By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

GLASS EYE PIX CELEBRATES THREE DECADES OF FIERCE, AUTEUR-DRIVEN FILMMAKING

Posted Tuesday, September 15th, 2015 - Comments Off on GLASS EYE PIX CELEBRATES THREE DECADES OF FIERCE, AUTEUR-DRIVEN FILMMAKING
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GLASS EYE PIX CELEBRATES THREE DECADES OF FIERCE, AUTEUR-DRIVEN FILMMAKING

This October, Revel at 30 Terrifying Years Inside Larry Fessenden’s World of Horror!

“Fessenden is a talent to watch. That he is able to see himself with such objectivity is almost frightening.” – Roger Ebert

 

On the delirious, dangerous streets of old New York, as young upstarts with names like Buscemi and Jarmusch rose to prominence, art-horror auteur Larry Fessenden birthed one of Gotham’s darkest icons of sovereign cinema. Called “one of the indie scene’s most productive and longest-running companies” by Filmmaker Magazine, Glass Eye Pix has been operated by Fessenden (THE LAST WINTER, WENDIGO, HABIT, NBC’s Fear Itself) since 1985, with the mission of supporting individual voices in the arts.

In addition to countless shorts, three seasons of radio dramas, and one of 2015’s most acclaimed, best selling video games, Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix has been involved with over fifty critically acclaimed films in and out of the horror genre, including WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt), STAKE LAND (Jim Mickle), THE COMEDY (Rick Alverson), THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (Ti West), BIRTH OF THE LIVING DEAD (Rob Kuhns) LATE PHASES (Adrián García Bogliano), SATAN HATES YOU (James Felix McKenney), LIBERTY KID (Ilya Chaiken), and the forthcoming DARLING (Mickey Keating).

Founder Larry Fessenden, who still oversees operations at Glass Eye, began his career acting in and shooting super 8mm shorts, eventually moving on to long format videos, such as his 144-minute caper flick EXPERIENCED MOVERS (1985), the first film to bear the Glass Eye Pix moniker.

1991 saw the production of Fessenden’s first original feature, NO TELLING and, in 1994, Glass Eye birthed what many consider the seminal NYC vampire film, HABIT. Fessenden’s subsequent award-winning films WENDIGO and THE LAST WINTER inspired The New York Times to opine, “Fessenden approaches the themes and thrills of the classic American horror movies
through a determinedly modern approach, as if John Cassavetes had been working for Universal in the early 30’s.”

Since the inception of Glass Eye Pix, Fessenden and co. have run a transmedia operation on a budget, producing movies, documentaries, performance art, comic books, audio dramas, soundtracks, trading cards, action figures, and a dedicated web presence since 1993.  The recent success of the Sony PS4 video game UNTIL DAWN, written by Fessenden and longtime Glass Eye collaborator Graham Reznick, indicates that the Glass Eye’s aesthetic of authenticity mixed with genre can inspire new generations of fright fans across all mediums.

To mark thirty years of fierce independence, Glass Eye Pix is celebrating with a series of special screenings and events this Autumn. On October 4, Larry will appear at SpectreFest in Los Angeles for a special screening of HABIT, followed by a conversation, and from October 8 – 11, Fessenden will appear at New York ComicCon alongside numerous Glass Eye directors, collaborators, and friends. October 20th sees Shout! Factory’s heavily-touted Blu-ray release of “The Larry Fessenden Collection”, containing four of the director’s most acclaimed works remastered in high-definition.

Additional events will be announced in October, including a retrospective at New York’s IFC Center, screenings in New York and L.A., and a special showing of EXPERIENCED MOVERS in the same East Village bar where it was shot 30 years ago.

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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

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~ David Simon