By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

FSLC Sets Terrence Malick Favorite “Ben Stiller Directs”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCES BEN STILLER DIRECTS,DECEMBER 6-8

THE CAREER RETROSPECTIVE INCLUDES ALL FIVE FILMS DIRECTED BY STILLER.

HE WILL ALSO APPEAR IN-PERSON FOR ZOOLANDER AND THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

NEW YORK, NY (November 4, 2013) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today Ben Stiller Directs, December 6-8, a complete survey of actor-director-producer-writer Ben Stiller’s work behind the camera. Following the world premiere of his new film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, at the 51st New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates Stiller’s body of work as a director – one that happens also to include several of his greatest performances. Tickets are now on sale, visit Filmlinc.com.

“It goes without saying that Ben Stiller is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, as well as a fearless performer with a gift for turning anxiety into comedy and back again,” said Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Cinematheque Programming. “But what doesn’t get said often enough-and what we wanted to acknowledge with this retrospective-is that he has also long been an inventive, risk-taking filmmaker.”

From the Generation X totem Reality Bites (1994) to the dark cult comedy The Cable Guy (1996) to the wild satires Zoolander (2001) and Tropic Thunder (2008), Stiller’s work as a director reveals a sharp and distinctive comic vision, not to mention an unparalleled eye for the giddy pleasures and dark absurdities of popular culture.

Ben Stiller’s acting credits include There’s Something About Mary, Meet the Parents, The Royal Tenenbaums, Flirting with Disaster, Night at the Museum, Greenberg, and Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, which he is currently filming opposite Naomi Watts. He also co-created, with Judd Apatow, the Emmy Award-winning series The Ben Stiller Show. Following his first visit to Haiti with Save the Children in 2009, Stiller has been committed to raising money for schools in the country through his StillerStrong campaign, and more recently with The Stiller Foundation. In 2010, Stiller was recognized by Time Magazine for his philanthropic work as one of the TIME 100.

Tickets are now on sale. For The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, tickets are $20;  $15 for Film Society members. For the other films screening in Ben Stiller Directs tickets are $10 and only $7 Students, Seniors (62+) as well as Film Society members. Visit FilmLinc.com for additional information.

FILMS, DESCRIPTIONS & SCHEDULE

The Cable Guy

Ben Stiller, 35mm, USA, 1996; 96m

Stiller showed his flair for dark material with this wily, disturbing psychodrama about the sinister relationship between a creepy cable installer (Jim Carrey at his greatest) and an unsuspecting customer (Matthew Broderick, in a terrific straight-man performance). Writing in 2011 in The New York Times, Dave Kehr called this “a seminal film…for the striking new tone it helped to establish.”

Sunday, December 8, 9:15pm

Reality Bites

Ben Stiller, 35mm, USA, 1994; 99m

Winona Ryder leads a cast of Generation X-ers in Stiller’s era-defining debut, a tender romantic comedy and a self-aware portrait of youthful aimlessness in the pop-culture-saturated 1990s. Co-starring Stiller, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Janeane Garofalo.

Friday, December 6, 9:45pm

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Ben Stiller, USA, 2013; 125m
Walter Mitty (Stiller) is a dutiful son, a loyal friend, and a man who takes pride in his work as the photo editor of Life Magazine. He is also a compulsive fantasist who gets lost in heroic scenarios in which he saves the life of the co-worker he adores (Kristen Wiig) but who he can barely manage to speak to in reality. When the publication is bought out and a team of corporate hacks elects to go all digital, a legendary photographer (Sean Penn) entrusts Walter with the negative of an image he considers to be perfect for the final cover… that he loses. Walter embarks on a worldwide search for the photographer, which becomes a journey of self-discovery and a recovery of his buried dreams. From James Thurber’s extremely short 1939 story, Stiller has created a quintessential tale about the irresistible allure of fantasizing.

Saturday, Dec 7,  6:30pm

*Director Ben Stiller in attendance.

Tropic Thunder

Ben Stiller, USA, 2008; 107m

In Stiller’s merciless, high-concept spoof of Hollywood narcissism, self-centered movie stars find themselves in the midst of actual armed conflict while shooting a big-budget Vietnam War epic. The all-star supporting cast includes a scene-stealing Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise, unrecognizable as a vulgar studio boss.

Sunday, December 8, 1:00pm

Zoolander

Ben Stiller, USA, 2001; 89m

In this delirious fashionista farce-reportedly a favorite of Terrence Malick’s-Stiller plays the male model Derek Zoolander, world-renowned for his inventory of facial expressions (not least the career-making Blue Steel). Co-starring Owen Wilson as rival model Hansel and Will Ferrell as the evil designer Mugatu, Zoolander effortlessly bridges the gap between the ridiculous and the sublime.

Saturday, December 7, 9:30pm

*Director Ben Stiller in attendance.

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of the moving image. Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year’s most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-vous With French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment Magazine, Film Society recognizes an artist’s unique achievement in film with the prestigious “Chaplin Award.” The Film Society’s state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stonehenge Partners, Stella Artois, illy café, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com<http://www.filmlinc.com> and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

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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