By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival Announces LIneup

Posted Friday, June 23rd, 2017 - Comments Off on Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival Announces LIneup
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THE TRAVERSE CITY FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES 2017 LINEUP WITH NEW VENUES, SPECIAL SCREENINGS, AND MORE
The 13th Annual Traverse City Film Festival, July 25-30, which will bring over 1000 movies to scenic Northern Michigan.
Big change has come to the festival and the world since we last gathered on the beautiful shores of TC to celebrate movies, but there are still some things you can always count on at the TCFF: the volunteers will be friendly, the out-of-town filmmakers will learn that pasties aren’t just for burlesque shows, and we will always show Just Great Movies.
The movies I’ve selected this year are bold, brave, larger-than-life stories that made me laugh, and sometimes cry, but always left me with a sense of hope and wonder. I can’t wait for you to see them.
As you go through this incredible list of movies, please note some of this year’s special happenings:
  • Two new (temporary) big screens: Kirkbride Hall at Grand Traverse Commons and the newly renovated auditorium in Central High School–transformed into cinemas by the same technical geniuses who remade the State Theatre, City Opera House, Old Town Playhouse, Con Foster Museum, and our other venerable venues into world-class movie theaters. Check ’em out, they’ll be this year’s hot tickets. (Central Grade School is closed for the summer, but returns next year!)
  • The Travel Ban Sidebar, featuring seven daring and beautiful stories that celebrate our connected world.
  • The Buzz — free movies and events, all day — will be moving around to different venues this year. Look for the FREE listings in every time slot.
  • Panels are also on the move. No longer stuck at the City Opera House every morning, we’re changing up the times and locations of the free daily panels so that more people can enjoy them.
  • Food on Film is Supersized. Enjoy more special screenings featuring candid conversations with chefs and filmmakers and sample bites of food inspired by the films.
  • Movies Around the Bay now goes further around the bay with the addition of the beautiful new Lyric Theatre in Harbor Springs kicking things off. Enjoy a week of movies before the festival begins and help relieve your schedule log jam.
  • Great guests! Film lover, critic, and historian extraordinaire Leonard Maltin will be joining us in TC. You’ll see him around the fest as well as recording his Nerdist Podcast, Maltin on Movies. And speaking of movies and podcasts, TC’s adopted son Doug Benson returns bringing new funny friends, and maybe running into another TCFF 2017 funnyman, guest Gilbert Gottfried.
  • The 117 feature films and the filmmakers we’re announcing today are just the beginning. Exciting announcements will follow in the coming days.
  • And if the hologram system we’ve been testing succeeds, you’ll see me floating above the Open Space on clear, moonless nights.
You can view the entire schedule of movies and events online, or you can download a PDF. Pick up a printed guide at the State Theatre, Bijou by the Bay, and other locations all around town, or in copies of the Record-Eagle later this week.
Tickets go on sale to our Friends of the Film Festival on July 9 and to the general public on July 15. Prices remain the same for the fourth year in a row, and there are dozens of free films and events so that everyone can participate.
Thank you, everyone, for your support. These crazy times call for community, creativity, and a loving approach to defining our future. Let’s celebrate the amazing work coming out of the countries our current president wants to ban, and let’s continue to enjoy “Just Great Movies,” and the incredible filmmakers who create them.
All my best,
Michael Moore
ABOUT THE TRAVERSE CITY FILM FESTIVAL
The Traverse City Film Festival is a charitable, educational, nonprofit organization committed to the idea that “One Great Movie Can Change You: Just Great Movies” and to helping save one of America’s few indigenous art forms – the cinema. The festival brings films and filmmakers from around the world to northern Michigan for the annual film festival in late July to early August.
It was instrumental in renovating a shuttered historic downtown movie house, the State Theatre, which it continues to own and operate as a year-round, community-based, and volunteer-staffed art house movie theater. The festival also renovated the historic Con Foster Museum building in Clinch Park and turned it into a sister screen for the State Theatre, the Bijou by the Bay.
The festival was founded by Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore who makes his home here, runs the festival, and serves as president of the board of directors. Other board members are filmmakers Rod Birleson (producer, “Capitalism: A Love Story”), Larry Charles (director, “Borat”), Terry George (director, “Hotel Rwanda”), Jeff Daniels (actor, “The Newsroom”), Tom Morello (musician, Rage Against the Machine), Christine Lahti (actor, “Running on Empty”), Mark Cousins (director, “The Story of Film: An Odyssey”), Tia Lessin (director, “Trouble the Water”), as well as Traverse City residents photographer John Robert Williams and former Walt Disney Co. marketing executive Penny Milliken.
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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