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LOUDER THAN A BOMB CHOSEN BY OPRAH WINFREY NETWORK FOR THE UPCOMING ‘OWN DOCUMENTARY CLUB’

Posted Friday, January 21st, 2011 - Comments Off on LOUDER THAN A BOMB CHOSEN BY OPRAH WINFREY NETWORK FOR THE UPCOMING ‘OWN DOCUMENTARY CLUB’
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FILM TO MAKE THEATRICAL DEBUT FEBRUARY 4 -10 AT THE GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER IN CHICAGO, OTHER CITIES TO FOLLOW.

Heralded as “one of the most inspiring and exhilarating documentaries in years”, the multiple award-winning film Louder Than a Bomb has been selected to be a part of the “OWN Documentary Club”, the new, monthly documentary showcase on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

The doc will make its premiere theatrical run February 4-10 at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Filmmakers Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs have spent the better part of the past year making the rounds at film festivals around the country, garnering eleven awards, including audience prizes at the Palm Springs, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Woods Hole film festivals. Louder Than a Bomb is also one of 18 films chosen for the 2011 American Documentary Showcase, a program created by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs “to cultivate greater understanding among people around the world.”

Louder Than A Bomb is a film about passion, competition, teamwork, and trust. It’s about the joy of being young, and the pain of growing up. It’s about speaking out, making noise, and finding your voice. It also just happens to be about poetry.

The film is based around an annual event where more than six hundred teenagers from over sixty Chicago area high school poetry teams gather for the world’s largest youth poetry slam, a competition known as “Louder Than a Bomb”, the only event of it’s kind in the country. The film chronicles the stereotype-confounding stories of four teams as they prepare for and compete in the 2008 event. What unfolds transcends the event or the story of high school slam contenders, and instead hones in on worlds merging, and how hope and disappointment become a common thread between ethnicities, races and classes. In the end, while the topics these remarkable teenagers tackle are often deeply personal, what they put into their poems—and what they get out of them—is universal: the defining work of finding one’s voice.

“An affecting and superbly paced celebration of American youth at their creative best…” -Variety

“Fascinating…Inspiring…” – LA Times

“Surely one of the best and most powerful films in this year’s Chicago International Film Festival…” -Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“A get-up-and-clap kind of movie.” -Paste Magazine

“One of the most inspiring and exhilarating documentaries in months, or maybe years…Vibrant and moving.” –Steve Pond, The Wrap

“Genuinely stirring…Irrestistible.” – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

http://www.louderthanabombfilm.com/

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon