Movies Til Dawn

Five AM and done with sleep. What better time for some Jackie Paris. The above "Tis Autumn" is from his greatest album, "The Song Is Paris". 1962. I'm perplexed by the re-emergence of 3-D. Not just the why of it but the reality of it. Seriously? 3-D? This isn't a hoax? It's the twenty-first century and we're going to wear the glasses again? Or have they found a way to do without them? Read the following and tell me what year we're in. "The panic within the movie industry has never been more palpable. Concerned that a new medium will finally empty out movie theaters, studios and exhibitors have seized on the new three-dimensional process as more than a gimmick-a new way for audiences to experience motion pictures. And one that can only be experienced in theaters." No--not 1952. Now. 2007. How boring. I still don't know if we have to wear the glasses. The new medium then was television. I suspect the new medium now is youtube. I went ...

So now we have a plan for our documentary. "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris" will be released theatrically by Outsider Pictures in New York. The date currently hovers around early October. That we are being exhibited in a good old fashioned theater for a week (or more?) neatly places us in two somewhat dissonant camps: the top percentile of independently made films as well as the retro-release category. Because as we all know, while a theatrical release is always preferable, it is not mandatory any more. There is no shame in going to straight to DVD--as long as the movie has found a home where it can in turn be found by those that are interested. Unless, of course, you have aspirations toward being recognized by AMPAS. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences steadfastly clings to the notion that the communal viewing experience is essential to the art (and I suppose the preservation) of the cinema. Sid Ganis, the President, has publicly urged people to conti...

Here's what my world looks like now: I've got sattelite radio playing in my office--over my direct-tv hooked-up fifty-inch screen. (The system is used primarily for radio listening. I currently watch two or three movies a week and perhaps an hour of 24 hour news rant a day. But the radio is on pretty much the rest of the time.) There are three movies currently in theaters that I would like to see. But since I work out of my home-office (and my day therefore is necessarily focused on what I have to get done professionally) the idea of going out and paying to park and walking around a mall and sitting through trailers I've already seen or didn't want to see to begin with doesn't sound like time well spent. (One of the misconceptions about working "for yourself" is that you get to do whatever you want with your time. The truth is I do much less outside of my work than people with nice normal out of the house type jobs do.) And: the movies that I want to se...

In the May 14 issue of the New Yorker Magazine there is a review by Steven Shapin of a book called "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900" (the books author is David Edgerton). The premise of the book--and Shapin's article--is that innovation in technology is never, in and of itself, the whole story. Rather time, and the way in which humans eventually come to regard and use technology, tends to have much more to do with whether or not a given innovation is ultimately successful (i.e.--we can't imagine life without it) or merely a passing fad. Sometimes new mediums are not even correctly understood for a good many years. An example is the telephone which, the article points out, was initially presumed to be a device only for use by the upper classes and one that could, if not monitored closely, lead to the end of interpersonal human contact as we know it. Edgerton also coins a term to describe the tendency to overrate new technology, "futu...

Here's a bunch of phrases, concepts and predictions that I've heard so often in the past few years that they no longer make any sense. "Digital Projection will replace 35mm projections." Why hasn't it yet? Because lawyers (for the distribution companies) and union leaders (for the projectionists) continue to argue over who should pay for all those screens to be converted, of course. If it were 1927 out (and I dearly wish it were), we would be saying the same thing about sound versus silents. The only difference between now and eighty years ago is that back then, with considerably fewer methods of speedy communication, thinks that got discussed actually became fact after a reasonable amount of discussion. One fine day in the late twenties, the pipe organs got thrown out and speakers got installed. And the changeover was complete. History can't get made unless people make it happen. "Digitial video will replace 35mm film." Why hasn't it yet? Becaus...

Who was Jackie Paris? And what has he to do with the future of independent film? Start with the name, which sounds like a crooner invented by Jim Thompson or some other hard-boiled noir paperback artist of the past. But It was his real name (sort of). Jackie Paris (born Carlo Jack Parisi) was a hell of a singer who took the jazz scene of the 1940's by storm. He was young, good-looking, a hepcat's hepcat and a musician's musician. He sang, played guitar and tap-danced. He was completely at home in the world of the "new sounds" (be-bop) and in crooning the ballads of the era. He was a protege of the Mills Brothers, was Peggy Lee's favorite male singer, won the Downbeat Poll as best Jazz singer in 1954 and was consistantly ranked in the top ten male vocal lists throughout the 1950's. So. Why haven't you heard of him? To be honest, it's more suprising when somebody HAS heard of Jackie than when they haven't. The story of Jackie Paris is one of st...

Somehow the end of "The Sopranos" as we know it seems to me a reasonable excuse for this web-logs first post, since back at the turn of the century the fate of one of my movies became breifly entangled with what is now known simply as "HBO'S Flagship Series." Briefly: when casting my film "Two Family House", our casting directors (Walken/Jaffe) started bringing in a lot of talented Itailian-American actors who they had just started seeing for a show they were working on for HBO. Since "TFH" is also an Italian-American based story, this was a no-brainer of no significance. In and out of our offices walked John Ventimiglia, Vincent Pastore, Michael Rispoli, Sharon Angela, Katherine Narducci, Elizabeth Bracco. Just about everyone but Gandolfini. The word on the street was that the show was excellent but probably wouldn't last out its original commitment (thirteen episodes?) Less than a year later I woke up and found myself and my film tied t...