013. Tel: (212) 219-9756, Fax: (212) 226-4875.





 
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