A veteran writer-producer of TV series as disparate as “Life Goes On” and “The X Files,” R.W. Goodwin had taken a break from TV after “hitting a wall,” as he puts it, while working on the series “Tru Calling.”
So he retreated to his homestead in Bellingham, Wash., to work on his real-estate investments and recharge. But when partner James Swift came to him with an idea for a science-fiction movie – one that celebrated the sci-fi pioneers of the 1950s – Goodwin found he couldn’t resist – and together they made “Alien Trespass,” a sci-fi homage to those films from the past, opening Friday. He sat down recently to talk about “Alien Trespass” and the nature of sci-fi. (More…)
Paul H-O sinks into a seat at a banquette in the lobby restaurant of the Tribeca Grand hotel and sighs.
“This damn thing never ends,” he says. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life on a project.”
But then, the project is his life – or about his life. With Paul H-O, it’s hard to tell where art is imitating life and life is imitating art – at least when it comes to “Guest of Cindy Sherman.”
The documentary, which opens Friday, March 27, in New York, is the story of Paul H-O’s life – or a certain section of it. (The H-O is short for his real name, which is Paul Hasegawa-Overacker.)
Beginning with his creation of the cable-access show “Gallery Beat” in the early 1990s, the film follows the alternately fawning and cutting H-O as he travels from art gallery opening to art gallery opening. Then he runs across reclusive art-world queen Cindy Sherman – whose specialty is creating photographs of herself in unsettling circumstances, makeup and costumes. (More…)
When actress Ali Wentworth launches the third season of “Head Case” on the Starz on Friday, her character, Dr. Elizabeth Goode, has wedding fever.
Or maybe it’s fever blisters.
After all, her fiancée, agent Jeremy Berger (Rob Benedict), has admitted to her that, among other things he’s bringing to their marriage, he has a case of herpes. And, it seems, a severe case of cold feet.
Get the impression that “Head Case” might be a little edgy? Wentworth, who is married to “ABC This Week” host and former Clinton administration bigwig George Stephanopoulos, loves to serve a side order of squirm with her sitcom, on which she serves as executive producer and writer.
Her series, which began as 15-minute interstitial programming to fill in between movies on Starz, quickly became a half-hour of original programming, in which Dr. Goode meets with – then interrupts, bullies and otherwise contradicts – the needs of her celebrity clientele. Among those who take to Dr. Goode’s couch in the early episodes: singer Macy Gray, comedians Janeane Garofalo and Larry Miller, with Jerry Seinfeld and Hugh Hefner slated for upcoming episodes.
She shares the office suite with Dr. Myron Finkelstein (Steve Landesberg), a shrink whose practice is so moribund that he’s constantly trolling the lobby for patients. And she’s forced to divide her attention between her own patients and the ongoing dramas in the life of her assistant, Lola (Michelle Arthur).
Wentworth talked about the show – and her own feelings about therapy – in a recent telephone interview: (More…)
Peter Davis remembers the moment he figured out what his movie, “Hearts and Minds,” should be – because it was the moment he realized what he wasn’t going to do.
It was 1972 and he was filming in a village outside Saigon. The former producer for CBS News – who created the award-winning documentary, “The Selling of the Pentagon” – was looking at a bomb crater and the debris that filled and surrounded it. As he did, he could see in his mind the way the network would have filmed it – the 15 seconds or so of silence as the camera panned over the heart-breaking fragments of a destroyed life, which would then have been interrupted by the narration, in the sonorous tones of a network correspondent, telling the viewer what he was seeing (think of any segment on “60 Minutes” or “20/20”).
“I understood how a network would have told the story,” Davis says. “And I decided that day that I was going to make a film about that 15 seconds of dead air. If I’d known more about cinema verite, I wouldn’t have had to figure that out. I just knew I wanted to get beyond the network techniques.” (More…)
Blink and you’ll miss “Personal Effects,” a moving contemporary drama starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Ashton Kutcher and Kathy Bates that’s playing for one night only in New York next Monday, March 16, at 9:15 p.m. at the IFC Center in Greenwhich Village. (It had its only L.A. showing last week.)
Yes, the movie will turn up on DVD later this spring. And writer-director David Hollander is thankful it’s even getting this tiny theatrical window.
Still, if you ask Hollander, the creator of the TV series “The Guardian” and show runner for “The Cleaner,” he’ll tell you that, when he made the film, he never would have imagined that a movie starring Pfeiffer and Kutcher wouldn’t ever get a real theatrical run. (More…)
When Jayce Bartok’s script for “The Cake Eaters” first came her way, Mary Stuart Masterson assumed she was being offered a role in the independent film.
Her agent neglected to tell her one key fact: that she was being sought as the director, not a performer.
“I was working on a bunch of projects I was writing or directing and my agent gave me this,” Masterson says. “But he didn’t mention that it was something I should consider directing. He just skipped that. Once I learned that, I was very excited.” (More…)
“I had no intention of being a lawyer,” Hruska says, sitting in the Manhattan office of his production company. “Making movies was something I was born to do. Had I not been engaged in the practice that I was, I would have done it earlier. It was the kind of practice that was very hard to leave.”
So he had to wait until retirement to push himself in the new direction – and since retiring in 2001, he’s made three films, the latest of which, “Reunion,” opened in limited release today in New York.
“I retired at 68, which was three years past retirement age for the firm,” he says. “I had known filmmaking would be the next step for a long time. It was a matter of getting free to do it.” (More…)
Getting an independent film made – and then actually into theaters – has become an epic struggle, even for the least-expensive endeavors.
So what chance does an arty, experimental little movie – about poverty in today’s urban setting, no less – really have of getting past the gatekeepers, let alone finding an audience?
Writer-director Mark Webber chuckles at the question. His new film, “Explicit Ills,” which opens March 6 in limited release (after an awards-gathering festival run), has battled those odds and actually found its way to the big screen.
“The film had a good festival life – and I was prepared for that to be its only theatrical experience,” says Webber, 28, who is better known as an actor in films such as “Storytelling,” “Hollywood Ending” and “The Hottest State.” “I’m lucky we got accolades and attention. We were able to partner up with a great company that was willing to put it out.” (More…)
