Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Best of Boston

ast Monday was the “Best of Boston” screening of the 48Hour Film Project, where the Audience Award-winners and judges’ favorites are shown together on the big screen one last time.  Then the awards are handed out.  My friends… Team ALBATROSS! walked away with an embarrassment of honors…

BEST FILM, BOSTON 2010
BEST ENSEMBLE ACTING
BEST WRITING: NEIL REYNOLDS AND ALBATROSS
BEST DIRECTING: NEIL REYNOLDS AND JASON HAAS
BEST ACTRESS: KATIE LEEMAN
BEST ACTOR: PATRICK FRENCH
BEST EDITING: SASHA GOLDBERG
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: WILLIE CONRAD
BEST USE OF CHARACTER
... and our venerable AUDIENCE AWARD.

The winner:

I am immensely proud to have led such a talented team through this cavalcade of distinctions.  Team ALBATROSS!‘s accomplishments are rendered even more spectacular by the fierce competition from some very talented Boston filmmakers.  Among my favorites from the screening (that I can find online):

Congratulations one and all!

p.s. Does anybody know the origins of the “official selection” fronds that adorn every DVD box ever made?

Thursday, May 06, 2010

For a Few Flowers More

or the last four years I’ve participated in the 48 Hour Film Project, an international filmmaking competition wherein teams compete within their city to make a short film in 48 hours, after drawing their film genre out of a hat and being given specific parameters that must be included in the final product.  This year, the team I formed, ALBATROSS!, drew a particularly tricky genre: “Musical or Western.”  We chose Western.

For a Few Flowers More: As the internet becomes our new frontier, a man from a simpler time must defend his virtual property the old-fashioned way.

In addition to the genre, we had to include a character named Wilma or Winston Weatherby (a gardner), a scale, and the line of dialog “You win some, you lose some.”

To say that I am immensely proud of my team and what we accomplished in such a short time frame would be an understatement of epic understatedness.  Whether or not this film is recognized in the competition, it represents a momentous leap forward in the quality of our shooting, editing, scoring, and storytelling.  Congratulations to all the 48Hour filmmakers—every year I’m blown away by the creativity that panic inspires.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

The Tides of March

arch has been an overwhelming month.  I spent most of February obsessing over the particulars of my graduate/film school applications, which I finished back in October and then forced out of my mind.  But not for long, of course—as snow melted and winter receded, notification-deadlines began to loom, and by late February every day felt like waiting for the results of an MRI.  I remained cautiously optimistic, but only just.

Earlier this month I was offered a place in the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC.  I accepted on the spot; it was and is my first choice program, an intensive immersion in the art and business of the film industry that seems to implicitly reject the notion that “artistic” and “commercial” projects exist in different spheres.  Unfortunately I can’t talk too intelligently about the curriculum, beyond what I’ve read, which is half-fact, half-pitch.

Exhibit A (New York Times)
Exhibit B (Variety)
Exhibit C (Variety/Program Director)

I don’t begrudge any program its bragging rights—stellar reputation is what drew me there in the first place.  The little legends are awesome, too—I love the anecdote about a Starkie throwing a chair in a passion-fueled dispute.  (“There’s your Felliniesque!” I imagine him screaming.)  Still more impressive is whatever the other guy said to provoke the chair-tossing.  Apparently I have four months to hone my dodging skills.

THIS IS HOW MOVIES ARE MADE!

Anyway, back to March.  It’s about to end, you know.  And then it will be April, and then it will be May, and then, in June, Sarah and I will be enjoying our final days as Boston-Cambridge residents.  For me, it will have been just under seven years—for Sarah, closer to ten.  A friendly reminder that time flies, which is itself a friendly way of saying, life is too fucking short.  Our relocation is no trivial thing—in addition to the logistical and financial burdens, we’ll be leaving behind our community of friends, family, and artistic collaborators, just trusting that in LA we’ll find new opportunities and awesome people, and that eventually we’ll find the money to visit old friends.  Anxiety?  We have it in spades.  But we’re not complaining.  It’s exciting, it’s a priviledge, it’s a challenge, it’s the next chapter in the great adventure we promised each other when we married.

Onward, friends!  Come, collaborators!  Adventure awaits us all.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Glory at Sea

y strongest recommendation for this week is that you find 25 uninterrupted minutes and watch this short film in as high a resolution as you can.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Methought I Heard a Voice Cry

leep no more. Macbeth does murder sleep.

I’ve wanted to write about The A.R.T./Punchdrunk production of Sleep No More for two months, but I’ve struggled with two hurdles: 1) I didn’t want to spoil the expectations of anybody in Boston who hadn’t yet attended, and 2) I could write an essay and still not capture the essence of the thing.  I went twice and wish I could’ve afforded to go twice more.  The installation is closed, now, and I need to commemorate it in my own memory.  Indulge me, those who saw it, and ignore me, those who didn’t.

I love Macbeth, as a piece of text and as a production.  I spent a whole semester of college wrestling with the staging as a member of the ensemble, and have half the play locked in my memory somewhere—so my instinct, when entering Sleep No More for the first time, was to reconstruct as many pieces of the original text as I could.  See that clever staging of the interrogation!  The witches, yes, and… ah, that must be Macduff!  Watch out, the forest is alive!  I was embarrassed to find—reading the program notes the next morning—that many of the elements I forced into the Macbeth narrative had their origins not in Shakespeare, but in Hitchcock.  I began to reframe my self-constructed narrative but, without the immersion of the installation, the details began to fade.  I had to go back, explore more, see more, be bolder, touch things, spend time with actors instead of chasing our tragic hero and his doomed wife.  Stop forcing the damn narrative, in other words.  The proposition of going to just be there was a new feeling for this jaded consumer of stories.  The world Punchdrunk built, for all its menace, was wholly seductive.

My second journey into that world was even more bizarre, memorable, and personal.  I’ll tell you about it sometime.

Everybody attends theatre for different reasons; everybody has a unique definition of entertainment.  For me, immediacy and immersion have always been the elements of theatre that keep it relevant.  So, keep that in mind when I insist that Sleep No More was the greatest theatrical experience of my life so far.  It was a masterful mix of indelible images, brutally demanding performances, and safe avenues to indulge your own voyeurism or desire to participate.

Incidentally, this Bernard Herrmann theme, a kind of welcome-mat to the installation, has trumped Vertigo in my brain’s association-map.  If my palette for Macbeth is hereafter mixed with Hitchock, I can likewise assume that the next Hitchcock film I see will stir up remnants of that haunted school in Brookline.

If you catch wind of a Punchdrunk production coming to your area, or mine, take note, and let me know.  I got the sense, dipping into Sleep No More’s history, that it takes an immense convergence of forces to make these kinds of installations happen.  Here’s hoping the good will this production garnered will drive this company to export more of their work to places we can reach.

Lastly: this installation was a photographer’s wet dream.  The small sampling of photos here barely capture it.