-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
DOMINIQUE DELEON: SPECIAL BOY FILMS
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Monday, December 14, 2009
THE OMO PEOPLE
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Sunday, December 13, 2009
ON THE ARCHETYPLE: C. G. JUNG'S "RED BOOK" EXHIBITION
December 12, 2009
Exhibition Review | 'The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jung’s Inner Universe, Writ Large
We know the archetype; we cherish the myth. The hero, like the world around him, is in a state of crisis. And in seeking to restore himself and the shattered cosmos, he valiantly passes through a vale of despair, descending into darkness. He risks his life and psyche in perilous encounters with dreams or dragons and finally emerges into the light, spiritually transformed, ushering in a new age.
That restoration may be like Odysseus’ epic journey home or like the return of the Israelites to Canaan. It may be like Siegfried braving his way to the side of the sleeping Brünnhilde or like ... well, perhaps like the journey that Carl G. Jung tried to outline in a private chronicle he kept for 16 years that until recently had scarcely been seen by anyone outside the extended family of his descendants. It’s an elaborately designed scripture, filled with his fantasies and surreal imaginings, known as “The Red Book.”
The title is not a metaphorical allusion to blood’s primal coloration nor does it require elaborate symbolic explication. The book really is red, and you can see it until mid-February, lying open in a glass case in an exhibition mounted in its honor at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea: “The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology.”
Jung, who by the time he began work on this tome had already broken with Freud and was developing his mythically suffused conception of the human psyche, made certain that the book’s significance would not be overlooked by future acolytes. Bound in crimson leather, it is an enormous folio, more than 600 pages, bearing the formal title “Liber Novus” (“New Book”). Jung gave it all the trappings of antique authority and stentorian consequence, presenting it as a Newer New Testament.
He wrote it out himself, using a runic Latin and German calligraphy. Its opening portion, which begins with quotations from Isaiah and the Gospel according to John, is inked onto parchment, each section beginning with an initial illuminated as if by a medieval scribe with a taste for eyes, castles and scarabs.
The book’s accounts of Jung’s visions, fantasies and dreams are also punctuated with his paintings (some of which are on display in the exhibition), images executed during the years of World War I and the decade after that now appear as uncanny anticipations of New Age folk art of the late 20th century. They display abstract, symmetrical floral designs Jung came to identify as mandalas, along with almost childlike renderings of flames, trees, dragons and snakes, all in striking, bold colors.
But what is particularly strange about this book is not its pretense or pomposity but its talismanic power. It was stashed away in a cabinet for decades by the family, then jealously withheld from scholarly view because of its supposedly revealing nature. Since being brought into the open, partly through the efforts of the historian and Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani (who is also curator of this exhibition), it has become a sensation.
A meticulously reproduced facsimile, published in October by W. W. Norton & Company, with detailed footnotes and commentary by Mr. Shamdasani (who also contributed to the volume’s accompanying translation), “The Red Book,” costing $195, is in its fifth printing.
This modest show, in which the book is supplemented by displays of the author’s notes, sketches and paintings, is now scheduled to travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from April to June, and then to the Library of Congress in Washington.
The book really is a remarkable object, and not just because it so eccentrically insists on its own significance. It represents Jung’s thinking during a period when he was developing his notion of “archetype” and a “collective unconscious,” positing a substratum of the human mind that shapes language, image and myth across all cultures. And as he was developing his ideas about psychological therapy as a form of self-knowledge, he seemed to have been engaging in just such a self-analysis: the book provides a bewildering, seemingly uncensored path into Jung’s inner life. Mr. Shamdasani writes, “It is nothing less than the central book in his oeuvre.”
That is something students of Jung’s life and work can ponder as they try to put these gnomic tales into intellectual and biographical context. As Jung himself warned in an unfinished 1959 epilogue to this unfinished book, “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.” Perhaps even to the nonsuperficial observer.
The narrator is a stand-in for Jung; he splits into multiple parts, engaging in cryptic dialogue with alternative souls. He is often in the company of a being named Philemon, an old man with the horns of a bull, a creature, Jung said, who evolved out of the biblical character Elijah. Philemon is a “pagan” who carries with him “an Egypto-Hellenic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration.”
Nearly every visitation has some such mix of exotico-mythico-primitivo coloration. One painting on display here shows a centipedesque dragon, its jaws opened to swallow a yellow ball.
Jung’s explanation: “The dragon wants to eat the sun, and the youth beseeches him not to. But he eats it nevertheless.” An inscription goes into more detail, naming figures in the story without explaining them: “Atmavictu,” “a youthful supporter,” “Telesphorus,” “evil spirit in some men.”
Confusion about the meaning of it all was apparently shared by Jung, who transcribed these visions and then reflected on them in streams of semiconsciousness, invoking death, sacrifice, love and acceptance, sounding at times like a Greek priestess moaning from the bowels of the earth. He wanders in the desert, he cries aloud, he eats the liver of a sacrificed girl, her head “a mash of blood with hair and whitish pieces of bone.”
The temptation, after numbingly turning these pages, is to react finally like the psychiatrist Spielvogel at the end of Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and say: “So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” Maybe that was Jung’s reaction too, which is why he abandoned the project in 1930. He couldn’t even complete the epilogue, some 30 years later, breaking off in midsentence.
Now it may be, of course, that Jung was speaking profoundly in tongues, and that more devoted souls may stumble on the key to all these mythologies. Perhaps. Jung himself, after all, was engaged in more compelling systematic work about the primal forces of the psyche during this period (ideas that may have also influenced the late speculations of Freud). Yet right now the lure of the book comes not from within, but from without, not from what it deciphers, but from what it signals about our own mythological predilections.
Mr. Shamdasani argues that “the overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation.” And as he points out, Jung undertook his strange project after a series of apocalyptic visions in 1913 and 1914 that he later believed were prophesies of an imminent world war. He looked out a window, he said, and “saw blood, rivers of blood.” Jung felt it within himself as well, the “menace of psychosis.”
And so he began this enterprise of self-examination, a ruthless overturning of the rational Western mind, submerging himself in a pilgrimage through the pagan land of his own psyche. This project was his belated answer to Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams,” which had also presented itself as the account of a heroic self-analytical descent into the maelstrom of the unconscious.
We are lured by that archetype still, even if it does not seem to shed the illumination Jung claimed. Go see this book and the exhibition, though, to glimpse an extraordinary relic of a particular way of thinking about the mind and its history. Then, cued by a 13th-century Tibetan mandala here that Jung owned, go upstairs and see the Rubin’s astonishing show of these ancient Tibetan designs, each enclosing an encyclopedic universe, encompassing desire, venality, wisdom, ecstasy and passion. Maybe “The Red Book” deserves a diagnosis: Jung had mandala envy.
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
SUNDANCE: SAMINA AKBARI AND JAMES FRANCO
HERBERT WHITE (Director and Screenwriter: James Franco - Current Grad Film student)—Based on the poem by the same name, a man struggles with his inner demons while trying to live a normal family life.
THE VISITORS (Director and Screenwriter: Samina Akbari - Current Grad Film student)—A young woman that makes up one part of a interracial relationship copes with the arrival of her family while trapped in a rat-infested apartment.
NYU Grad Film will be well represented at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival by a number of films written, directed, produced, and shot by current students, alumni, and faculty. - CINECITY, NYU GRAD FILM BLOG
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Sunday, September 20, 2009
ARMONDO DIAZ: NYU CHAIR'S WORKSHOP
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
ARMONDO DIAZ TONIGHT!
A MASTER OF IMPROVISATION
THE CHAIR'S WORKSHOP PRESENTS:
ARMANDO DIAZ
'Widely regarded as one of the finest improv instructors in the country.'
Armando Diaz (see bio at bottom of page) will bring in actors and conduct an improv demonstration
Jose Santana will host a Q&A with Armando following the demonstration.
*This is a fantastic opportunity to watch a leader in his field demonstrate how to best bring out an actor's abilities. DON'T MISS IT!*
WEDNESDAY, September 16th
6:30 PM
Room 1027
6:30 PM
Room 1027
Armando is widely regarded as one of the best improv teachers in New York City and beyond. His list of teaching credits is a long one: the ImprovOlympic Theater, Victory Gardens Theater, The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, The Peoples Improv Theater, and Michael Howard Studios. He has trained dozens of actors who have performed or written for Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Mad TV, and The Daily Show.
A Chicago native, Armando studied improv under Del Close at the ImprovOlympic, Mick Napier at the Annoyance, and graduated from the Second City Conservatory. He performed in and helped create one of the most popular improvised longforms in Chicago, "The Armando Diaz Experience...." For the last decade, "the Armando" has been performed weekly in Chicago, and is now taught and performed in many other cities including Los Angeles and New York.
In addition to writing and producing short films, Armando wrote sketches for the show Upright Citizens Brigade on Comedy Central, and has performed on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Saturday, September 12, 2009
NY TIMES: CUBA MOURNS COMRADE-IN-ARMS
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Roberto Luis Santana as Juan Almeida Bosque, in "Che."
Roberto Luis Santana as Juan Almeida Bosque, in "Che."
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published: September 12, 2009
Filed at 1:44 p.m. ET
HAVANA (AP) -- The death of Juan Almeida Bosque, a vice president who was one of the last giants of Cuba's 1959 revolution, plunged the island into mourning Saturday and was a stark reminder of the mortality of all of Cuba's aging leaders -- including brothers Raul and Fidel Castro.
He was the first of Cuba's revolutionary leaders to die since President Raul Castro's wife Vilma Espin, a one-time guerrilla commander in her own right, passed away in June 2007 at the age of 77. (read more)
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
ON FILMMAKER SPIKE JONZE
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In February 2008, a blogger named Devin Faraci led off a post on the Hollywood news site CHUD (Cinematic Happenings Under Development) with a solemn proclamation: “We’re on the verge of losing a movie.” He was referring to “Where the Wild Things Are,” a big-budget adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book for children. According to Faraci, executives at Warner Brothers had deemed an early cut of the film “too weird and ‘too scary’ ” and were now contemplating extensive personnel changes and reshoots. The news rippled through Hollywood’s online underground. At Slashfilm.com, it generated 88 reader responses. At Firstshowing.net, another 25. Some readers pleaded with the studio: “Please please please follow through with the original.” Others took a more authoritative tone: “Do not turn ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ into something common and forgettable!” There were calls for fan solidarity and several threats of boycott, or worse: “I will personally face-punch anyone who stands in the way of this film being released.” Such variations aside, though, a common theme emerged: “Jonze is brilliant”; “Jonze is an artist”; “Trust Jonze!” (read more)
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
CAROL DYSINGER: CAMP VICTORY
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE)Camp Victory, Afghanistan is a verite documentary that tells the story of several U.S. National Guardsmen stationed in Herat, Afghanistan and the Afghan officers they are assigned to train.
These Americans along with a band of Afghans have been given the enormous task of building the 207th Corps of the nascent Afghan National Army into an institution capable of providing security, stability, peace and justice to a tattered, volatile nation. Although the United States has poured military aid into Afghanistan, money alone does not produce an army; people do. And these Afghans and Americans have more in common than anyone would expect.
With lives on the line and the military budget ballooning, can a modern Afghan army be created when 80% of the enlistees are illiterate; all are impoverished; the weaponry is second rate; and the enemy is elusive, dangerous, and lawless?
Using nearly 300 hours of verité footage shot between 2005 and 2008, Camp Victory, Afghanistan, directed by Carol Dysinger, is the first film to examine the reality of building a functioning Afghan military-the initial critical step toward bringing stability and peace to Afghanistan.
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Friday, August 28, 2009
"THE KILLING" by WILLIAM INGE: WHAT THEY SAY
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photo: Richard Termine for The New York TimesJ.J. Kandel and Neal Huff in “The Killing” by William Inge.
Directed by José Angel Santana
Directed by José Angel Santana
The New York Times
“A Death Request . . .After watching ‘The Killing’ by William Inge, it’s best to take a slow, quiet walk home. This is a play that benefits from reflection, a story that sticks in the mind and demands further thought, no matter how dark those thoughts may be.
. . . ‘The Killing.’
In the play Mac (Neal Huff) brings Huey (J. J. Kandel) home after the two meet in a bar. Within a few minutes Mac reveals that he wants Huey to kill him, ending a life of deep despair. Knowing that Inge struggled with depression and committed suicide adds an even stronger undercurrent to Mac’s plea, and that awareness, combined with the tension of whether the request will be carried out, leads to a play that is both bleak and riveting.
José Angel Santana’s direction is wisely restrained, and the two actors deliver truly heartbreaking performances. ‘The Killing,’ a superb piece of theater, is given an intelligent production here. It’s a story of loneliness and great pain, one that explores the saddest parts of the soul.” – The New York Times, Ken Jaworowski, August 8, 2009.
THEATERMANIA
“William Inge's never-before-produced one-act "The Killing" . . . Jose Angel Santana's perfectly modulated production keeps the action grounded. He elicits nuanced performances from his two actors, with Huff exuding a quiet desperation and Kandel speaking in slow, measured tones that give weight to the crucial choice his character must eventually make.” – Theatermania, Dan Bacalzo, August 6, 2009, New York.
nytheater.com
“Jose Angel Santana makes a fine New York directorial debut with a revival of William Inge's The Killing. Through the use of pauses and awkward silences, Santana furthers the psychological drama the playwright so aptly captured in his words.” – nytheater.com Jo Ann Rosen, August 4, 2009.
BackStage.com
“Huff, Kandel, and director José Angel Santana give these lonely souls an aching presence. . . . . "The Killing" is chiefly valuable as a new addition to the canon of one of America's underappreciated playwrights, but the performances make it worth seeing.” - BackStage.com, David Sheward, August 7, 2009.
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photo: Richard Termine for The New York TimesNeal Huff, left, and J. J. Kandel in “The Killing” by William Inge
New York Post
“A recently exhumed William Inge play . . .
‘The Killing’-- about a despondent, religious man who asks a young drifter to murder him -- is hardly first-rate Inge. Still, it's a fascinating rediscovery that's only now receiving its world premiere.
Staged with real tension by Jose Angel Santana and superbly acted by Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel, it also has an eerie resonance today, decades after Inge, a closeted homosexual, committed suicide." – New York Post, Frank Scheck, August 11, 2009.
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Scenic Design by Maruti Evans
‘The Killing’-- about a despondent, religious man who asks a young drifter to murder him -- is hardly first-rate Inge. Still, it's a fascinating rediscovery that's only now receiving its world premiere.
Staged with real tension by Jose Angel Santana and superbly acted by Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel, it also has an eerie resonance today, decades after Inge, a closeted homosexual, committed suicide." – New York Post, Frank Scheck, August 11, 2009.
(click to enlarge)Scenic Design by Maruti Evans
Lighting & Sound America
"The Summer Shorts series of one-acts is generally a showcase for new work, but, this year, the buzz is all about "The Killing," by William Inge -- who died in 1973.
'The Killing' is one of a couple of dozen Inge plays that have recently come to light, and it's a much darker work than such signature pieces as Picnic or Bus Stop. Mac, a middle-aged loner, has brought back Huey, a near-total stranger, to his apartment, ostensibly for an evening of whiskey and conversation. The situation looks, for all the world, like a gay pickup -- that's what Huey thinks he's in for -- but Mac has another plan: He wants Huey to kill him.
As Mac tells his stunned companion, he can't stand another day of loneliness, but his religious scruples prevent him from pulling the trigger. Huey balks, but, over the course of 20 minutes or so, Mac quietly and devastatingly makes his case.
'The Killing' . . . offers a fascinating inside view of the demons that tormented this fine writer. (Inge was deeply closeted, self-loathing, and addicted to the bottle; he ultimately committed suicide.) Under Jose Angel Santana's highly controlled direction, the piece achieves an intensity that's far beyond anything in the rest of the series; he gets especially fine work from Neal Huff, who vividly captures the way Mac's soul has been corroded by lsolitude. J. J. Kandel isn't quite old (or working-class) enough as Huey, but he partners well with Huff. 'The Killing' makes one eager to see what other works Inge had filed away." -- Don Barbaur, 11 August, 2009.
'The Killing' is one of a couple of dozen Inge plays that have recently come to light, and it's a much darker work than such signature pieces as Picnic or Bus Stop. Mac, a middle-aged loner, has brought back Huey, a near-total stranger, to his apartment, ostensibly for an evening of whiskey and conversation. The situation looks, for all the world, like a gay pickup -- that's what Huey thinks he's in for -- but Mac has another plan: He wants Huey to kill him.
As Mac tells his stunned companion, he can't stand another day of loneliness, but his religious scruples prevent him from pulling the trigger. Huey balks, but, over the course of 20 minutes or so, Mac quietly and devastatingly makes his case.
'The Killing' . . . offers a fascinating inside view of the demons that tormented this fine writer. (Inge was deeply closeted, self-loathing, and addicted to the bottle; he ultimately committed suicide.) Under Jose Angel Santana's highly controlled direction, the piece achieves an intensity that's far beyond anything in the rest of the series; he gets especially fine work from Neal Huff, who vividly captures the way Mac's soul has been corroded by lsolitude. J. J. Kandel isn't quite old (or working-class) enough as Huey, but he partners well with Huff. 'The Killing' makes one eager to see what other works Inge had filed away." -- Don Barbaur, 11 August, 2009.
Smith & Krouse
"['The Killing'] . . . is a long-lost play by William Inge . . . wherein a lonely man brings a guy he picked up in a bar back to his room late one night. What at first appears to be a gay pick-up play turns dark when we learn that this lonely man is terminally depressed . . . this takes on heartbreaking poignancy . . . it’s a gem of a one act play, beautifully acted by Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel." - August 13, 2009 Lawrence Harbison, smithandkraus.com
BroadwayWorld.com
"'The Killing' by William Inge - a premiere performance of a lost play by a renowned writer. It was directed by José Angel Santana, and starred Neal Huff and J.J. Kandel . . . Both actors are fantastic, and certainly do justice to this neglected play by a master of the stage." Friday, August 14, 2009; Posted: 10:08 AM - by Duncan Pflaster
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Show Business
"Inge’s terse, poetic dialogue evokes an eerie 20th-century night-world populated by rugged individualists. Under José Angel Santana’s direction, Kandel and Huff neatly embody their archetypal characters in a fitting tribute to a bygone style of American playwriting." - Ethan Kanfer, Auguest 14, 2009
Theater Scene.net
"William Inge’s “The Killing,” recently discovered, has the best pedigree. This unknown play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Picnic, Bus Stop and Come Back, Little Sheba may be the most autobiographical play that Inge ever wrote. . .“The Killing” brings two middle-aged strangers together. Mac (Neal Huff) has brought Huey (Kandel) home for a drink after meeting in a bar, but his real motive is that he has an unusual request: he wants Huey to put him out of his misery by shooting him . . . Jose Angel Santana has staged the play with great sensitivity . . ." Victor Gluck, Theater Scene.net., August 16, 2009.
Variety
"The Summer Shorts series . . . have a forgotten gem . . . William Inge's horrifying "The Killing," a terrific one-act, never before performed, about an unnamed man (Neal Huff) and the guy he picks up in a bar (J.J. Kandel) for reasons that aren't clear until well into the play. The setup is vaguely reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock scenario and gets an appropriately noirish staging from helmer Jose Angel Santana . . . it's nice to see work that occasionally pushes the shortform boundaries (especially "The Killing")." - Sam Thielman, Variety., August 17, 2009
The Epoch Times
"'The Killing' . . . casts a dark and mysterious note. One man (Neal Huff) invites a younger man (J.J. Kandel) to his furnished room. The purpose of the invitation is not known at first. The two chat . . . What is desired is something so unique, so startling, that I won’t disclose it.
Suffice it to say that the play has tremendous tension; the actors compel our attention. José Angel Santana has directed with sensitivity and verve." - Diana Barth, The Epoch Times., August 23, 2009.
Suffice it to say that the play has tremendous tension; the actors compel our attention. José Angel Santana has directed with sensitivity and verve." - Diana Barth, The Epoch Times., August 23, 2009.
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Thursday, August 13, 2009
INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS DISTRIBUTE ON THEIR OWN: NY TIMES
Saturday, August 8, 2009
THE KILLING BY WILLIAM INGE - NEW YORK TIMES THEATER REVIEW
Richard Termine for The New York Times
Neal Huff, left, and J. J. Kandel in “The Killing” by William Inge.
After watching “The Killing” by William Inge, it’s best to take a slow, quiet walk home. This is a play that benefits from reflection, a story that sticks in the mind and demands further thought, no matter how dark those thoughts may be.
“The Sin Eater” by Keith Reddin, however, is imprudent on every level. A modern retelling of “Electra,” it is misguided in concept (the original is too wide-ranging to be raced through in a brief time) and execution (the clichéd dialogue is delivered in a mishmash of styles).
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Thursday, August 6, 2009
ON "THE KILLING" BY WILLIAM INGE
Richard Termine for The New York TimesJ. J. Kandel, left, and Neal Huff in “The Killing,” a rediscovered Inge one-act that is part of the Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters.
The New York Times
August 6, 2009
In a small Kansas town that inspired some of William Inge’s most melancholy characters, about two dozen never-before-performed plays are poised to become the found treasures of his collected works. These plays were not hidden in the proverbial cedar chest in a dusty farmhouse but languishing in a college library in obscurity and solitude, like a tragic Inge heroine.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of them, “The Killing,” is part of the Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. This story about a man so terrified of committing suicide that he asks another man to kill him has parallels to Inge’s life. He killed himself in 1973 after struggling for years with depression and alcoholism.
Pain permeates most of Inge’s work. His major plays, “Come Back, Little Sheba,” “Picnic,” “Bus Stop” and “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” portray rural Americans struggling with sexual repression (he was gay), alcoholism, small-town gossip and religiosity.
These issues haunted Inge most of his adult life, said Peter Ellenstein, artistic director of the William Inge Center for the Arts in Independence, Kan., Inge’s hometown. Inge, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Picnic” in 1953 and an Academy Award for writing the 1961 film “Splendor in the Grass,” sought approval from townsfolk who often scorned him for being a homosexual.
“The Killing,” which runs through Aug. 27, is the second rediscovered Inge play to receive its world premiere in New York this year. The Flea Theater in SoHo staged a reading of the three-act “Off the Main Road” on May 11 with Sigourney Weaver, Jay O. Sanders and Frances Sternhagen. The Flea is considering staging a full production of it or another unperformed play by Inge this fall.
These two works are among about 25 — an exact count is still being determined, since some of the plays may be incomplete — stored in the library at Independence Community College, which houses a collection of Inge’s writings, as well as artwork he collected. The plays have been available for researchers to read on site but, in order to preserve them, were not to be copied or checked out of the library. It was a case of manuscripts hiding in plain sight.
“There’s often a disconnect between the caretakers of a collection and the arts organizations that might want them,” said Marcel LaFlamme, curator of the collection and the college’s library director. “Curators have been trained to put the preservation of the artifact first, but within the last 20 years there’s been more of a focus on access, mostly because of digitization.”
Beyond Inge’s hometown few knew these plays existed. Many of the works, including “The Killing,” were written after his naturalistic style of characterization became passé.
“Inge has been called the American Chekhov because on the surface you have mundane conversation about the smallness of people’s lives, but the characters go very deep,” Mr. Ellenstein said. “I think for many years in the flash and bang of new types of theater and sparkling dialogue, the richness and the fabric of his writing got lost.”
Mr. Ellenstein and his colleagues at the center decided last year to petition the Inge estate to allow these plays to be disseminated. With approval from Inge’s heirs, they approached International Creative Management, the literary agency that represents Inge’s estate, about doing an anthology. This collaboration led to a more elaborate idea.
“I was so thrilled about this, but I thought many of these, especially the one-acts, might be ignored in a catalog,” said Buddy Thomas, an agent at ICM. “I thought we should get them out there to theaters because we’ve always felt that he doesn’t get the modern attention that Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller get.”
The William Inge Theater Festival in Independence, a four-day celebration of his works held annually since 1982, staged six of the plays in April and published them in the anthology “A Complex Evening: Six Short Plays by William Inge.” Mr. Ellenstein said the works ranged from Pinteresque minimalism to a comedy “that could have been written by Christopher Durang.” After Inge’s last Broadway play, “Where’s Daddy?,” flopped in 1966, he turned to different forms of writing, experimenting with the one-act, then in vogue, Mr. Ellenstein said.
At the Summer Shorts festival “The Killing” joins one-acts by contemporary playwrights, including Neil LaBute and Carole Real. In Inge’s play two men enter an apartment with unclear motives; then one begs to be killed.
While working on the play the director, José Angel Santana, said he found an unanticipated connection. “One of the big influences after I decided to direct it was the death of Michael Jackson, a man who was truly lonely and who needed relief from that,” Mr. Santana said, adding that this made the play more timely for him. “The pain of isolation is so great that he asks for relief.”
That pain feels biographical: “The Killing” depicts a possible gay sexual encounter and a plea for death from a character too afraid to kill himself.
Independence, Kan., has not always celebrated Inge, one of its own, Mr. LaFlamme said. But as times have changed, so has his local legacy and popularity.
“There was resistance in the community at one time even to archive his works,” Mr. La-Flamme said. “Gay and closeted was a dark secret once upon a time. The town now seems to feel like, ‘This is our native son, even if he was different.’ ”
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Saturday, July 4, 2009
KIEL ADRIAN SCOTT: "THE ROE EFFECT"
HBO AMERICAN BLACK FILM FESTIVAL
****** WINNER ******"THE ROE EFFECT"
WRITTEN & DIRECTED
BY KIEL ADRIAN SCOTT
PRODUCER, KIARA JONES
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
J. J. KANDEL: THE HURT LOCKER
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KARL MALDEN: NY TIMES JULY 3, 2009
An Appraisal
A Character Actor of Intensified Normalness
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
FROM LA TIMES: PRODUCERS
From the Los Angeles TimesProducers struggle to stay productive
Michael London, Gary Lucchesi, Marshall Herskovitz and Gale Ann Hurd discuss current challenges in making films.By John Horn
June 3, 2009
What does a movie producer really do?
Before you start with the jokes, the Producers Guild of America wants to have its say. This weekend, the PGA will present its first-ever Produced By Conference, an open-to-the-public (although sold out) gathering on the Sony Pictures lot with seminars on such topics as independent film financing, digital rights, viral marketing and -- why not? -- booking private jets.
Ahead of the three-day conference, kicking off Friday, four experienced producers sat down to discuss the many challenges they face in these turbulent economic times: Studios are cutting producer deals, taking fewer risks, and finding more reasons than ever to say no. Our panel -- Groundswell Films’ Michael London ("Sideways," "Milk"), Lakeshore Entertainment’s Gary Lucchesi ("Underworld," "Crank"), Marshall Herskovitz ("Blood Diamond," "The Last Samurai") and Gale Anne Hurd (" The Incredible Hulk," "Terminator") -- covers an array of filmmaking styles.
Here are edited highlights from the conversation:
Q: What does it say about your business when well-reviewed, star-filled adult dramas like "Duplicity" and "State of Play" don't work?
London: I think there is something sobering about it. I think right now there is a premium on escapist material that makes people feel good. I don't believe for a moment that adult movies are going away, but it definitely has given me pause -- not to abandon the things I am most inspired by, but to make sure I am not out of step with what people are feeling.
Lucchesi: Having once been a studio president [at Paramount] and trying to turn the business into a science, I know that it's impossible. Last fall, I looked up the top movies of the '30s, during the depression. They were the Marx Brothers, comedies, escapist movies, "King Kong" was big then. You had "It Happened One Night," so you had romantic comedies. And then you had musicals, and then gangster movies like "White Heat." So, there were certain types of genres that were working during a recession.
Q: Is the passage through which you have to squeeze narrower than before? Gary, your last two films were "Crank: High Voltage" and "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans." Is there a future where you make Philip Roth's "American Pastoral"?
Lucchesi: Before that, we made [the adaptation of Roth's "The Dying Animal"] "Elegy." We're a very practical company. We're going to keep making commercial movies and then occasionally we're going to make those movies that are very, very difficult to make.
London: My company has worked primarily in adult drama. And right now there is such an enormous challenge in getting studios to assign a distribution slot to a movie that they perceive as belonging to this shrinking market. Right now, the number of distributors has shrunk dramatically, and of the distributors that are still in business, they are reserving those distribution slots for movies they feel appeal to the so-called four-quadrant [young and old males and females] audience. It's hard to give them a rationale to devote one of their precious eight or nine distribution slots to one of our movies instead of holding it back for a tent-pole, a comic-book, pre-sold franchise.
Herskovitz: There's a structural problem that permeates the entire media business in America, which is consolidation. In the last 15 years there has been this very interesting opening up of the movie business because you could make films independently -- there were a lot of distributors, there were a lot of different ways to get a movie out there. That's starting to shrink now, and now there's starting to be a bottleneck in the distribution area. This happened to us last year with " Defiance." We had independent financing, all we needed was a domestic distributor -- which was very hard to find. We finally found one, they did a great job, but they were the last -- we wouldn't have gotten the film made if it wasn't for them.
Q: Why was it so hard?
Herskovitz: Companies fear taking risks. The perception was that it was a World War II Holocaust film, and therefore would be difficult to find an audience. A lot of people said "Sorry, no thanks. Been there, done that."
Q: Does that mean marketing is now more important than ever?
Hurd: Everything really is about marketing. What is going to get people to leave their homes to go see a film? The industry has changed. It used to be that a film didn't need to have a huge Friday night, but now everyone looks at the grosses Saturday morning. And that determines a lot: "Well, that movie bombed, I'm not going to go see it."
Q: When you start making a movie, do you have to know how you'll sell it before you even shoot a foot of film?
Lucchesi: I think the process of getting a green light is so complicated that you pretty much have to know who your audience is before you start shooting.
Herskovitz: The audience is inundated by inputs from the culture -- from television, online and films. Marketing has become so difficult -- to penetrate the clutter. And you don't always succeed, even if you have good materials. So I have to know what is going to be the imagery or the sensibility of the film that will attract people.
Q: When studios are less willing to take risks, how does that affect you?
Lucchesi: When Universal greenlit "Duplicity" and "State of Play," it also was greenlighting "Fast & Furious." They didn't know that one wasn't going to work, that one was going to overperform and another was going to underperform. They didn't know that. No one can read the future. But producers are the greatest optimists in the world. I mean, that's who we really are. We are the people that find some material and actually imagine that it could be a movie. What are the odds of that? And then not only do we imagine it can be a movie, we imagine it could be a hit, and maybe even win an award. We are the ones with the machetes going through the Amazon jungle to the places we've never been before.
Q: Can you try to crystal ball the national mood in two years? What do you think people will want to see?
Hurd: I hope my movies!
Lucchesi: My gut tells me that people are desperate for emotion.
Q: How has industry belt-tightening affected you? Does it change who you hire and how much you pay them?
Herskovitz: The studio belt-tightening has had a direct affect on many producers because they cut producer deals. Producers not only create but also nurture intellectual properties for the five, seven, 10 years it takes to get movies made. I don't think we can afford to lose that as an industry. The studios have to cut their overhead, they have to deal with their bottom line. But in terms of the future, that army of producers that was creating new properties is going away. I think that is a problem for all of us.
Q: But don't good ideas rise to the top?
Hurd: What's a good idea? Who could have predicted "Slumdog Millionaire"?
Herskovitz: The reality is that most producers are financially struggling and being driven out of the business, and you have fewer and fewer independent producers. There are a whole bunch of young people trying to come up, but in terms of experienced, independent producers just trying to get by, it's very, very difficult right now, and a lot of them are being driven out of the business. If you begin to say, "The American film industry is starting to look less creative," you have to look at the causes of that in a lot of different areas. And one of them could be that it's really difficult now for creative people to get a movie made.
Q: Are there now more awkward conversations with actors about how they are not going to earn what they are used to?
Lucchesi: Here's something that I learned as an agent. Many years ago, clients would do movies and television and they would also go back and do New York theater, and make maybe $500 a week. With the more art-type movies, it's very easy to go to somebody and say, "We know you get X amount of dollars for your big studio movie, but this is a different animal, this is like you are doing equity theater, and you've got to cut your price to do it." Most people get that.
London: I think that everyone is so cognizant of the world we live in. I'm sure there's a lot of agents who are unhappy about the fall in that pay scale, but anyone who's got their eyes open recognizes that what's important now is to keep working.
Q: Michael, you're dependent on outside financing, and that money seems to be in jeopardy too.
London: From a business perspective, I'd like to have a successful business that rewards my investors and keeps my company afloat. But we're in a culture now, a movie culture, where so little premium is placed on original ideas, as the studios veer more and more toward this notion of something that has a pre-sold element, whether it's a comic book, or a remake of a movie or a television series. Well, what do we do? What have we all done our whole lives but find and champion and support original ideas? The truth about producer deals being cut is that [the studios] are not interested in original ideas. But you are talking to a group of people who when we leave here will go to a meeting, or lunch, or a movie this evening and fall in love with something that completely defies the analysis that we are talking about here.
Hurd: Let's go back to "Slumdog Millionaire," perhaps the most profitable film out there. If you start thinking, "Who is the audience for that? A film that takes place in India?" It was clearly a struggle to get it made, and yet, if you had gambled on that film you would have the greatest return of any film last year.
Q: "Milk" won a couple of Oscars, but didn't do all that well at the box office.
London: We had certainly thought at many points that it might follow more in the path of something like "Brokeback Mountain" and some of the other Oscar movies that sort of exploded. "Milk" bore a certain burden in terms of its seriousness and its themes, and its perception in terms of the audience that it spoke to. The pop culture has become really unpredictable and really resistant. People are not going to want to stop going to see movies about grown-ups. They might be slightly different movies about grown-ups, they might not be $45-million movies about grown-ups, they may not be led by movie stars, but people are always going to want to see those good stories.
Herskovitz: There's no doubt in anybody's mind that some of the above-the-line people in this business have been overpaid for a very long time to the point where it was very deleterious for the business itself. In fact, the business-model movie, when you look at it from the outside, often looks a little bit crazy where you have a star making four or five times more profit on the movie than the studio did. The studio risked all the money and the star risked zero. That's just not a sustainable model, and it's been one of those things that's been very hard to talk about.
Hurd: The interesting thing is that the tent-pole films don't generally star the top box-office names. Having been part of negotiations, they're very tough on actor compensation because there's a dynamic there, which is for actors to raise their fees for the next film, they need a huge breakout box-office hit. So the trade-off there is, well, if you star in this tent pole we may even pay you less than your quote. If there's a next film, you'll get a significant increase.
Q: Does that mean you're having to spend more time trying figure out deals than work on scripts?
London: In the independent world, we have to do it ourselves, and that's a nightmare. It's just like the movie business has become this incredibly intricate house of cards with so many different elements. And unless you're professionally devoted to spending morning, noon and night figuring that out, it's complicated and yet it's important to understand.
Herskovitz: But let's remember that no matter how odious it is, relatively speaking it's a small part of the process.
Hurd: On the other hand, if you are too close to the process, you are blamed for having an actor unhappy with the compensation package. Then it's your fault, as opposed to the person in business affairs.
Q: What are the things that take up your days that you would not have wasted more than a few minutes doing five or 10 years ago?
Lucchesi: It's the panning for gold that's the hardest part -- you wade through a ton of material. You know, you don't have pitches anymore, so you've got a lot of spec scripts and sometimes there might be a kernel of an idea in a spec script, even though it may not be completely well-written, that you feel is worth chasing.
Herskovitz: It is very difficult to pitch these days. I spent 20 years going in a room and telling stories and making deals based on a story that I told. But we're not in that business anymore. Right now there is a project that we're trying to sell, and there's really no way to sell it other than tell the story in the room. It's an amazing, wonderful story, and it's a struggle now. And I feel like there's a potential this great thing will be lost because that means of getting that development money is gone. They don't want to hear a pitch because they are not going to pay to have a script written.
Q: How do you think technology is going to change your business?
Herskovitz: I fear that we are on the precipice right now of . . . a huge rise in piracy in America. I think that the era of illegal downloading of films is about to begin in a major way. Beyond that, what I've seen in the last two years in terms of delivery systems is utter confusion. And I think that nobody knows anything yet. I think that what's clear is that people want to go out to the movies and will continue to want to go out to the movies for a long time to come. I think that we just don't know how this whole multi-platform thing is going to sort itself out. And everybody that I talk to just throws up their hands and says, you know, "I can look at four different models and I don't know which one is going to work."
Lucchesi: Had "Milk" come out on video on demand eight weeks after its theatrical release, would it have done better? I don't know, but I'd be curious about that.
Q: What gives you reasons to be optimistic?
Hurd: What I find exciting is that my 17-year-old daughter and her friends don't want to give up going out to movies. Their choice of films is much wider than we would expect. They get excited about some foreign films -- and they forget that they are reading subtitles. We are at times underestimating the younger filmgoers and what entertainment interests them.
London: The indie world is not as healthy as we'd all like, but there is a huge wave of new directors that are creating a lot of excitement, and audiences are excited about movies that take them out of their day-to-day lives.
Herskovitz: There's a huge diversity in the kinds of movies being made, and that allows for change to happen, and that to me is the healthiest sign.
Hurd: Being at Comic-Con last summer, everyone knew at that point the response to Robert Pattinson, in Comic-Con, heralded a new star is born. It was unbelievable, I haven't seen a reaction like that since the Beatles. . . .
Q: Don't you think also that there has been a shift in the traditional notion of stars? The studios are more open to new faces, new kinds of stars. Obviously, we cycle through them a little more quickly too, but it feels like the traditional movie star notion is changing.
London: Does everybody get that, though? Do the studios get that? Do the agents get that?
Hurd: It's harder to quantify that now. If you look at television and you look at ratings, that's not necessarily capturing the audience that is viewing a particular TV series, especially something like "Gossip Girl." My daughter couldn't even tell you what time it's on, she watches it online, on demand, and every one of the actors in "Gossip Girl" is a huge star to her and her friends, which is not something that you can quantify so easily just based on . . .
Q: It seems as if the studios care most about concepts -- "Transformers," " Star Trek," " Harry Potter."
London: I think execution is king. I really do. I saw "Star Trek" last week -- I'm not in particular a tent-pole movie guy -- and I loved it. It was alive and funny and moving and imaginative, hot and smart.
Herskovitz: A lot of these high-concept movies fail when they are not done well. This notion that concept is king is already 25 years old. I think the audience is more discerning about it now. But there is a danger here that is analogous to the auto industry. More and more of the studios have placed their bets on these high-concept films, but there could be a moment where people just get tired of those films. My fear is the studios are essentially getting rid of the apparatus for creation of new content.
john.horn@latimes.com
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."