FilmStew.com: HOLLYWOODSPIN

Putting On a World War II Show

03/09/2010

Before he became an influential American fashion designer, the late Bill Blass held a most unusual position: soldier-artist with the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, a top-secret Word War II outfit also known as the Ghost Army. Alongside painter Ellsworth Kelly, photographer Art Kane and the many other lesser-knowns who comprised the 1,100-person Camouflage Battalion, he was tasked with helping with some of the 21 large-scale deception maneuvers staged on the Continent during the waning days of the conflict, using weapons such as inflatable tanks, sound effects and even playacting.

Not to be confused with the First United States Army Group, a task force featured in the 1978 Ken Follet novel Eye of the Needle and subsequent 1981 film adaptation, the Ghost Army is now - finally - the subject of a documentary of the same name by Rick Beyer. Though still in rough cut form, it is scheduled to be sneak previewed on Wednesday, March 17th at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Library, which is running a concurrent exhibit of photos and drawings supplied by the filmmaker.

Like so many filmic enterprises, the idea for The Ghost Army was born at a Starbucks where, in the summer of 2005, Beyer was introduced by a business colleague to the daughter of unit operative John Jarvie. One of the most dangerous of all the Ghost Army missions took place in September, 1944; code-named Operation Bettembourg (pictured below), it involved plugging an unmanned 70-mile breach in the Metz massing forces of General Patton by having the artist-soldiers make like 20,000 members of the 6th Armored Division.

[Photo courtesy of GhostArmy.org]

Catching Up to a Kentucky Tragedy

02/22/2010
The school bus accident that formed the basis of both the Russell Banks story and subsequent Atom Egoyan Oscar-nominated 1997 drama The Sweet Hereafter took place just over 20 years ago in the small town of Alton, Texas. Tragically though, the fatality count of 21 chilren drowned does not make it the worst such accident in U.S. history; that morbid distinction belongs to an earlier 1958 mark on the psyche of residents of Prestonsburg, Kentucky that claimed the lives of 26 children.

This February 28th, 1958 tragedy is the focus of The Very Worst Thing, a documentary screening on Wednesday, February 24th at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington after premiering last Friday in Prestonsburg to a massive audience of 1,040 people. Taking its title from the summation by local Josephine Fields that the crash was “the very worst thing to ever happen in Floyd County," Michael Crisp and Andrew Moore’s film features interviews with only one living survivor willing to talk about it on camera, relying for the rest of its talking-head documentation on eyewitnesses, emergency personnel and others.

The filmmakers worked closely with Jackie Branham-Hall, author of a 2004 book about the bus crash entitled Portrait of a Disaster. Banham-Hall’s connection to the crash is that as a child, she was sick that day, thereby missing school and the need to make the trip; in director Crisp’s case, he is related to several of the children who perished and moved away from the area as a child in 1955.

Echoing the crash sourced by Banks and Egoyan, the exact cause of the Prestonsburg plunge into a swollen river remains unknown. Crisp plans plan to eventually submit The Very Worst Thing to film festivals and even at this late date, is still hoping that some enterprising archivist will materialize with elusive local TV news footage from the crash site.

[Photo courtesy of The Very Worst Thing Facebook page]

Getting a "Handle" on Michigan Moviemaking

02/18/2010
Michigan’s obscenely entincing tax incentives for filmmakers are in the news a lot these days, but not all of those making movies in The Wolverine State are doing so under the auspices of runaway savings. Case in point: Rebel Pictures, Michael McCallum and Anthony E. Griffin’s Lansing outift; founded in 1999, the company is set to unveil its second feature, Handlebar, on Sunday, February 21st, at the Celebration Cinema.

Clocking in at 70 minutes and shot over a scant two weekends, the farcical mafia comedy may be a tad on the feature-length light side, but it marks the continuation of a journey that began at the same Celebration Cinema in January of 2007 with the launch of Fairview Street, a more serious offering starring McCallum in the title role of a paroled ex-con. McCallum sports the titular handlebar moustache in this new film, and is already at work with partner Griffin on the 2011 comedy-drama Lucky.

The duo promise to have some exciting news regarding Handlebar at Sunday’s premiere, though they hasten to add on Facebook that it involves neither an unplanned pregnancy nor a call from Steven Spielberg. Their newest offering can also be purchased online as a $20 DVD, complete with three Audio Commentary tracks and the 2007 Griffin-McCallum short Nice Guy Blues.

[Photo courtesy of HandlebarMovie.com]

Shifting Gears in Potomac

02/17/2010
Writer-director Michael Merino is certainly far from a household name, but in the last few years he’s managed to make a heist film (The Deal), some suspense horror (502) and some slasher horror (The Milkman). Now, to his credit once again, he’s raised several hundred thousand dollars in financing for Our Last Supper, a change-of-pace drama set to roll from late March through early April on location in the wealthy equestrian enclave of Potomac, Maryland.

The film, about five male friends in their late 30s who gather for an annual catch-up steak dinner, also marks the first time Merino, a one-time L.A. acting hopeful, is taking a co-starring role in one of his productions. In a way, the story sounds a little bit like it could be a sequel to fellow Maryland native Barry Levinson’s 1982 classic Diner, wherein a group of lifelong friends grow older to face a different set of issues such as caring for a sick parent and ageing out of a sports profession.

The rest of the Our Last Supper cast - Kris Arnold, Ken Arnold, Regen Wilson and David Jon Wilson - reflects an even mix of repeat MCMFILMS collaborators and first-timers. Merino meanwhile already has a couple of other projects in pre-production: The Haunting of Pearson Place and The Razorman.

[Photo courtesy of MCMFilms.net]

A Dwindling Slice of Paradise

02/08/2010
The words Te Henua E Nnoho are a lot harder to pronounce than An Inconvenient Truth, but the message of this new Kiwi documentary is in many ways far more incontrovertible than the slide show arguments presented by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning documentary. The title comes from the Polynesian words "There Once Was an Island," and sure enough, that is the very imminent reality faced by inhabitants of the tiny southwestern Pacific atoll of Takuu in Papua New Guinea profiled in this Grand Prize winner at the recent 2010 Pacific International Documentary Film Festival.

Shot during the winter of 2006-2007 and in the last few months of 2008, Te Henua E Nnoho shows how residents Satty, Endor and Teloo must struggle with the very real effects of global warming, man-made or otherwise. Producer Lyn Collie and director Briar March were initially inspired by the writings of Richard Moyle, an Auckland, New Zealand anthropologist who has been visiting and studying the island for two decades. Onscreen, that scientific perspective is taken up by oceanographer John Hunter and geomorphologist Scott Smithers, who work with the local trio to quantify what is occurring.

Permission to shoot had to be secured from Takuu’s tribal chief, and the challenges of production were augmented by the fact that there is no electricity on the island. Te Henua E Nnoho will make its U.S. debut February 15th at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Montana, where it will no doubt continue to make a big splash.

[Photo courtesy of ThereOnceWasanIsland.com]

A Projector Runs Through It

02/03/2010
It’s probably a safe bet that the overlap between the filmmakers at the recently completed 27th edition of Sundance and the just-started fourth year of the traveling Fly Fishing Film Tour is nil. But Robert Redford, one-time writer-director of 1992’s A River Runs Through It, might do well to head down to Salt Lake City when the lesser known road show stops there later this month.

Tonight in Billings, Montana and onwards to dozens of other U.S. locations throughout 2010, this collection of seven documentaries of varying lengths is the brainchild of Thad Robison, a former partner of AEG (Angling Exploration Group) Media. He’s reeled in an impressive batch of corporate sponsors, set up a solid website with online screening room and snared titles that belie the gentility of the subject matter (Nervous Water, Trout Burn Diaries III: The Final Chapter...)

Tickets for each presentation are in the Avatar price range of $14, but then again, to practitioners of the sport, the chance to viscerally share in the river run experiences of others is very much their version of a trip to Pandora. For example, a pair of January 28th sold-out FFFT showings in Fort Collins, CO still was not enough to accomodate all those who wanted in. Which is good news for the featured filmmakers, because as Robison recently pointed out on the Fish Schtick podcast, they are now for the first time getting a portion of the event’s proceeds.

[Photo courtesy of FlyFishingFilmTour.com]

From "Corn" to Cottage Industry

01/28/2010
As the independent film business splinters into a million, mostly unprofitable directions, the search is on for successful 21st century grassroots paradigms. Two guys who appear to be well on their way to figuring out such a model are Yale University alums Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis (pictured below, left to right), the pair of filmmaking novices who burst onto the scene with the 2007 Peabody Award winning documentary King Corn.

Take for example the Cheney-directed 2009 effort The Greening of Southie, an in-depth look at the construction of the Macellan Building, Boston’s first LEED-certified green edifice. The company behind the project, Pappas Enterprises, also provided most of the funding for the documentary, which meant that although Greening could not veer towards the realm of expose, it could still provide Cheney with a slick canvas from which to work.

Then there is the matter of how the duo comes up with ideas for their prolific documentary output, a process that is itself organic. For example, the pair’s relocation to the New York area has inspired not one but two 2010 Big Apple-centric non-fiction swirls: one about the eradication of the night sky (The City Dark) and another about the never-ending fight over street parking (That’s My Spot).

A quick look at the website for Cheney and Ellis’ Brooklyn-based operations, Wickedelicate.com reveals all sorts of other resourceful revenue streams: $150/hr private moviemaking coaching services; a DIY bootcamp hosted at a Maine farmhouse last September for the fee of $1,500 per participant; and so on. All in all, with an occasional assist from benefactors such as Rooftop Films, which awarded a grant to Wicked Delicate for the post-production of The City Dark, these guys appear to be well on their way to mastering one of those desperately needed new paradigms.

[Photos courtesy of Wickedelicate.com]

Love Means Never Having to Say You're
"Saw"-ry

01/26/2010
Once upon a time, the 1965 British film The Collector garnered three Oscar nominations (Best Actress, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay) for its tale of a disturbed bank clerk (Terence Stamp) who kidnaps a pretty art student (Samantha Eggar). Now comes Twisted Seduction, a just-wrapped $30,000 project that expands upon the same general territory with a pair of unknown leads, Tom Broadwell and Caroline Brassard.

Along with a killer title, Twisted Seduction boasts a (brand new) killer trailer, whose compelling music by Adam Pietrowski and crisp RED Camera images should resonate with fans of the Saw franchise. Debuting UK native Broadwell, who lives in Leeds, met French-Canadian writer-director Dominique Adams in 2008 when the pair worked as fitness instructors on a cruise ship; they soon discovered a shared ambition for moviemaking and after discussing, post-contract, an idea of Adams’, the latter was able to crank out a script in two days.

Broadwell stars as David Grant, a genius IQ level 25-year-old Englishman living in Montreal who, based on an analysis that 24-year-old sales executive Francesca Besson is his on-paper 99.3% compatibility match, kidnaps her for an accelerated, forced courtship. In keeping with this main theme, the official website for the film offers a tonge-in-cheek multiple-choice quiz to determine how twisted any particular reader might be, beginning with the query, "You are cooking for someone. You accidentally drop your saliva in the dish as you were about to serve it. Do you?..."

(For the record, my answers to the quiz merited the verdict of, "Your mind is definitely very twisted. By society’s standards, you belong in jail. We truly hope that you are not upset with the makers of this quiz, because we would not want to be on your bad side.")

[Photo courtesy of TwistedSeductionMovie.com.]

Leaning on "Lavorsia"

01/21/2010
Much was made at the outset of Seth Rogen’s meteoric Hollywood rise about the fact that he launched his stand-up comedy career at the tender age of 13 in a Vancouver lesbian bar. But in terms of west coast precociousness, writer-director Bill Cornelius has him handily beat – when he founded his company B.C. Films back in 1991, he was all of eight.

Still, it wasn’t until the age of 14 that Cornelius wrote the screenplay for Lavorsia, a cliffhanger love story about a pair of outcast high school students (Blake George, Anna David). The short film won a prize at the 2006 edition of the University of Western Kentucky’s Western Film and Video Festival and Cornelius is now hoping to gain traction for feature-length expansion by offering it up online.

Clocking in at 18 minutes and 35 seconds, the drama mixes black and white with color footage and relies heavily on an original soundtrack provided by Nashville artists. The title Lavorsia comes from the first name of David’s new-in-town character, whose unspoken past may be tied to the recently disbanded Durham, North Carolina operations of one Cybernetics Corporation.

[Photo courtesy of Lavorsia.com.]

Bowling at Las Cruces

01/15/2010
As the 20-year anniversary of an unthinkable scene of carnage at New Mexico’s Las Cruces Bowl approaches, the two Hispanic suspects thought to be responsible remain at large and unaccounted for. This despite the fact that three of the four victims gunned down during the February 10th, 1990 robbery were girls ages two, six and 13.

First-time filmmaker Charlie Minn is hoping to change all that with A Nightmare in Las Cruces, a 100-minute high-def video documentary shot last fall with the assistance of several New Mexico State University students. Set for a limited local engagement at the Cine 10 Theaters beginning Wednesday, February 10th, the movie features interviews with three surviving victims, case lead detective Mark Myers and a replay of the haunting 911 call by a distraught young Melissa Repass (listen to it here).

Minn tells the Las Cruces Bulletin that he became fixated on the so-called Bowling Alley Massacre after watching a report on the TV program Unsolved Mysteries while attending college in Boston; he would even periodically check in with the local police department to see if anything new had developed. Minn went on to become a local TV news reporter in Albuqurque and will be speaking locally about his film on February 1st at the Barnes & Noble at the Mesilla Valley Mall.

[(l to r) Victims Paula Holguin, Valerie Teran,
courtesy of Unsolved-Crimes.com.]

FilmStew.com: HOLLYWOODSPIN

Putting On a World War II Show

Catching Up to a Kentucky Tragedy

Getting a "Handle" on Michigan Moviemaking

Shifting Gears in Potomac

A Dwindling Slice of Paradise

A Projector Runs Through It

From "Corn" to Cottage Industry

Love Means Never Having to Say You're "Saw"-ry

Leaning on "Lavorsia"

Bowling at Las Cruces

Love Means Never Having to Say You're
"Saw"-ry