Redford, Sundance Press on For Opening Day

Traveling from New York to Park City may have taken 14 hours, and establishing a functioning Internet connection may have taken 24 hours, but through it all, you have to have known you could not get rid of me that easily.
And so begins the 2006 Sundance Film Festival–breathtakingly immense, ball-shrinkingly cold and exploding today with more than three dozen screenings across eight area venues. Then there are the parties, panels, performances, celebrity jurors (Terrence Howard, making his triumphant return a year after Hustle & Flow) and, of course, an opening day press conference with festival godfather Robert Redford, holding forth on Sundance’s evolution as its namesake institute celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Geoffrey Gilmore and Robert Redford wistfully recall the old days as shared by Friends With Money filmmaker Nicole Holofcener (Photo: STV)
“Your perception of the festival depends on where you sit,” said Redford, meaning philosophically and not in a 25-degree bus shelter across the steeet from the Library Theater. “If you get away from the main heart of the programming, which is basically programming for new voices in film and new filmmakers, it’s about discovery. It’s about discovering the filmmakers by creating the opportunity for them. That’s our focus. So we program this thing as a festival, which means we don’t program it according to partiality. We don’t make that choice. I wouldn’t want that on my shoulders anyway.”
Redford’s remarks–touting the growth of international and documentary cinema in particular–followed an introduction by festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, who managed to score the day’s Sundance-keyword-quota of “work” and “independent” within seconds of sitting down. The pair was joined onstage by Nicole Holofcener, the Sundance alum from way back whose latest film, Friends With Money, opened the festival Thursday night. She led the gathering on a nostalgia trip to the early ’90s, when she emerged from the institute’s writing and directing labs with her clever, assured debut feature, Walking and Talking.
“I was born at Sundance,” Holofcener said. “I have a really bad memory, but I remember panicking because I forgot how to talk to actors. Or I realized I never knew how to talk to actors. And I had these actors looking at me–one liked to rehearse, one didn’t like to rehearse. One was in a bad mood, one was insecure. And there I was, and I think that they sometimes thought I was supposed to know what I was doing, and I kept telling them, ‘No, I was told this was for practice. I was told it’s OK if I don’t know what I’m doing.’ ”
It was at that point that Holofcener said she leaned on her Sundance advisors for the luxury of advice. “I’ve got to just do it my way and not the way I think it might sound ‘intelligent’ or sound like a director,” she said she learned. “It’ll sound like me, and in a way that will get them to do what I want on film. I think that was the most valuable thing in the directing labs, I think–being able to run to these people that I respected and have have them look at me like, ‘You can do this.’ And they’re not my Mom.”
Ah, Sundance. Selective, independent and nurturing. No wonder we put up with all of this fucking snow.

Jareck-ing Ball: The Cruel Brilliance of 'Why We Fight'

In describing Eugene Jarecki’s extraordinary documentary, Why We Fight, it is not enough to say that the filmmaker did his homework. Nor is it enough to say that Jarecki simply “gets it” or “understands” or “knows what he’s talking about,” all impressions that linger resonantly enough when you view his film or listen to the director elaborate on its thematic trinity of war, economics and imperialism.
Rather, Jarecki sort of absorbed his homework, so much so that Why We Fight virtually revels in a cold, burnished knowledge that possesses all of the answers while–despite its pedigree (Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary) and authority (interviews with Sen. John McCain, William Kristol, Gore Vidal, exhaustive research, etc.)–having none. After all, the film implies, we fight because fighting is necessary.

Ike has a complex in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary Why We Fight (Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)
Or is it? “One of the things that happens is that a viewer comes into Why We Fight, and sees that tremendous amount of effort to think reflectively about the question of the title, which is so desperately important to all of us,” Jarecki told The Reeler. “I think that if a viewer walked out and felt that the film thought it knew the answer, or that Eugene’s voice was too clear and ringing out too loudly, they would be terribly disappointed. It would act as though a question as far reaching and as complex as why we fight is just simple to answer. If it were simple to answer, then it it would simple to stop fighting. The point is that we keep fighting, and we fight for reasons. We fight because we are victims as human beings–we are victims of forces far larger and more complex than we were led to believe.
“And so the only consistent answer in Why We Fight is that though there is no one answer why we fight the current war or why we have fought past wars, what is true of all the wars is that there is a terrible and tragic gap between what the public is told and what turns out later to truly have been going on behind closed doors. So we are never really fighting for the reason at the beginning, and we find ourselves all too often as we are now: Deep in the quicksand of the war, scratching our heads wondering, ‘How did we get here again?’ ”

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From NYC to Sundance: Carter Smith, 'Bugcrush'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
“The moment I read the short story the very first time, it was like being hit by a bus,” Carter Smith said, waiting in a Dallas airport for a changeover flight to Salt Lake City. “I was like, ‘This is the film that I can make better than anybody else. This is the film I have to make.’ It just sort of clobbered me over the head.”
Indeed, Smith made Bugcrush, an adaptation of Scott Treleaven’s story about the “sinister” fallout from a relationship between two high-school boys. An in-demand fashion photographer by day, Smith had directed only a few commercials and small TV projects before diving into his 35-minute film debut last May.
Sundance, however, was not among Smith’s immediate goals for the short. “Really, I wasn’t thinking about anything other than getting it made,” he told me. “As we were sort of going along in the finishing process–editing through the summer–it sort of presented itself and it became prtety obvious that the Sundance deadline would be tight–a complete stretch to get it done by then, but it almost fit with our timetable.”
Smith cut post-production so close that he was still burning Bugcrush‘s rough cut to DVD 30 mintues before Federal Express’s last New York pick-up to make the festival’s submission deadline. He had, however, color timed and sound mixed what he sent–a work-in-progress impressive enough for Sundance shorts programmer Roberta Munroe to eventually send an e-mail asking Smith how it was coming along.
“I was sort of ecstatic that someone had even watched it,” Smith said of Munroe’s note. He called her back to assure her that Bugcrush was still on track and would not be too much shorter or longer than the relatively epic short she and fellow programmer Mike Plante had just watched. “You know,” Smith continued, “The rough cut might be great, but all the doubt and indecision that can happen in the finishing stages can get the better of you, and you can completely fuck it up in the time between the rough cut and the final cut.”
In the end, Smith not only did not fuck it up, but he was invited to participate in the Screenwriters Lab leading up to Sundance. The ebullient filmmaker said the 2006 event is his first “full-on festival experience anywhere ever.”
“I’m a total newbie,” he said. “I’ve been here or there to a screening, but I’ve never actually gone to a destination for a film festival to be there the whole time. This is definitely a first, and I guess don’t really know what to expect. I’ve been picking the brains of everyone I can.”

From NYC to Sundance: Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa, 'La Muerte es Pequeña'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa does things the hard way. At least, that is sort of how it sounds while talking to him about his sexy, intense Sundance short La Muerte es Pequeña. For starters, the native Brazilian adapted his source material–a Sergio Sant’Anna short story–from Portuguese to Spanish, and then cast Latino actors for whom neither tongue was their first language.
“Basically, I had no real reason to do this in Spanish other than the fact that I wanted to set a very specific tone,” Gamarano Barbosa told The Reeler. “What drew me to the story was the tone it was trying to hit, which was a sort of melodrama. The actors are acting; they don’t hide the fact that they’re acting.”
At least the guy knows what he wants and how to get it, a trait that likely played no small role in his 17-minute, $300 student exercise earning one of 73 coveted spots in this year’s shorts program. The story addresses the strange and sudden coupling of a man and woman viewing the same vacant apartment. She is just out of a relationship with a younger man, he is a paranoid journalist who observes her devastation up close. “It’s like a dance between those two,” Gamarano Barbosa said, “very much like Last Tango in Paris with a warm, almost Almodovar kind of touch. That was totally where I was coming from.”
After shooting Muerte, Gamarano Barbosa won a James Bridges Fellowship at Columbia’s film school in recognition of his strong work with actors. The award provided him a chunk of money he used to shoot his thesis film in South America, but on his way out of New York, he decided on a whim to submit Muerte to Sundance. He said he had no intention of actually being admitted, and he shot in such a remote location outside Brazil that he did not receive the festival’s e-mailed acceptance note until he returned to Rio de Janeiro–the day before the line-ups were announced.
Having snuck in at the last minute, Gamarano Barbosa started planning. He printed a set of business cards (“I’ve never made them before in my life, so I think that’s already some kind of accomplishment.”) and prepared a feature treatment with Muerte’s co-writer Ken Kristensen, just in case. But amid all the other little things, Gamarano Barbosa is more or less determined to relish the experience. “This is the first festival I am attending with a film that I made,” he said. “I’m going to have a blast there. That’s all I can tell you.”

From NYC to Sundance: James Ponsoldt and Scott Macaulay, 'Off the Black'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Off the Black was almost done. Almost. What its veteran producer Scott Macaulay sort of shruggingly referred to it as a “photo finish,” its writer-director James Ponsoldt laughed off a little more nervously.
“I think we were probably in the last batch of films to submit to Sundance,” Ponsoldt said last weekend. “We shot really late. So we were doing the sound mix this past week at Sound One, and we finished that late Friday, and we’re doing our Dolby imprint Monday. We saw our first answer print Friday, and then we’re going to have the second print Tuesday or Wednesday. We’re doing titles as we speak; I think those are probably going to be done Tuesday. And our first screening is Friday.”
And then there were all “the weird things about emulsion.” Nevertheless, the irrepresible Ponsoldt–a first-time feature director whose shorts have screened in dozens of festivals around the world–was virtually counting down the days to Off the Black‘s Eccles Theatre premiere. And why not? The Brooklyn resident will travel to Sundance with one of the festival’s most anticipated titles, starring Nick Nolte as a lonely, washed-up high school baseball umpire who strikes up a bizarre relationship with a young pitcher (Trevor Morgan) he catches vandalizing his house.
“It was fantastic,” Ponsoldt said of working with Nolte. “Obviously, a lot of people have an idea of what Nick Nolte is like as a personality, but he’s such a sweet guy. If he has an ego, I didn’t notice it. He was kind and awesome to everybody on set, and he really committed himself to do it.”
But, dude–Nick Nolte. On your first feature. “He read it and said he wanted to meet me,” Ponsoldt said. “So I went out to L.A. to meet him. I guess he wanted just make sure I wasn’t a fucking idiot or a jerk or whatever, because once he said he would do it, from that point on, he was willing to do anything, and he was the easiest actor to work with.”
As a world premiere, Off the Black naturally travels to Sundance without a distribution deal in place. Macaulay has plenty of experience with the feeding frenzy that can result from this, but he and co-producer Robin O’Hara are not letting the extra work and pressure overwhelm them. “We’re excited about Sundance because we think it’s the perfect festival to launch this film,” he said. “And at the same time, as a producer, you sort of have to take the long view on everything.”
Ponsoldt is equally philosophical. “I had somebody once tell me that when you’re making features, there are two distinct parts,” he said. “The making of the film, and the selling of the film. And don’t corrupt the former with the latter, or you’ll probably compromise anything that’s meaningful to you. So I guess the big difference is the selling part of it.”
Not that he is preoccupying himself too much with that before the titles are even done, or with so many other movies finding their ways to his schedule–especially some of those by his film school colleagues from Columbia.
“I don’t think Sundance is the ideal place to see films you want to see, especially if you have a film there,” he said. “It’s kind of a gross mob scene. I don’t really like going to parties. But I’m going to be there for pretty much the whole festival, and what I’m resolute in doing is seeing my friends’ films. … I just want to see the films that sound wonderful.”

From NYC to Sundance: Dito Montiel, 'A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
If and when you run into model/boxer/punk/memoirist/New Yorker/first-time filmmaker Dito Montiel around Park City, then here is my advice to you: Just let him do the talking. Especially about the teeming, steaming city portrayed in his high-profile Sundance breakthrough, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.
“The biggest thing was, I’m from Astoria, Queens, and I definitely wanted to make (Saints) here, because, you know, it would just be fun,” Montiel told The Reeler. “The idea of trying to make the movie anywhere else and fake it is impossible. I see movies (shot) in Canada all the time, and it takes about five minutes before it feels like Westworld–something feels sterile, you know? You know what I mean? It’s too clean, something’s not right, and then it’s like that’s what it is. It’s not New York. So it was really important to make it in New York, and particularly in Astoria, Queens, because that’s where the story takes place.
“As far as it being a story about New York, I never felt like that,” he continued. “I just happened to be in New York and it was nice to make it here because I knew the street names. I never wanted it to be this ‘yo Vinny’ New York movie. It was just about some kids who, I’m sure, if you’re from Ames, Iowa, you knew in your version of it. I read the oneliner things about the film, where it’s quintessential New York movie. I certainly didn’t set out to do that. I love New York, but to me it’s not a New York story. It’s just a story about a bunch of kids and they live in New York. That was a really important for me to stay away from that sort of thing.”
I could (and probably should) go on all day with Montiel, whose spellbinding intensity fueled the coming-of-age memoir on which Saints is based, which in turn earned him the high-profile fan club that encouraged his screen adaptation. He had exactly zero filmmaking experience, but that represented something of a plus for admirers like Robert Downey Jr., Trudie Styler (aka Mrs. Sting), Chazz Palminteri and others.
Montiel wound up at the 2004 Sundance Screenwriters and Filmmakers Labs, where he developed Saints from its wiry, kinetic source into its wiry, kinetic script. It was the latest facet of many that shaped its author’s renaissance-man reputation: from a kid expelled from high school for fighting to an amateur boxing career; from a male model to a punk rocker who famously scored a $1 million record deal for his hardcore band Gutterboy; from running with Allen Ginsberg to directing Rosario Dawson; from so on to so forth.
It was all mildly unbelievable and, for Montiel, totally fucking insane. “I was just talking to my friend Jake (Pushinski), who’s editing with me,” Montiel said. “He’s never edited a film before, ever. He learned Avid while we were making the movie. The luck of it was that I had producers with guts–Trudie Styler and Robert Downey. But the guts to literally let someone…” He takes a breath. “I’m not saying this for press or because it sounds good, but I had no idea what I was doing. For real.”
In addition to writing and directing, Moniel also played casting director for the kids who populate his film. “My goal, really, was to get a bunch of kids off the street,” he told me. “I did five auditions. I put fliers up at Coney Island and did an open call there. I put fliers up in Astoria, Queens, and did an open call in a music rehearsal studio. I just literally walked the streets of New York to find kids that just looked interesting and had something special, and the movie’s full of them–kids roaming around past their bedtimes.”
But for better or worse, what catches eyes at Sundance are the names: An A-lister here, an Oscar-winner (Dianne Wiest) there. Montiel said he was initially against casting stars, but he eventually acquiesced once he knew he had found the “right famous people.” “Life gets a little easier when you have them around,” he acknowledged. “It was going to get made regardless, but two things were a blessing–one, that they were famous enough to make me care, and two, they were good enough to make me better.”

From NYC to Sundance: Hilary Brougher, 'Stephanie Daley'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
I remember reading about Hilary Brougher’s drama Stephanie Daley last summer in The Times; I think it was something about a growing number of indie productions shooting upstate. Starring Amber Tamblyn as the title character–a young woman accused of killing her baby–and Tilda Swinton as the psychologist who evaluates her competency to stand trial, the film had indie cred to spare and Sundance written all over it.
At least that was my impression at the time, and evidently, Brougher thought so, too–even if the clock was against her. “We were really hopeful we could make the festival,” she told me over the weekend. “It was kind of a mad dash because we shot in the summer, we did winter pickups and we submitted with a rough cut. And we just finished sound mixing like a day ago.”
Brougher chuckled, then laughed as though absorbing the absurdity of it all. Of course, deadlines are hardly an unusual challenge facing premieres like Stephanie Daley. But less than a week before her Sundance debut (her previous film, The Sticky Fingers of Time, screened at the 1997 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals), Brougher’s attitude seems to defy the fatigue and stress standards commonly accompanying those deadlines. Her initial relief and happiness at cracking the competition line-up gave way to an even more concentrated resolution.
“Somewhere after relief, it’s a sense a panic,” she said. “And then you just kind of do what you have to do. I’m a big believer in efficiency. This happened for a reason–I really think the film came into its own and happened just the way it should. I think the the lack of time itself sort of offset with a really positive momentum and excitement that keeps you going, just from the energy. You find yourself saying, ‘I have to do this, I have a reason to do this and we can do this.”
Expressing her “hope in the marketplace,” Brougher also plans to avoid the distribution pressures likely to follow Stephanie Daley‘s festival run. Instead, she said, she views Sundance as her just-finished film’s unofficial wrap party. “In my heart, I really just want to enjoy some of these people I’ve worked with before we all disperse,” Brougher told me. “That’s what I’m thankful to focus on. I know that there’s going to be lot going on, and it’s going to be very new for me and not like anything I know. But I’m not going to worry about it. So far the film’s been a lot of fun and the center of a lot of growth, so I’m just going to try and have a good time and stay positive and be near the people that I love and trust.”

From NYC to Sundance: Jeffrey and Joshua Crook, 'Salvage'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Full disclosure: I was in an awful horror-film rut when I interviewed Jeffrey Crook, one-half of the Crook Brothers team that made what sounds like it could be 2006’s most terrifying Sundance entry, Salvage. The story of a woman (Lauren Currie Lewis, right) who suffers a brutal murder only to relive the incident again and again (and, naturally, to try solving the mystery of why it happens), Salvage is the horror film I am counting on to wash Hostel‘s and Wolf Creek‘s bad tastes out of my mouth.
Like the Crooks need that tiny, added pressure with their movie a week away from its world premiere in Sundance’s Midnight program. But so far, so good, to hear Jeffrey Crook tell it.
“What I see missing in things is that there’s no mystery,” Crook said, patiently reacting to my anti-Hostel broadside. “There’s none of that supernatural side in a lot of the slasher type stuff. Ours is sort of a mystery wrapped in a horror shell, and there are a lot of kind of supernatural hints at things that are going on. I think the overall feel of it is a little more mysterious than just thing where somebody’s getting chased around for the entire movie with a chainsaw. And our approach to it was that we wanted to have scary stuff–we wanted to have her going down dark staircases and into basements and creeping around and things like that, because that stuff just wotks as scary scenes. But we also wanted to drop all these creepy hints. The Ring was so successful because it’s just mysterious. You don’t know what the hell’s going on through it, you know?”
Sure, I know, and it actually pisses me off even more that I have to wait another days before I can check it out. But that is not the Crooks’ problem. In fact, it does not sound like the Brooklyn natives and current Sunnyside residents have many problems at all when it comes to Salvage. Shot in the small town of Marietta, Ohio, where Joshua Crook attended college and met his future wife, the film is the brothers’ fourth film in as many years. It follows the the buzz-packing tradition of their previous indies, which landed distribution with Artisan, Lionsgate and most recently, in the case of their dark comendy The Fittest, won best picture at the 2004 Valley Film Festival.
Of course, this is Sundance, and while Crook tells me he is thrilled to be making his first trip, he adds that he and Joshua have no idea what to expect. “It’s kind of overwhelming for us in that it gets you so much attention you didn’t otherwise have,” he told The Reeler. “We’ve been in guerilla filmmaker land out here for years. It really gets you connected to a lot of people in the industry and bumps you up another level. We’re sort of taking other people’s advice on what we should do.”
But with a film this promising–and producer’s rep like Washington Square’s Christopher Pizzo and (as of last week) the Gersh Agency on their sides–it is likely some solid advice. Well, a lot better than Hostel, anyway.

From NYC to Sundance: Christian Ryan, 'Sólo Dios Sabe'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
As far as scenic routes to Sundance go, Sólo Dios Sabe executive producer Christian Ryan followed one of the more unconventional ones. A former management consultant and high school physics teacher, Ryan had dabbled in writing and producing when he received a telephone call from an old business school friend in San Francisco.
“We hadn’t been in touch,” Ryan explained. “But he called me up and said, ‘Hey, a script just crossed my desk.’ He works in private wealth management, and that world of high net- wealth money management kind of intersects with the independent film world. That’s people with money, and independent filmmakers are always looking FOR money. There’s some connection there–not always a natural fit, but sometimes.”
The script was Carlos Bolado and Diane Weipert’s Sólo Dios Sabe, and for Ryan, the fit was pretty much perfect. The film was already in an advanced stage of development, with Diego Luna and Alice Braga cast as the story’s star-crossed lovers and the screenplay on its ninth draft, but the funding had yet to be locked down. Bolado, an internationally acclaimed filmmaker with an Oscar-nominated documentary and Mexican Ariel award-winning feature to his credit, flew from San Francisco to New York in 2003 to meet with Ryan.
The neophyte producer leveled with the director right away. “I said, ‘Hey, you know, I don’t have experience in independent film that I can bring to the project,’ ” Ryan told The Reeler. “But I know how to run Excel, and I can make PowerPoint presentations if we need those. I don’t know anything about cameras or anything like that, but I’m totally happy to learn.”
That was enough for Bolado and fellow producers Sara Silveira and Yissel Ibarra. Ryan made his first trip to Sundance in 2004, relentlessly networking and familiarizing himself with the festival dynamics. Sólo Dios Sabe, meanwhile, took shape as a genuinely international production. The filmmakers took advantage of incentives in Mexico and Brazil (indeed, Ryan informed me, Sólo Dios Sabe is the first-ever co-production between the two countries), while Ryan scrambled to keep up with conference calls that often comprised participants in four time zones.
“The sort of things I’ve been helping to do are raising money and negotiating deals we’ve cut along the way,” Ryan said. “Basically, after talking to other people who’ve had the title of executive producer, I think that on any independent film it means any and all things. It’s pitching in on almost every aspect of the film down to, as one of the other producers and I put it, sometimes mopping up the coffee.”
But it primarily means that when Ryan attends his third Sundance Film Festival this week, he will officially be there as a New York filmmaker. “It’s kind of funny that here I am in New York involved with this thing,” he said. “I guess it sort of points out the international nature of independent film now or something. And hopefully, it becomes a launching pad.”

From NYC to Sundance: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, 'Half Nelson'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson (right) had just begun production last summer when pedigree and background made it a fairly tough film not to see coming at this year’s festival. In an intriguingly cosmic (if not necessarily new) style of adaptation, Fleck and creative partner Anna Boden attended the Sundance Screenwriters Lab to flesh out their 2004 jury prize-winning short Gowanus, Brooklyn into a feature-length screenplay. Except that the feature was written well before the short, and Gowanus was an adaptation of that. Got it? Great.
Anyway, now that the concept has come full-circle, with their story of an unlikely friendship between a junior-high school student and her drug-addicted teacher expanded as a feature with Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie and Gowanus‘s young star Shareeka Epps (reprising her role as Drey), it makes sense that the filmmakers’ closure would sort of interlace with the festival’s. Pretty much everybody wants to see how this thing is going to end.
Of course, anticipation is just one part of the features game played in Park City. “It’s definitely different,” Boden said. “We’ve been to Sundance with two shorts (Gowanus and 2002’s Struggle) now, but I imagine it’s going to be a really different experience there. There are different expectations when you have a pretty good deal of someone else’s money at stake. There is a lot more pressure to find a distributor for the film. It was just really fun having a short there, and we just saw lots of really good movies and met other filmmakers. There was very little pressure.”
Fleck agreed. “We have a publicist for the first time,” he said, “which is a strange thing, but great because we would never know how to arrange any of this stuff on our own. It’s a new kind of experience.”
Half Nelson is even a risky project, to some degree, if only because its celebrated bloodline confers a higher level of expectations than most feature debuts contend with. I asked the filmmakers about the advantage–or possible disadvantage–of reimagining a story that audiences so took to heart in 2004.
“I don’t think it’s an advantage,” Fleck told me. “I think the only thing that could be perceived as an advantage is that anybody who saw and liked the short will go see this. I think in terms of getting people into the theaters–whether it’s a distributor or general audience or press or whoever–not a lot of people saw the short, but anyone who did and liked it, they’ll go see it again and I think they’ll like this. It’s just different enough to make you think you’re not watching the same thing. But you know the characters in some way, and hopefully liked the characters in the short. I think in that sense it’s an advantage.
“But in terms of selling the film, or winning any prizes?” he asked. “I really can’t see any kind of advantage to having a short. I don’t think the jurors are going to be aware of that. You still have to make a good movie to impress distributors. I don’t think it matters.”

From NYC to Sundance: Jeff Lipsky, 'Flannel Pajamas'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
While a lot of Sundance competition features will likely find distribution in one form or another, only a handful go into the festival every year assured of not only distribution, but probably a bidding war. And if you had to place wagers on which film might manage the most spirited negotiation in 2006, you may as well go with the one written and directed by one of fathers of modern independent film distribution itself.
But do not bet on Jeff Lipsky’s relationship drama Flannel Pajamas just because he is hyper-connected from the days he released indies with John Cassavetes, New Yorker Films and his own companies October Films and Lot 47 Films. Bet on Pajamas because Lipsky really loves it.
“It’s very funny,” he told The Reeler last week. “Our production has hired a publicist. Our production has engaged the services of a sales representative, and I have been instructed in no uncertain terms to attend the festival and have a good time. This is the first time I will be attending the festival in absense of inhuman pressures that I always felt as a distributor. If I was not proud of my film, that would be another story. But I’m confident, not even so much in the film, but this really was a collaborative effort. I’ve got actors in this movie that are revelations. And they’re going to be there with me, and at the very least and my greatest pride will come for the recognition these people get. That might sound a little altruistic, but it’s absolutely true.”
Of course, nobody has actually seen this movie yet (“I swear to you on a stack of bibles,” Lipsky told me after I claimed this disadvantage in writing about it. “I will be carrying the first 35mm print to Sundance under my arm. I thought I would never have to do that, but that’s the truth.”), but that hasn’t stopped the buzz citing the film as an American heir to Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. As 30-something lovers in New York, Stuart (Justin Kirk) and Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) fall hard for each other and supposedly fall harder in their ensuing relationship. A native New Yorker himself, Lipsky attributed parts of the story to autobiography; other parts he attributed to that old, nagging “human condition.”
Somewhat miraculously, despite being one of Sundance’s quintessential grizzled veterans, his first festival “filmmaker” badge seemed to infuse Lipsky with a reborn, almost giddy burst of enthusiasm. “I’m trying not to sound too Pollyanna-ish, but it’s a completely new experience,” he said. “I truly am in the best sense of the word dazed and astounded at the attentiveness and the organization from the newset volunteer at the festival to the top organizers. I mean, it gives you real insight that this festival really is not just about the discovery of new filmmakers, but the nurturing of new filmmakers. Trying to lend as much inspiration on every level at every step of the process that they can. And as I say, you feel that not just from (festival bosses) Geoff Gilmore and John Cooper–you get it from everybody.”
Oh, Jesus–brownnosing from the top down. I’ll see your $10 million distribution deal and raise you a Grand Jury Prize. This must be Lipsky’s year.

From NYC to Sundance: Madeleine Olnek, 'Hold-Up'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
You might call it luck: A rookie filmmaker gets her seven-minute short accepted to Sundance on her first try. Or you could say she earned it, just through summoning the will to tackle the arduous application process alone.
“I’m not good with any device with buttons,” said Madeleine Olnek, a way-Off Broadway playwright, director and Columbia film student whose comedy Hold-Up nabbed a slot among this year’s festival shorts. “Sundance had an online application, and it actually took me a long time. I swear I typed an essay that disappeared. It retained all this other information, but when I went back to work on the essay, like Brigadoon, it was all gone.”
In the end, her facility with a camera–not to mention that harsh mistress comedy–was all Olnek really needed. Hold-Up won the Short Film Audience Award at New York’s New Festival for its tale of a woman who persuades her fiance to join her in convenience store robbery. Of course, as with all successful short films, nothing is ever that simple, and friends like indie producer George LaVoo (Real Women Have Curves) found the twists suitably hilarious enough to encourage Olnek to send it around.
“That was the first I thought of it,” she told The Reeler. “I mean, honestly, when you’re making anything–plays, movies–you should send them out. Even to the best places, however slight your chances are. You just have to put things in the mail.”
Besides shopping for warmer socks and checking the Sundance alumni tip sheet for other useful suggestions (EX: Allow for a period of altitude sickness by arriving a day early), Olnek said she was preparing for Sundance mostly by maintaining a sense of perspective. “It’s different for the feature filmmakers than it is for the shorts, even though the shorts people feel a lot of pressure because they think it’s their big chance,” she said. “But you know what’s hard? I think because so often when you’re involved in a creative field, you’re outside the normal 9-to-5 thing. There’s less of a sort of structure for a filmmaker’s career. So when these successful moments come along, you can really be destablized by them. And put a lot of pressure on them and think that this is it. ‘This is my chance.’ You know? You have to take advantage of the opoortuntity but at the same time, not decide it’s going to be the last thing that ever happens to you.”
As such, Olnek plans to take advantage of the standard mix of networking, panels and screenings without running herself too ragged, but instead savoring the opportunity. “All anyone wants is to get into Sundance,” she said. “Any filmmaker. It’s a kind of encouragement that you just really need to keep going–how inspiring it is to be chosen for an honor like this, you know? It really means a lot.”

From NYC to Sundance: Ramin Bahrani, 'Man Push Cart'

[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
I first spotted Ramin Bahrani’s name last summer, when the strength of his feature debut Man Push Cart scored the filmmaker a rave from Variety and prime screening spots in festivals from Venice to Marrakech. The 30-year-old Bahrani had reputedly made a shoestring yet sterling New York film about a Pakistani immigrant whose daily grind as a pushcart vendor anchors him through a swirl of loss and lament.
Six months later, as Bahrani reestablished himself in the city, enjoyed another glimmering write-up in New York Magazine and prepared Man Push Cart for its Sundance bow, we finally managed to catch up. “In North America,” he said, outlining his film’s route to Park City, “You think about Sundance. And we had contacted (Sundance programming director) John Cooper with the hopes that he could see the film in Venice on the big screen with an audience, but he arrived just after our film had already shown. So we really just mailed the DVD, and that’s it. Most (feature) films in Sundance are world premieres, and we’re one of the very few films that is not. So we feel very lucky and honored that they selected us.”
Bahrani, a North Carolina native who moved to New York to study film theory at Columbia University, made a student film during a spell in Iran and a handful of shorts upon returning to New York. Man Push Cart came about after he got to know his actor, Ahmad Razvi, at a pastry shop in Brooklyn. One screenplay and a few screen tests later, Razvi was a leading man.
Working closely with cinematographer Michael Simmonds, Bahrani sought a visual style that estblished the city as both a setting and a character. I asked how he refined his conception of a New York aesthetic, and what it meant in relation to films that came before it “It’s the fact that it feels like the city in the film–not a backdrop,” Bahrani said. “That’s really important to us. Edison was putting the camera in New York 110 years ago, and in conceiving the screenplay, I really wanted to show things that nobody had seen before. In all that time, we had never seen a movie about a pushcart vendor, so we really wanted to show locations and characters and take on the city that had not been seen before.” That included taking cues from Taxi Driver (“the greatest New York film ever made,” in Bahrani’s estimation) and John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie–an L.A. film, but still. “We were especially looking for nighttime films; our film is about 85 percent at night,” he explained.
And though the 2006 event represents Bahrani’s first trip to Sundance, he says his previous festival experience has him feeling prepared–almost as if he is supporting his second film. He recalled his and Simmonds’s immunity to the nerves that nagged other local filmmakers at a recent Sundance orientation in midtown. He acknowledges that he would love to sell Man Push Cart in Park City (the film already has a March 22 release date in Paris), but is equally preoccupied with viewing other films and meeting potential creative collaborators from New York. Simmonds, Razvi and Cart‘s producers plan to join him.
“I’m kind of keeping my expectations minimal,” Bahrani said. “I’ve had the great pleasure to see the reaction to the film in various countires, so now I’m curious what an American audience is going to think.”

From NYC to Sundance: Paul Rachman and Steven Blush, 'American Hardcore'

[Ed. Note: For the next few days, The Reeler will present a series of profiles of some of the New York-based filmmakers with movies at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The subjects worked on various aspects of this year’s shorts, documentaries and features; their Sundance experience ranges from that of rookies to seasoned veterans to prize-winning alumni. Starting Jan. 19, The Reeler’s Sundance coverage will continue from Park City, Utah. — STV]

Paul Rachman had a feeling. The director had spent more than four years adapting writer Steven Blush’s 2000 punk survey American Hardcore as a documentary, and after submitting a rough cut for consideration in this year’s Sundance Film Festival, he found himself doing what thousands of other Sundance hopefuls do every fall: He waited.
And waited.
“Neither one of us really thought is was going to get into Sundance,” Rachman told The Reeler last week. “You know, you hear the rumors about people getting in; they hear weeks before the final, final deadline. They already know, but you haven’t heard, so you’re not in. I heard nothing from them. … You’ve got politics matched with a documentary about a subculture. I didn’t know if they were going to get it.”
Then Rachman received a voicemail last Novemeber while vacationing in the Dominican Republic: American Hardcore was set to screen in the documentary competition.
“What we figured out is that it’s almost a new chapter to the book almost–an addendum,” Blush said. “It’s like a counterpart. A book, in its essence, is delving into certain particular facts and the like. The film is an overview on the subculture. So while the basic premise that this was a tribal, regional, underground, early ’80s movement is consistent throughout, everything else is different. There are different interviews, there are some different people, and of course, there’s the visual element. So it’s a very different experience. But I’m very pleased with it; they should be a little different.”
Of Rachman’s three previous Sundance submissions, Hardcore is the first to make the cut. Not that he is any stranger to the event’s dynamic; as a founding filmmaker of the Slamdance Film Festival in 1995, Rachman helped to build Park City’s underground, strictly indie alternative to the burgeoning Sundance hype machine. As he wound down work on American Hardcore, which looked at the legacies of pioneering bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, D.O.A. and Black Flag, he knew it would be easy enough to screen it at Slamdance.
Of course, Rachman knew that would somewhat defeat both Hardcore‘s and Slamdance’s purposes. “The mission there is first-time filmmakers, films without a distributor and that discovery of talent,” Rachman said. “And while Slamdance might be the expected audience, Sundance is the less-expected audience. And that’s more challenging. And, you know, by not going to Slamdance, it really frees up the screening slot to a first-time filmmaker who deserves that slot.”
Judging from the film’s succession of sold-out screening dates, the challenge seems to have made its impact. “I’m just looking forward to having the opportunity to play this beyond the underground,” said Blush, a longtime musicologist making his film writing debut. “Bringing this to a larger audience–people who might not even know what this movement is. That’s what excites me–the chance to do that.”

Screening Gotham: Jan. 13-15, 2006

A few of this weekend’s worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:
–We can argue forever about which NYC theater programs the best midnight movies. But this weekend, every other cinema in town can kiss the Sunshine’s ass as The Muppet Movie takes a packed house of adoring viewers into the wee hours. Is it a kids film? Is it a cult classic? A musical muddle of kitsch, cameos and talking socks with eyes? It is all of these and much more–a classic ’70s archetype as enduring (and endearing) as The Godfather, Jaws or Shaft. Plus it features Orson Welles. This debate is over.
–This just in from Craigslist:

Howdy neighbors,

Have you seen March of the Peguins? [sic]

Well, have you seen it on the Inwood Hill Nature Center’s 42″ Plasma
T.V?!

Bring the kiddies to the Inwood NC’s first movie night.

Saturday, January 14th at 4p.m. at the Inwood Hill Nature Center (218th/Indian Rd.-Inside the Park)

March of the Peguins [sic]

Movie goodies provided!

Free!
Free?
FREE!

Bill, the Inwood Hill Nature Center Coordinator

Radical! Thank you, Bill.
–I know, I know: “So, Stu, why are you shilling again for the Pioneer Theater?” Because it fucking rocks is why. I could get all righteous about “underground filmmaker”-this and “independent cinema”-that, but its eclectic, egalitarian, NYC-centric calendar speaks for itself. This weekend alone, you have the DIY enterprise Threat, the 9/11 documentary Liberty Street: Alive at Ground Zero and the especially intriguing collection Cine-Poetry on the Web: A Year of ScratchVideo.TV, which Pioneer programmer Ray Privett describes as “my favorite vlog”:

Every couple weeks, videomaker Charlene Rule posts a new little episode, dealing with some eccentric event in her life. In Dearest Geraldine, Rule engages in a conversation with someone who had telephoned her by mistake. … The episodes are almost always disjunctively edited, suggesting an endlessly curious videomaker whose consciousness darts about the world around her seeking insight and beauty. Fortunately, she is willing to share.

Or, hey, I don’t know–you can always go burn $11 to watch Hostel. Your call.