Screening in LA by Remote - August 15, 2008

I actually feel weird about this one. The Downtown FF website is a bit shy about giving the filmmakers an easy to navigate
description of how's, what's, who's - you know the drill. I couldn't find anything about the theater we're screening in - much less it's location. On another site I googled it looks like an arena that classic rock bands like Mott the Hoople and Spinal Tap play, so it has more seats than the usual venue. Like if there was 500 people they would be a small cluster in front of the stage. If we were the Batman Dark Night movie I'd feel like we had a chance but this? 2000 seats and no PR?

So we hired a writer/blogger on Craigslist to attend the screening and then give us the lowdown on how the show went down, and that is a poor choice of words. I'm writing this on our editing Mac so the writing is very tiny and the keyboard doesn't have letters, only shortcut icons and colored keys. The weirder thing is that someone kept killing our ad to get a reporter to cover the screening. We had to post it three times in one day because some fucking troll kept killing us off. I heard there is an eclipse of Uranus tonight, so that definitely cannot help.

So the whole thing is a squincher. (as in that eclipse you're having, yes) I really don't want to be there but I think I should be there but I can't be there because I'm shooting in the morning and then driving Dona to Vermont to move stuff so she and Brad can go live in Rome because he won the Rome Prize. Simple country folk made to live in Rome, can you imagine? Horrible.

So, there will be a report from LA, from one or two sources, and quite soon. Will I let it slide if the report is a ride with "Death of an Indie"? No fucking way, Jose. We'll have a new updated film fest listaval too because we got the green from Mill Valley. Yah mahn.

Love or mercy,
Paul

Boston Globe Highlights GoCS for R.I.F.F.

A big festival in Little Rhodie
The Ocean State will showcase nearly 300 films
By Leslie Brokaw
Globe Correspondent / August 3, 2008
The Rhode Island International Film Festival may be a little far afield of Boston, but it always offers an impressive lineup and earns its spotlight each year. Opening on Tuesday, the six-day program this year includes 289 movies selected from 3,000 submissions - 33 feature narratives, 67 documentaries, and nearly 60 world premieres. That's a whole lotta movie.

[This quote, complete with a confused synop (leaving out co-director/editor Tom) was front loaded with the few films mentioned. I think we should get a prize for plugs. (gawd give us a prize!)]

"Guest of Cindy Sherman" is director Paul H-O's 15-year project documenting his initial series of interviews with the artist, their subsequent romance, and thoughts from New York art-world big-wigs Eric Bogosian, Danny DeVito, and Ingrid Sischy (Thursday at 7 p.m. at Courthouse Center for the Arts and Saturday at 4:30 p.m. at Cable Car Cinema). "Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio with the Red Shoes" goes behind the scenes at "A Prairie Home Companion" (Friday at 7 p.m. at the Columbus Theatre Arts) "
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2008/08/03/a_big_festival_in_little_rhodie/

Film Festival as Trial Balloon

Editorial
We're engaged in the process known as the 'film festival circuit' and virtually every indie film travels it, or at least attempts to. I'm learning do's and don'ts as we began the process with the Tribeca FF back in April. I was much better at the do's then because Tribeca is so well organized for filmmakers, and we had Falco Ink as PR and those gals just told us where to go and what to do without telling us what to say. I'm not saying that I'm making more mistakes now without Falco to manage me, but I do see where I could have managed things better in the ensuing Provincetown FF, where we had afternoon screenings on a Friday and Sunday in a RESORT BEACHTOWN and that was it. The little schoolhouse for our first showing with one of those home movie screen-on-a-tripod was sweltering and had 12 people. Good people. Really good people. Like John Waters. But imagine the pressure of having Mr. Waters sitting right up front with a lot of empty seats around him and Tom and me sitting in the back. Somewhat humbling since we'd SOLD OUT 0VER 2000 seats at Tribeca in five days.
I'm not going to list the things I'd do differently, but it's long, and so is the list of festivals we'll be doing until at least February 2009.
Paul H-O