NYU TISCH SCREENING

The Goldberg theater in the Tisch Department of Dramatic writing was packed with writers. NYU instructor Mary Gallagher, a stunning playwright/screenwriter in her own right (Ayn Rand starring Helen Mirren), a fellow Actor&Writer (actorsandwriters.com) met me on the 7th floor. Sophia had left me at the Beard Papa's across the street buying cream puffs with David Smilow, another Actor&Writer, who also plays the Confederate who kills Harry in RACING DAYLIGHT, who we ran into at the Astor Place Starbucks on his way to a rehearsal, for the HB lab, of his play HIT THE BUTTONS. Whew! Sophia had gone ahead to take control of the technical aspects of the screening. She is awesome and detailed and charming and kind. A wonderful business partner to have.

So, packed with, not just writers, but screenwriters, Sophia and I huddled in the front row of the Goldberg theater surrounded by about 60-70 students. In that moment, I could feel my cheeks getting red and hot, the skew of this audience had not occurred to me until this moment. These people were potentially my worst nightmare!

There are markers in the way this film generally plays to an audience, or at least ones I have come to notice in repeat tests, markers of whether the viewers are in synch with the rhythm. In the first book shop scene Emily Ruscoe's "Whatever .." usually earns the film's first chuckle, followed by Sadie's "Well it is, you little twit ..." as the second. By the end of the film, if they laugh at the fart joke they're still llistenting, which is all you can really ask of an audience after all. Once we hit the first mark with this audience, and the chuckles came, I calmed. They reacted delightedly, as we have heard so many now, to the antics of Sadie, Edmund, and Henry, and their subtle esoteric love story, which we have offered up in whimsy, and economy.

The questions were about the making of. The first of the evening a question about the ppm, the financing, not an art question but a question for the executive producer. In our post-mortem on the drive home, Sophia noted that in a group of writers not a single question was related to the story or structure, the questions were all how did you do this thing, get these people, make it happen, the industry ... with questions as well about how long it took to write, whether I preferred writing for art or money ... they were clearly smart people, very smart, each about to launch into this world and wondering. It was so interesting to be among them.

I spoke with Madeleine, a writer who's focusing on cable at present, interning at Jon Stewart and writing spec scripts. She thanked me for the way we portrayed women in our film. I am grateful for this comment because it was a concerted effort to portray a woman's beauty as completely tied to her vision of self. Thanks for noticing and for reinforcing our notion that changing the conversation is about changing what we see.

Roxanne Bridglall along with Mary shared their classes with us last night and we are grateful. Jamie Kirkpatrick and Jason Downs came with us to field a broader spectrum of questions. Thanks guys! And thank you to to another wonderful audience who received our film with good humor and enthusiasm.

We are not an "edgy" film by industry standards. We have no pretentions to it. "Edgy", which to me means that someone has to get slammed up against the wall while getting simultaneously fucked and shot in the head in the opening scene, has its place, as do films such as ours, which assault different cognitive senses. We are a love story which crosses time, with elements of history, ghost stories, and murder mysteries all wrapped in a jigsaw puzzle of breathtaking beauty, coupled with exquisitely simple performances from some of the best actors working. Racing Daylight consistently delights and has a proportionately high repeat viewing interest. We are excited by the possibilities.

Watch and vote for us on Babelgum, the online film festival judged by Spike Lee, premiering in March,

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhref="http://www.babelgum.com/online-film-festival/">

Due to the time constraints imposed by this festival, our 3 act structure has served us allowing us to show RACING DAYLIGHT as 3 seperate films, (Sadie, Edmund, Henry), which make up the RACING DAYLIGHT TRILOGY.

APPLE SOHO SCREENING

It was pouring rain last Friday night and Prince street was full of bobbing umbrellas . Inside the Apple Store the lights were bright and the populous abundant. Our movie screened, such a gorgeous picture! From my seat in the back row center I could hear the film and the store as well, which I found distracting, but then I have a preference for a dark no talking from the audience movie, and find it difficult to train my focus on the one event, my mind darting hither and yon, a butterfly in a blooming meadow.

But I know that my kids thrive on this seeming chaos. When we screened at Ursinus in the cafeteria they stayed with it. Here too the audience seemed to be able to fall into the world of Cedarsville and not just be voyeurs to it. Most stayed for the q&a and the questions were a good mix of technical and artistic, which were answered deftly by Stephen M Harris, Jamie Kirkpatrick, and Jason Martin on the technical side. These three speak tech fluently, it's very sexy. Sophia, Melissa and myself fielded the creative queries.

Melissa Leo was in town fresh off her Sundance whirlwind with the jury prize winning "FROZEN RIVER". Her commitment to our project is so greatly appreciated. Producers of FROZEN RIVER , Chip Hourihan and Molly Conners, honored us in the audience along with many others who had braved the weather to see what caliber of film the Panasonic HVX 2000 and Final Cut Pro, in the hands of artists, can make.

Molly commented on how exciting it was to see Melissa, after a week of watching her onscreen at Sundance, to see her in such different roles than the ones she usually inhabits. The softer, beautiful side of Melissa. We too love to see this other Melissa onscreen, the breadth of her range only just scratched. A remarkable actor, I am in grateful awe of the gift she has given us with these performances.

Apple - Soho was a cool venue!!! Thank you to Frank who set us up and worked his Apple magic making our visit so effortless and comfortable.. To Dan for running the evening. And to Brian Popovic and Corey Smith for all for which they won't take credit.

We are applying to other Apple Stores around the country with a recommendation from the Soho staff. With any luck we will get to see our film projected in such a fabulous way again. Next time I'll sit in the front row.

SOUND & MUSIC

When Jamie Kirkpatrick finished putting his sensitive editing skills to our footage it went out to sound and music. A new journey for me who had never ventured this way before.

Sound Design was Andrea Bella and ADR Michael (MIscha) Feuser a husband and wife team who operate in a basement studio in their apartment in Park Slope Brooklyn. Amazing! They made field trips with microphones to many of our locations to harvest. They brought a Foley Artist over from Germany who worked with antique cloth for Grandma and Anna, the tinkle of china, the rattle of cicadas ... breathtaking detail to an already rich palate.

At some point Andrea asked me if she might attempt a sound montage to accompany the visual one Jamie had so incredibly rendered from my scribbles on the page. Absolutely! What a brilliant idea, and its execution only heightens the moment.

Mischa filtered out generators and airplanes ... magic ... they worked with the actors in ADR in an unusual, more organic way, in front of a screen, and listening to the cadence of their own voices to recreate the mood, the words, like music, no bells and booths. Melissa and David were there together, overlapping, competing for number of takes, remembering the moments and giving them to us again. It was beautiful. A nice way to work. Very generous actors. We are so grateful.

While the sound design is in progress I started meeting with Sarah Plant, our composer. Sarah is a very gifted professional working out of an attic studio in the country. It's amazing what and where Mac equipment allows people to work. Quality of life.

Sarah asked me to give her a list of the music in my car. We've known each other for years, but never in this way. I give her that list. My tastes are eclectic from Cecilia Bartolli to Kanye, which I listen to with my son. She asked me what I was looking for ... that was a nice question to be asked, because I knew the answer to that and would not have known how to express it otherwise. I was looking for 'Puckish'. playful, magical, slightly ominous but you know it's all gonna work out in the end type music. If I had to quantify it in Shakespearean tones I'd liken it to' Midsummer', a place and time where it's all possible and gonna happen anyway, so why sweat it?

Sarah's music did all of that and more. The score on its own tells a story, and with pictures ... breathtaking moments which couldn't have happened any other way. We talked about instruments as characters. She'd heard Sadie as a cello, and sometimes in triplets and ... it's a lovely score. She wrote it a woman possessed. It was beautiful to be a part of this type of creativity. We are so honored to have her music to enhance our delghtfully simple and lovely story.

The opening credits music was a fluke, and one, like so much else on this film, filled with serendipity. We recorded the score in Woodstock over a 2 day period. Sarah had invited incredible musicians to play for us, and they said yes! For fun she had asked each of them to improvise to an Afro-Caribbean piece, "Chocolate" she had written for another film but which appears in the Racing Daylight Dress shop scenes. The second day of recording Sarah says,

"You've got to hear the music Tomas improvised."

She says it several times during the day, I never hear it, too much going on, until I'm on my way out the door and she says, you have to hear the Tomas solo. I do. It's amazing to me. I ask her to please send me the track because I have an idea to use it for the credits and want to send it to Jason Martin who is editing that compelling sequence with photos culled from the Stone Ridge Library collection.

Sarah sends me an mp3 with the caveat that she thinks it's too Latin sounding to set the tone of the film. I listen to it, and I agree and reply that I thought just the cello track would work, and isn't that what she played for me? She sends me the cello articulated and it's exactly as I'd heard it; wild and daring, and timeless. But she tells me that she played me the tracks overlayed, and that the cello alone might be a good idea, but it's not how she played it for me. Funny that. All I heard was the cello, when she played it, and Jason Martin said it fit perfectly. Meant to be. Thank you, Sarah and Tomas.

Thank you Andrea and Mischa who put this film together with such love and care and taste and talent ...I truly admire artists, and was so fortunate to have found so many willing to collaborate, at such a high level, on RACING DAYLIGHT, our collective film-that-could.

A NEW YEAR!

It is indeed a New Year and we've just booked a date to screen at Apple-Soho. 2/15/2008, 6:30 p.m.

We were told by industry veterans that a film without a distribution deal was not gonna get Apple's attention. It's amazing how often we're told that we CAN'T do something based on rules which were set in sand yesterday before the windstorm.

Optimism will out!

We thought that our use of all digital technology which, at the time, meant we could ONLY edit on Final Cut Pro would certainly make us attractive, even if we did not come out as a bona fide 'studio' independent.

We also thought that our incredible editor, Jamie Kirkpatrick, and seasoned award winning d.p., Stephen M. Harris, would add some glitter to our shiny red wagon. Maybe it's because we know a few people who work there or that the Final Cut Pro liason in L.A. is married to Debbie Zipp (http://www.inthetrenchesproductions.com) and she loves our film and has our teaser running on her site ... or maybe they just liked the film, its content and character, and its stellar cast ; David Strathairn, Melissa Leo, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Downs, Sabrina Lloyd, LeClanche Durand ... well, you get the picture.

I'm not sure what combination of factors and events have led to this new good thing which we were told couldn't happen.

Hm ... so which next impossible to climb mountain will we find has a starircase round the back?

2008!

SLAP&TICKLE READING

Twenty actors met us at the Atlantic Theatre studios yesterday for the first reading of "Slap&Tickle" our next project, Sophia's and mine. It was awesome! We invited members of our Racing Daylight crew who have already signed on for the next round, Stephen Harris, our d.p., Jamie Kirkpatrick, editor, and Michelle Baker, locations and on the producing staff, and of course Donn Gobin who is the best cheerleader exec. producer in the world! Ingrid Price will be returning as costume designer, Melanie Dimitri as key in makeup ... so reassuring to us, that so many have wanted to work with us again. Quality of life as hallmark.

The performers were so supportive of the quirky way we devise a screenplay reading which eschews the narrator and has the characters reading their own actions. Melissa Leo told me that the staged readings of Racing Daylight we did this way helped her get the charcter deeper into her bones. With small budget films rehearsal is all but nil so this method of reading seems to give us a bit of rehearsal we hadn't anticipated.

Slap&Tickle, unlike Racing Daylight, is a more traditional narrative in construct, and content, though there is a twist. The multi-generational and multi-racial nature of this depression era story surprised the cast and the small invited audience. They have never seen this movie before, with a family that looks less like the segregated stereotype of the Hollywood renderings, and more like America. This is the American family I know from the inside out.

Our potential investors and partners were smitten. YES!!! They laughed, they cried.

Racing Daylight has opened many doors. One in the can proves you can get it there I expect. I also suspect that moving on to the next project frees up the first from over-mothering. But lest you think I have forgotten this first in the excitement of the second, fear not, we are looking at some very interesting and cutting edge methods of distribution for our first love-child, RACING DAYLIGHT.

THE INTERNET/WGA/TEASER

We have been counseled to cut a new teaser. One which features the quirky funny side of the film. Jamie Kirkpatrick, beloved cutting genius, is fitting this into the schedule of his new feature.

Our present teaser is running on a couple of websites now besides our own:

There's YouTube, where we posted ourselves, and In The Trenches, a site by and for women over 40. We met them on the internet and Melissa Leo and I met up with COO, Debbie Zipp, and members of her team over lunch in Los Angeles. Debbie liked the film enough to support it with a teaser of it on her site. She also helped us get a script of Slap&Tickle, our next project, to the legendary Ruby Dee.

Thanks, Debbie.

__________________________


MotheringHeights.net
GriefBecomesMe.com
ChristineFugate.com

I met Christine Fugate at a Sundance producers weekend. She and Suzanne Jurva were my housemates there. Such a supportive pair ... of each other, of me, whom they'd only met the second before. So happy. Very motivating women. And now Chrisitine has posted us on her blog MotheringHeights which is witty, sage, and insightful advice irreverently proffered. I wish she'd been writing it when my kids were of an age. I have passed it on to those in need.

Visit her other sites as well to learn about christine the filmmaker. Thank you, Christine.

__________________

It's propaganda, the notion that 'the internet as new frontier' is so far away in producer spin, with regard to their position in the WGA strike. Ten years ago I got a script (Pretty Bird) to the American Zoetrope inner sanctum from an upload to the AZ website. I followed due process; reviewed four scripts on the site then I was eligible to post one of mine own for review. I posted one an agent had told me was "an embarassment" to me, and which at the time was my love child.

The script of Pretty Bird worked it's way up the food chain with good reviews, then it was read in house, and we exchanged several phone calls with regard to an option which was tanked when my then agent got into the picture and loaded my deal with a director and producer she represented, people I had never met but who liked the script but had not optioned it and ... you've got to love the way this system works, huh? Or run mad...

That was ten years ago. Levels of protected access have changed. It's easier then ever to reach people. I wrote to Mark Cuban directly. He got his company, HDNet, to read the script of Racing Daylight with an eye to finance. And if I had emailed them a pdf with something they felt they could market I would have sold it direct. That's my point. That's not what has happened for me, but then I know I'm not making films for mass consumption.

But please, make no mistake, I KNOW there is an audience for this film. They are not a small group, but diverse and hungry for product which makes them think, both morally and spiritually. They are men and women who are looking for a bit of whimsy in their everydays. I have sat in those audiences and listened to the women laughing at the foibles of Sadie, at themselves, and that awkward feeling which floods your body when near the person who gets your motor running. I have heard the pious moan, and seen them nod at Edmund and his karmic dilemmas. I have watched men, who are already surprised that it's not a 'chick flick', guffaw at the antics of Henry, as us, watching the strange woman discover herself, and him.

In this new digital age I can find people with whom to do business with greater ease and provide them with a product they want at a reasonable, no middle person, rate of return. And until the walls of protected access go up in this medium, opportunity is rife for the maverick who likes to pioneer.

We're arguing over the internet, the writers and the studios, as if it were an entity way in the distant future, when it's here now.