SALLY PHILLIPS - ACTRESSES TO BEWARE

This from Jay A. Thanks!

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 12

- part 12
"Saboteur" through to "Shadow of a Doubt"

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

IF CHARLIE PARKER WAS A GUNSLINGER THERE'D BE A WHOLE LOT OF DEAD COPYCATS

Great Film Blog

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,
There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 13

- part 13
"Lifeboat" through to "Spellbound"

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

CARL GORDON - AN IINSPIRATION

July 23, 2010

Carl Gordon, a Late Blooming Actor, Dies at 78

By Margalit Fox

Carl Gordon, who four decades ago, nearing midlife and feeling trapped in a series of dispiriting jobs, heeded a surprising call and became a successful character actor on television and the stage, died on Tuesday at his home in Jetersville, Va. He was 78.

The cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his family said.

To television viewers, Mr. Gordon was best known as the patriarch on “Roc,” a situation comedy about a working-class black family in Baltimore, broadcast on the Fox network for three seasons starting in 1991. In a highly unusual move, Seasons 2 and 3 were televised live, an approach to sitcoms that had been attempted rarely if at all since the 1950s.

The show starred Charles S. Dutton as Roc Emerson, a sanitation worker, and Mr. Gordon as his proud, irascible father, Andrew. So proud was Andrew Emerson that he seeded the family home with pictures of Malcolm X and maintained that a certain member of the Boston Celtics was far too good a basketball player to be a white man:

“Larry Bird was born and bred in Harlem,” Andrew declared in one episode. “His real name is Abdul Mustafa.”

On Broadway, Mr. Gordon originated the part of Doaker, the upright uncle in “The Piano Lesson” (1990), by August Wilson, one of two Pulitzer Prize-winning installments in the playwright’s 10-part cycle about black life. He reprised the role in the television adaptation, broadcast on CBS in 1995.

Rufus Carl Gordon Jr. was born on Jan. 20, 1932, in Goochland, Va.; he later jettisoned the “Rufus.” When he was a child his family moved to Brooklyn, where he grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. As a young man he spent four years in the Air Force, serving as an airplane mechanic during the Korean War.

Afterward, Mr. Gordon attended Brooklyn College but left to work before graduating. By his late 30s he had reached a low point. He was twice divorced and seemed consigned to unfulfilling jobs, including sheet-metal worker and department store stockroom clerk.

One night, as he recounted in interviews afterward, Mr. Gordon fell to his knees, weeping. “Lord, tell me what I need to do,” he said. From somewhere within him, an answer arose: “Try acting.”

To Mr. Gordon, the idea seemed preposterous: he had never considered acting and had barely been to the theater. But who was he to question the Lord? Before long, he had enrolled in the Gene Frankel Theater Workshop.

There, as The New York Times later wrote, Mr. Gordon was the oldest student, the only African-American and the only one without a college degree. But little by little, audition by audition, he built a career.

Mr. Gordon’s other screen work includes the film “The Brother From Another Planet” (1984), directed by John Sayles, and guest roles on “Law & Order” and “ER.”

Among his other Broadway credits are the musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” (1971), with book, music and lyrics by Melvin Van Peebles, and a 2003 revival of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” by Mr. Wilson, starring Mr. Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg.

Mr. Gordon is survived by his third wife, Jacqueline Alston-Gordon; a son, Rufus Carl III; five daughters, Gloria Gurley and Candise, Demethress, Yvette and Jasmine Gordon; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

When “Roc” went live, interviewers asked Mr. Gordon and his cast mates if they were daunted by the prospect. Not at all, they said, for most, like him, were veterans of the stage.

“It feels good,” Mr. Gordon told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1992. “It’s like going back to Broadway.”

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

"LIFE DURING WARTIME" - WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY TODD SOLONDZ - NY TIMES CRITICS PICK

July 22, 2010

Movie Review | 'Life During Wartime'

By A. O. SCOTT

Shades of 'Happiness,' Appalling and Funny

Should you laugh or cry? Nearly every scene in “Life During Wartime,” Todd Solondz’s sort-of sequel to his 1998 film, “Happiness,” seems to pose this question, pitching the viewer into a queasy limbo between mirth and anguish. The characters are almost uniformly miserable — the one named Joy perhaps most of all — and whatever joy they do encounter is likely to be short-lived. And yet the painful conversations that make up the bulk of the film’s action are structured like mordant jokes. These people are so clueless, so bad at communication, so ridiculous that they must be suffering for our amusement.

But then again, maybe not. Mr. Solondz’s view of modern American humanity, from “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” through “Happiness” and “Storytelling” and “Palindromes,” has never really changed, though it has yielded uneven results. He is unsparing in his attack on the complacencies of the suburban upper-middle class, but to describe his attitude as cruel or contemptuous is to miss the compassion and the almost rabbinical ethical seriousness that drives his inquiries. And to take a movie like “Life During Wartime” as satire is to simplify its intentions and effects. Mr. Solondz exaggerates in the direction of mockery, yes, but his lurid colors, emphatic musical effects and dead-center framing also betray a commitment to melodrama that can only be sincere.

So as Joy suffers, you suffer along with her. Played by the mousy-voiced, quick-eyed Shirley Henderson (Moaning Mabel in the “Harry Potter” movies), she is one of three sisters whose quest for contentment, fulfillment and normalcy sits at the center of this episodic exploration of failure and disappointment. Joy, played by Jane Adams in “Happiness,” has married Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams), and the first scene of “Life During Wartime” reconfigures the opening of “Happiness,” in which Ms. Adams and Jon Lovitz sat in an opulent restaurant acting out one of the most painful dates in movie history.

How you experience this scene will depend somewhat on your memory of “Happiness.” In revisiting that earlier film more than a decade later, Mr. Solondz has changed the cast entirely and allowed the characters to age at different rates, so that the events of “Happiness” occupy different phases of each one’s past. (Mr. Lovitz’s character, now a ghost, is played here by Paul Reubens.) Allen (originally played, with indelible creepiness, by Philip Seymour Hoffman) has tried to mend his perverted ways, with Joy’s help.

Joy’s sisters, Trish (Allison Janney) and Helen (Ally Sheedy), have left New Jersey hoping to put their own lives in order. Helen, a writer, has cut off all ties with her family, while Trish has started a new life in Florida, telling her younger son and daughter that their father, Bill (Ciaran Hinds), in prison for molesting children, has died. Trish has a new suitor, a solid older gentleman named Harvey (Michael Lerner), whom she likes for his sensitivity and his steadfast support of Israel. “He voted for Bush and McCain,” she explains to Joy. “But only because of Israel. He knows those people are idiots.”

Meanwhile, Trish’s freckle-faced, wide-eyed son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) prepares for his bar mitzvah, at which he plans to talk about the relationship between manhood and forgiveness. Bill has been released on parole, and he wanders across the country, from a sad sexual encounter (with Charlotte Rampling) in a hotel to an awkward reunion with his elder son, Billy (Chris Marquette), in Billy’s college dorm.

It is all perfectly dreadful and at times appallingly funny. Mr. Solondz winds thin tendrils of narrative around the dinner-table conversations, and allows everyone a chance to be earnestly foolish, unguardedly selfish and also, almost by accident, cruelly honest. The actors handle the awkwardness beautifully, each finding a way to make Mr. Solondz’s meticulous, slightly mannered dialogue sound like natural speech. Not that realism is exactly the intention here. Shades of the “Happiness” cast seem to flicker across the frame until you can’t quite be sure who is who. How did Dylan Baker turn into Ciaran Hinds?

Much as “Life During Wartime” draws you back into the fictional past of “Happiness” — and to a moment that looks in retrospect like the high-water mark of American independent cinema — it is also preoccupied, albeit obliquely, with more recent real-world events. The title is an indication of this concern, as is Mr. Solondz’s evocation of the ambient, interminable anxiety of the post-9/11 world.

Trish’s occasional outbursts about terrorism seem to displace her fear of more intimate disturbances, and it is Timmy, tumbling out of innocence, who grasps the link between his broken family and the dysfunctional republic for which they stand. He has the last word in the movie, a fitting and troubling epitaph for the first decade of the 21st century and the most complex and resonant punch line Mr. Solondz has yet produced: “I don’t care about freedom and democracy. I just want my father.” Should you laugh or cry?

LIFE DURING WARTIME
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Todd Solondz; director of photography, Ed Lachman; edited by Kevin Messman; production designer, Roshelle Berliner; costumes by Catherine George; produced by Christine Kunewa Walker and Derrick Tseng; released by IFC Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Shirley Henderson (Joy), Ciaran Hinds (Bill), Gaby Hoffman (Wanda), Allison Janney (Trish), Michael Lerner (Harvey), Chris Marquette (Billy), Charlotte Rampling (Jacqueline), Rich Pecci (Mark), Paul Reubens (Andy), Ally Sheedy (Helen), Dylan Riley Snyder (Timmy), Renée Taylor (Mona) and Michael Kenneth Williams (Allen).

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

25 NEW FACES IN INDEPENDENT FILM

FILMMAKER MAGAZINE
The 25 New Faces of Independent Film

Congratulations!

Holden Abigail Osborne

HOLDEN ABIGAIL OSBORNE. PHOTO BY MATT BURR

In February 2009, Holden Abigail Osborne’s brother Zach was released from prison and put under house arrest. In grad school at NYU Film School, Osborne grabbed a camera and jumped on a plane to Missouri. She wouldn’t understand why she had done it until the short film the footage became was completed. “It was my form of intervention,” she says.

The result was Solitary/Release, a two-part short film that premiered at SXSW this year. Solitary is a documentary about her brother transitioning back into society while under house arrest, navigating a complex reentry into the lives of his family after serving time in prison. Release is a narrative starring James Franco as Zach and Holmes Osborne (Holden’s actual father) as Zach’s dad, who has chained him to the ground in a decrepit outdoor living space with a floor of leaves and a hot plate. Release serves as an imagined redemption, a surreal visual metaphor anchored by Franco’s slightly brutal performance.

“I wasn’t sure in the beginning that the two pieces would play together,” remembers Osborne, “but I think the pieces need each other.” Her brother was intimately involved in the process. For Zach, “the movie is heartbreaking, in that it reminds him of how powerful a challenge he faces, but also hopeful, in that it points towards the possibility of a new life.” The film will play a host of festivals around the country, but more important for Osborne is touring the film to addiction treatment centers. “One of my initial goals with the film was to start a conversation in my own family about how we could take control of an extremely difficult problem,” she says.

Osborne grew up in tiny Bates City, Mo., and studied government in college, thinking that she should focus on a stable career. On a whim, she auditioned and was cast in a play by Sam Shepard, and soon she was making films. An editor on PBS’ The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend and head producer for Wieden + Kennedy China for a year, she has one year left at NYU. Another short film and two features are under way. Without being didactic, all of them have larger issues at stake than your standard boy-meets-girl fare. “The only way that I can justify being a filmmaker is by telling stories that have a purpose, by making films that have a life beyond the screen. I think this little life we’re all trying to live can be just so excruciatingly difficult, so I make films to shine a little light; to let people know they’re not alone.” — A.V.C.

Contact: haofilms at gmail dot com; haofilms.com

Rashaad Ernesto Green

RASHAAD ERNESTO GREEN. PHOTO BY DANIEL PATTERSON

Possessor of a sneaky sort of charm that hides his utter tenaciousness, Rashaad Ernesto Green, a promising directorial talent from the Bronx, makes movies that get under your skin with what, upon reflection, seems like relative ease. His pictures, a trio of shorts and a forthcoming feature, openly seek to reveal the humanity within the taboos and faux pas of people of color. Green is clearly out to surprise us with his unusual depictions of equally unusual milieus, and he isn’t much for asking permission. “I was in a black box theater in St. Louis, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” he told me recently during preproduction for his forthcoming feature debut Gun Hill Road. “It said to view your life from the prospective of your funeral. I let it inspire me. When I sat there in the casket, looking at what others would say about me, I felt them speaking about someone who did not wait for opportunities to come my way, who took the bull by the horns and created my own path.”

Whether it’s his HBO Short Film Award winning Premature, a classically built narrative short about a Bronx teenager who, having found no support for her pregnancy from either her disaffected family and brutal community, resorts to drastic, near-tragic measures to free herself of responsibility, or his 2009 Sundance approved four-minute short Choices, a one-shot formalist wonder that stays with you well after it’s over, you get a sense with Green that he is someone who very deeply wants to say vital things through this often wanton medium. The stark impression Choices leaves you with of one young man’s ambiguous sexual encounter with his girlfriend is the product of willful attention to the most nuanced details of acting. Little surprise then that one finds that Green was a working actor for years before turning his attention to film.

The NYU Film grad counts Spike Lee, the walking film-directing brand and dean of Black Cinema himself, as a mentor, influence and friend, but he also name checks Paul Greengrass, Clint Eastwood and 2003 25 New Face Seith Mann as influences. “I respect those who have a voice, who speak up, who have something to say,” he said. His upcoming film, produced by Night Catches Us producer Ron Simons, is about “a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx whose father returns home from prison after three years to discover that his teenage son is gay/transgender, and the drama that ensues.” Look for it on the festival circuit next year. — Brandon Harris

Contact: mialmafilms.com; rashaad at mialmafilms dot com

Sara Colangelo

SARA COLANGELO. PHOTO BY SHLOMO GODDER

Sara Colangelo’s Little Accidents is one of the more arresting shorts on the festival circuit at the moment, both immediate and restrained in its tale of a woman working in a Massachusetts soda drink factory who fears that she’s become pregnant. She recruits her mentally disabled ex-boyfriend to shoplift a pregnancy test for her and bonds again with him as she struggles with what to do. “I was interested in the juxtaposition of two people, one of whom is recently disabled and trying to reintegrate himself into society and who is the stable one, and the other a woman who may be pregnant and who is spinning out of control,” Colangelo says. “And I was interested in the factory setting, which is almost a metaphor for motherhood. Through the course of the short, you slowly realize that these people have a past, and that they dated once. I’m always interested in withholding information from the audience. It becomes more interesting for them that way; it gets their wheels turning.”

For the New York City-based recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Little Accidents has traveled to numerous festivals, including Sundance and the Seattle International Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Short.

Colangelo is midway through another project, a documentary. “I heard a story on NPR one morning about this band, BILL,” Colangelo says. “The older brother is the manager, and he put his younger brother, Bill, who has Down syndrome, in as lead singer. My younger brother has Down syndrome, so their process was fascinating to me. I gave them a call and they let me spend a lot of the summer of ’08 with them, sitting in on recording sessions, following them around when they perform. I think disability is talked about a lot when people are younger and going through special needs schools, but when they’re older it feels like they’re forgotten about. They fall off the grid.”

Continuing, Colangelo says, “We have so much material. One of the film’s arcs deals with John, the older brother. He’s had musical failures, going from band to band and not having them work out. Suddenly he puts his younger brother in a band and it starts getting all of this attention. But the film is also about mortality. Bill has had two heart surgeries, and John, who wasn’t that close to him early on, worries he doesn’t have much time left with him.”

Finally, Colangelo is working on a feature script “loosely based” on Little Accidents. “It takes the same character and the same type of small American town and weaves in another storyline,” she says. “It’s similar in that it looks at trauma and its trickle-down effects.” — S.M.

Contact: Craig Kestel at WME: (310) 285-9000

Julius Onah

JULIUS ONAH. PHOTO BY RICHARD KOEK

Writer-director Julius Onah describes his debut feature, The Girl Is In Trouble, shooting this summer on the streets of New York City, as a film that takes “the various archetypes of film noir and marries them to the diversity of the Lower East Side.” There’s a European femme fatale, a downtown denizen in over his head, a murder victim, a few thugs and, of course, a setting steeped in the history of Gotham’s immigrant culture. Explaining the appeal of his setting, Onah, who was born in Nigeria and grew up in the Philippines and Arlington, Va., says, “The Lower East Side was a meeting point for freed African-American slaves and the destination for German immigrants, Dominican immigrants and many others. I’m from an immigrant family myself and am attracted in all my work to stories that will resonate internationally, in different cultures.”

In addition to having researched the history of the Lower East Side — recalling the work of Richard Price, Onah’s script weaves bits of that history throughout its narrative — Onah knows the neighborhood firsthand because he lives there and has worked in its club scene. Quite organically, then, he has given his project a transmedia element. “I have a lot of friends who d.j. and promote [parties],” he says. “I’ve written some of these real people, like Nicky Digital, into the movie and made them part of the story. They’ll run little bits of viral footage on their photo blogs. On top of that, the film is told in 10 chapters — I liken it to a music album. Each chapter is a song, its own experience. We may leak one of our chapters [online as a promotion].”

Of course, those 10 10-minute chapters are the perfect length for other forms of distribution, as the Wesleyan University theater-program graduate is well aware. His previous films include shorts shot on and for mobile phones, like Goodbye Chicken, Farewell Goat, which premiered this summer at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Other shorts include The Boundary, a border-crossing thriller selected by Amnesty International as one of its “Movies that Matter,” and the Berlin-premiering doc short Szmolinsky.

Among his many jobs and positions — Onah has done everything from the Tribeca All Access program to the Berlin Talent Campus to the obligatory gig at Kim’s Video — interned with Spike Lee, who has since come on board The Girl Is In Trouble as an executive producer. Onah, who is still attending the Graduate Film Program at NYU (The Girl Is In Trouble is actually his thesis film), developed the script in weekly meetings with Lee, who is a professor there. “But it wasn’t until I could articulate to him how I could make the film on not just a creative level but a technical and production one that he came on board,” Onah says. Lee’s name helped raise finance and attract cast, Onah says, “but mostly it was just a lot of hunger. People responded to the script and my shorts, which reflect my ability to tell a story with any number of resources, from a 35mm rig to a cell phone.” — S.M.

Contact: juliusonah.com

Seth Durkin

SEAN DURKIN. PHOTO BY RICHARD KOEK

After living in London as a child, Sean Durkin spent his final year before moving back to the States in the English countryside. For the then 11 year old, the sprawling, beautiful landscape was a world away from the hectic streets of the city. But when night came, so did dark seclusion and feelings of fear and anxiety — feelings heightened by the scary movies Sean and his mother would spend their evenings watching.

“As a child I built this irrational fear of home invasion,” Durkin, 28, recalls. “All of these unsolved mysteries seemed to always happen in Southern California, so for a kid watching in England it looked like Southern California was the scariest place on Earth.”

His fear later turned into a driving fascination with one of Southern California’s most infamous home invasions, the Sharon Tate murders, and the people responsible, the Manson family. His interest didn’t fade when he began attending NYU in 2002 to become a filmmaker. “I didn’t want to do something on the Manson family, but I wanted to make a film about lost people trying to find their place who get manipulated beyond their control.” And while Durkin has been busy producing and running the production company Borderline Films with fellow NYU classmates Josh Mond and Antonio Campos (they’re responsible for Buy It Now and Afterschool, both directed by Campos, as well as Alistair Banks Griffin’s Two Gates of Sleep), he has continued to research cults. Finally, last year he began moving forward. But with financing not yet in place and the screenplay still not to his liking, Durkin postponed his debut feature and decided instead to make the short Mary Last Seen.

The 12-minute short explores the initiation a person unwittingly goes through before they are introduced into a cult. Durkin highlights this through the story of Mary (Alexia Rasmussen) and her boyfriend (Brady Corbet) as they take a drive into the woods of upstate New York. After a string of bizarre incidents, they show up on a farm where Mary is welcomed with open arms. When the boyfriend leaves, we realize that Mary has been inducted into a cult — or, as the open ending leaves us free to imagine, worse.

“I made Mary Last Seen to have something to send out with the feature script,” Durkin admits. But after taking a second pass at the edit he decided to submit it to Sundance, which accepted the film. It went on to play the 2010 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, where it won the section’s short film prize. Festivalgoers have raved about the short’s creepy ambiguity and beautiful camerawork, which includes a gorgeous shot of Mary and her boyfriend jumping off a highway overpass, the camera’s POV taken from the water’s surface where they land. “It’s so gratifying,” says Durkin of the reaction. “At times you’re broke and you ask yourself what it’s all for and then something like this happens. It’s inspiring.”

Durkin is now focused back on the feature, titled Martha Marcy May Marlene, which he’s working on at this year’s Sundance Labs. The film returns to the farm shown in Mary Last Seen, but follows another young girl, Martha, who after escaping lives with her sister though she’s still haunted by memories of her time there. (Ted Hope has signed on to executive produce.) “I want the story to be grounded in this family drama, which I think everyone can relate to, but also get into these subjective paranoid aspects from her past, which audiences aren’t used to seeing.” — Jason Guerrasio

Contact: Melissa Breaux at Washington Square Arts: (323) 850-2782; David Flynn at UTA: (310) 273-6700

Zac Stuart-Pontier

ZAC STUART-PONTIER. PHOTO BY MARC SMERLING

If you go to the website of Zac Stuart-Pontier (zac-edits.com), your browser heading will display the following: “Zac edits really, really, really well.” This cheeky claim was earned in early 2010 when the three feature documentaries that Zac had been working on since he graduated NYU in 2006 premiered within a month of each other: Jody Lee Lipes and Henry Joost’s NY Export: Opus Jazz, which premiered on PBS and took to the festival circuit with gusto in March, via SXSW; James Rasin’s biographical doc Beautiful Darling,about the Warhol superstar Candy Darling and the loves she left behind, which premiered at Berlin and ND/NF; and the Sundance sensation Catfish, which chronicles the twists and turns of a Facebook romance.

“The reception of Catfish was a trip,” says Stuart-Pontier. “Working on it for years, you become desensitized to the story, so when people have a reaction like that, it’s just amazing.” As his edits have progressed, Stuart-Pontier has consistently taken on a bigger role in his productions, earning himself co-producer credits on both Catfish and Beautiful Darling. He has also been an assistant director, chiefly on Cannes selections Afterschool (directed by Antonio Campos) and Two Gates of Sleep (directed by Alistair Banks Griffin), but also on some of the same commercials and music videos that he edits. “That’s perfect, because I can be on set and say, ‘Guys, I’m never gonna use this shot. Let’s cut it.’” Stuart-Pontier says he has a difficult time sitting back when there’s work to be done. “It’s hard for me to stop working on something; it feels like admitting defeat. It feels like, ‘I wasn’t able to solve this problem.’”

Growing up in Narrowsburg, N.Y., his parents ran the local newspaper together, which is where he was first bit with the story bug “learning to write news, what information you give first, how you introduce the characters.” He writes a weekly column for the River Reporter about his life, begun during college at the behest of his mother, and credits it with keeping his creative brain turned on while focused so intently on other people’s projects.

“I love documentaries — I enjoy having to find that and the process of pulling out what the story is. What I’ve learned the most is not to try to force anything. Shaping the story around what is there is much more powerful than trying to mold the footage into your preconceived idea.” — Alicia Van Couvering

Contact: Mira Yong at Gersh: (212) 634-8157

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 14

- part 14
"Notorious" through to "The Paradine Case".

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 15

- part 15
"Rope"

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

WHAT IS FUNNY.

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 16

- part 16
"Rope" and "Under Capricon"

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

WHAT'S ON MY MIND?

:|:

A letter to my Neighborhood,

A few days ago I posted a link here about the upcoming festival in which I was to direct a play. While the festival goes forward full steam ahead, I have decided to resign from directing a play that I have done extensive/months of work on to prepare for, a play that I like very much.

My decision is as a result of serious differences with the show’s producers about the play’s casting and rehearsal process. I state this plainly as such, so as to avoid any wonderment about, "What happened?"

I post it here, because of the encouraging feedback I've received today from members of The Casting Directory*Social. Also, because friends have expressed interest in attending the performances and some of you have a pattern of just showing up by surprise (Steve M.). I need to spare you the trip.

Since so many of my students are here as well and have expressed anticipation for seeing the play, I share this experience with you as a lesson that though it is disappointing and sad that something I was so looking forward to and would have loved to do on my own and always collaborative terms: that my life in art has taught me that nothing worthwhile or lasting ever results from dishonoring one’s own personal sense of truth – no matter what anyone else may think. Because even total failure on one's own terms - is success, because the lessons learned point in the direction of our own "True North," that no one can take away.

As Directors we must collaborate. Yet, if it is not our vision, our own sense of truth in the work, it is not our work. An artist must be the final word on their own work.

I have found that forming the habit of honoring/listening to one’s own sense of truth and vision is the artist’s “horn of plenty” from where all lasting and truly rewarding pleasure and joy are derived. It is one thing to compromise (which is good), another to sell one's self out for perceived short term personal gain.

It is no use walking anywhere to talk about "the work" unless our walking is "the work."

Sincerely.

Now everyone knows what I’ve been doing for the past 35 years.

Yikes! :)

:|:
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

SUMMER SHORTS 4

ThroughLine Artists with J.J. Kandel and John McCormack will present SUMMER SHORTS 4, their fourth annual festival of new American short plays, at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street). Performances begin Friday July 30th, and continue through Thursday September 2nd.

Featured will be eight World Premieres from some of New York's finest established and emerging playwrights, including Jonathan's Blaze by Christopher Stetson Boal (Order, currently playing on Theatre Row); Play With The Penguin by Roger Hedden (Bodies, Rest & Motion), directed by Billy Hopkins; The Graduation Of Grace by Wendy Kesselman (My Sister in This House, new adaptation of The Diary Of Anne Frank), director TBA; Fit by Neil Koenigsberg (producer of such films as Pollack, A Walk on the Moon, and High Art), directed by Merri Milwe; Romance by Neil LaBute (reasons to be pretty, The Shape of Things), directed by Dolores Rice; The Expenses Of Rain by Deb Margolin (Obie Award for Sustained Excellence), directed by Laura Barnett; An Actor Prepares by Timothy Mason (Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical, Babylon Gardens), directed by Maxwell Williams; Happy by Alan Zweibel (700 Sundays, "Saturday Night Live"), directed by Fred Berner ("Law & Order")*.

RoBert Gould will provide scenic design, with costume design by Michael Bevins and lighting design by Greg MacPherson.

Summer Shorts returns for another summer of new American one-acts featuring original plays by the country's top playwrights. Representing some of today's best writing, directing and acting talents, Summer Shorts celebrates theatre, summer and the short form. The festival's two separate series offer a diverse range of voices, styles, and subject matter. Summer Shorts 4 offers eight world premiere one-act plays, in two separate evenings. The two series will run in rotating repertory. The New York Post declared "one-act shorts fit nicely in summer heat!"

(READ MORE)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 17

- part 17
"Stage Fright" through to "Strangers on a Train"

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 18

- part 18
"Strangers on a Train" through to "I Confess"

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 19

- part 19
"Notorious" through to a discussion about suspense.

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 20

- part 20
Initial discussion about the "The Birds" through to "Rear Window."

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 21

- part 21
"The Wrong Man" - "Vertigo"

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

'THE WIRE' CREATOR DAVID SIMON TELLS A STORY ABOUT REVENGE AS MOTIVATION.

David Simon tells a 7 minute story about REVENGE AS MOTIVATION

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT TAPES - PART 22

- part 22
"North by Northwest"

Click on image to see Tom Sutpen's original blog posts at "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (2006)

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."