Movies Til Dawn

Last night I attended the official opening night of a musical we made of my film "Two Family House", which I wrote and directed and which was released in 2000. We call our musical "Buddy's Tavern"--really I should have titled the film that but was stupidly talked out of it by...well, it doesn't really matter anymore, does it? We've been working on this show since early 2002--seven years--and to see it finally staged (and very well staged at that) and begin to take real shape in front of our eyes is a wildly rewarding experience, not the least because putting on a musical is a feat that makes making an independent film look like playing in a sandbox. Why should this be? After all, eight actors and one set in a theater seating a couple of hundred people would appear to be a much more manageable task then spending six million dollars and traveling all over the tri-state area to tell a ninety minute story. I should add that "we"--a term I'll b...

A few more shots from our Polish adventure before moving on to less exotic pursuits. But first, a plug. Do you like swing music? Dig Benny Goodman? Never heard of him? Well, the "King Of Swing" is having his centennial celebrated by New York's great jazz station, WKCR. Literally weeks of all Benny Goodman programming are winding down as we speak, though there's still plenty of great 24 hour BG to catch through June 1. If you love swing, or haven't the slightest idea of what I'm talking about, do yourself a favor and click here to listen and groove. Happy birthday, Benny. Even though you've been dead for thirty or so years. By the way, Benny was supposed to be something of a horror to work for. So loathsome was his reputation that musicians used to tell the following joke. "I have good news and bad news. The good news is Benny Goodman died. The bad news is he died in his sleep." Ouch. Here are our "Miss City Island" girls. Myself and th...

And poof! The whole Poland experience is over. I spent most of yesterday on an interminable (but luxurious) Lufthansia flight back to New York. The screening of "City Island" on Saturday night was an eye-opener. Largely because none of us were sure if the movie's humor would translate to a foreign audience. But it turns that it did--they loved it, laughed, cried and applauded the same as they did in Tribeca. I'm not sure why we were skittish--families are families (i.e., screwed up central organisms that we struggle, in vain, to escape from) all over the world. Might we actually have a movie that transcends cultural barriers? Also quite wonderful was the concert of Jan Kaczmarek's music on the previous evening. Here are Jan and Grzegorz Hajdarowicz, our Executive Producer (as well as being our marvelous host in Poland) looking rather pleased with themselves before the screening... And here Zachary Matz, my producing partner, and I are apparently in the act of wat...

Welcome to Krakow. My hotel is around the corner from the main square, pictured above--the "marketplace" as its called locally. A delightful, colorfully historic, quite negotiable town, Krakow is one of the largest and oldest cities in Poland--it was actually Poland's capital for five-hundred years back in the Ten-hundreds through the sixteenth century. Having escaped destruction (unlike Warsaw) by everybody's favorite loathsome German A. Hitler, Krakow has re-emerged as a major treasure trove of historical...stuff. Want to know more about it? What do I look like--a Krakow expert? Click here and go to Krakow's official site. One of its truly imposing structures is... Wawel Castle on Wawel Hill. Wawel Cathedral (the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Stanisław and Vaclav) is a church located on Wawel Hill in Kraków, which is Poland's national sanctuary. It has a 1,000-year history and was the traditional coronation site of Polish monarchs. It is the cathedral of th...

Dig the heavyness of my composing this blog at dawn from the airport lounge in Frankfurt, Germany while waiting for my connecting flight to Krakow, Poland. The walllessness--the boundry-lessness of it all--makes me idiotically happy. What's in Krakow, you ask? The second annual Film/Music Festival (or some such)--a very rich sounding five day event featuring lots of music that has something to do with movies, including an evening conducted by the composer of "City Island's" score, Jan A.P. Kaczmarek as well as a special screening of "City Island", attended by yours truly and my producer partners Lauren Versel and Zachary Matz. Jan, you see, is Polish. He came to us via one of our major investors, executive producer Grzegorz Hajdarowicz (or, as I prefer to bill him, Greg A.P. Hajdarowicz--"A.P." standing for "also Polish"). Click here for a very nice article about Greg and his company Gremi Films and their involvement with "City Isla...

Most of us can probably remember back to a time when a particular piece of technology that we now take for granted seemed stunningly new, oddly exotic and perhaps beyond our given talents for competent management. I'm old enough to have had to "learn" the computer instead of simply having grown up with it. Hell, I had to "learn" the typewriter when I was twelve. More recently there have been i-pods, Final Cut Pro and TIVO to name just a few things that I've had to figure out. Jesus, my parents still haven't "learned" e-mail... Going back in time, we can sympathize with the people (mostly dead now) who had to struggle with some of our earlier technological miracles--hooking up the VCR, working the xerox machine, dealing with the microwave. All of these things--though commonplace now--clearly required a leap in the thought process, a change of point-of-view, a bold spirit willing to invest in the rapidly changing world. But dialing a telephone? ...

Below dig the superb mention of our movie on comingsoon.net. I decided to cut and paste it below since the sentiments it expresses make me absurdly proud and happy. Less you doubt the veracity of the below rave (in other words, it reads like something I--or my mother--might have concocted on my own behalf) you can click here to read the whole article. "One of the films that we think has the best chance at breaking out from this year's festival is Raymond DeFelitta's City Island. It's the closest Tribeca Film Festival has come to a crowd-pleasing comedy on par with Little Miss Sunshine, and it's absolutely no surprise that it won the Audience Award this year. It revolves around a dysfunctional family living on City Island, the isolated community off the coast of the Bronx, the head of the household being Vincent Rizzo, a prison guard played by Andy Garcia, who learns that one of his prisoners (played by Steven Strait) is actually his illegitimate son from a previou...

Click here to read a moderately interesting interview with me and Andy Garcia , conducted for a publication called Hosokinema, which sounds awfully Japanese to my ears. Well why not? Thank you to the reader known as JC for finding this one. I'm off to Connecticut for a few days where a musical play that I wrote is having its very first production. "Buddy's Tavern" is a musical version of my movie "Two Family House"--that movie was released in 2000 and the next year we began work on musicalizing it. My composer Kim Oler and lyricist Alison Hubbard have a good deal more experience in the theater than I and thus were mildly taken aback when I suggested that we could write and produce the show in about a years time. Gently they explained to me that the pace of the theater world makes the pace of the movie world seem positively frenetic. Indeed the word that pops to my mind that best describes the process of writing and mounting a show would be: GLACIAL. Nonethel...

Finally it's turned up: the Andy/Dominik "Access Hollywood" moment, broadcast on opening weekend of the Tribeca Film Festival. Click here to watch it. They do a fine job plugging the movie and Dominik--bless her--says that she considers this movie her father's best work... For those of you who have been following this little excercise in self-promotion over the past few months, you might be interested to know that this blog didn't begin as a purely selfish forum designed to trumpet whatever minimal acheivements I may have...er, acheived. Rather, the initial purpose of this blog was to justify the ENORMOUS amount of time I was losing on a daily basis watching youtube. My passions are old music (jazz--20's-60s) and old movies. Music on film is also good. And youtube, as you may or may not be aware, has become a respository for all kinds of material--live concert footage, old musical numbers extracted from the long (and no longer necessarily interesting) plot-dr...

Yesterday morning my producer Lauren Versel and I flew from New York to LA on the 9AM flight. We arrived around noon, had lunch in Beverly Hills, then joined our other producing partners--Andy Garcia and Zachary Matz--for a meeting with a company interested--very interested--in distributing "City Island". The meeting went terrifically well and then, wiith maximum glamour and flash, Lauren and I boarded the evening flight back to New York (after a quick and expensive Sushi dinner). The aplomb with which all this was accomplished hit a snag early this morning: the fog at JFK in New York prevented us from landing. We were re-routed to Dulles in Washington DC to refuel. Eventually we shlepped back to New York. Add to this the fact that we were sitting in coach and had to pay top dollar for tickets on such a short notice and essentially what we had was: the longest, least comfortable and most expensive 24 hour trip to LA and back ever recorded. But all that pales next to the news...

The other day I posted an interview with me in Italian from an Italian blog, which I suggested as a possible new wave method for learning a foreign language. Continuing that theme, dig the above--an article from a Spanish Language newspaper. Can any of you translate this article? I don't mean any of you who actually speak or read Spanish--that would be too easy. I'm interested in a kind of off the cuff, strictly instinctive free translation by somebody who hasn't the foggiest idea of what they're reading. (Don't forget to click to enlarge). Thanks for all the comments from the other day concerning how and when the film will finally be available to be seen. Soon I'll have some news--all good--about the fate of our movie. Below I've posted part one of a panel that I did at Barnes and Noble a week ago. It was called "Pen to Paper" or something of that ilk. The panelists were all writer/directors--one of them was the very charming Conor McPhearson whos...

Above, click to enlarge and then scroll down past the mention of Jerry Herman's honorary Tony Award and see the New York Times mention of our winning the Audience Award, published in the "Grey Lady" this morning. If something happens and it isn't mentioned in the New York Times, then it probably isn't real. Hence our delight at this mention... Click here to read the beknighted Peter Knegt of Indiewire (the ultimate source for Indie film information) and his attempt to explain his failure to have predicted our win--he blames Tribeca's tracking system and indicates that we "benefitted" from our three late screenings, though we had already had three screenings by the time Thursday night rolled around. Thanks to you, my friends and readership, we packed the screenings and created a buzz that was clearly helpful in our attracting enough attention and interest to help take our movie to the top of the festival. And don't think that I'll stop aski...

We did it! We won the best award any festival has to offer--the Audience Award. At 8:30 PM last night, me and my producer Lauren Versel and my editor David Leonard mounted a small stage at a Union Square boite upon hearing that "City Island"--the movie that many of you dear readers have investested much of the last year in reading about and following the progress of--was the winner of the coveted Heineken Audience Award. Out of the eighty-five movies that Tribeca selected to show this year, we were chosen by the public as the favorite. Click here to read the official announcement. Damn I'm happy. I'm going to bed. It's the middle of the night and I'm still fielding congratulatory e-mails. But before I disappear, may I share with you an article from Indiewire, published just two days ago? It discusses the probable Audience Award winner and manages to name a remarkable number of potential winners...none of which are "City Island". Does the phrase ...

Click on the above to read an article about...just click it. ALERT: AMC Tribeca Special – Interviews with Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, and Dominik Garcia- Lorida WHERE: AMC WHEN: Fri., May 1 @ 11PM | 10C Sun., May 3 @ 6:30AM | 5:30C Fri., May 15 @ 5:45AM | 4:45C Do you speak or read Italian? Do you want to learn? Perhaps our movie can help. Click here to read an interview with me in an Italian blog (proof that I really will do ANYTHING to help promote this movie). Then watch the video of me saying the same stuff. What a crazy concept for language learning! Is there money in this? More than in making independent films? Yesterday I did a panel at the DGA on the "future of independent cinema" with Austin Chick, Mary Harron and my old friend Gary Winick. I think I can say, with confidence, that collectively we thorougly failed to answer the burning question of what the future of independent cinema will be. But at least we all told a few good...

http://www.thewrap.com/files/news_article/VarietyFront_600x320REV_0.jpg Below I've cut and pasted Variety's rave review of our movie. Normally I would simply provide the link for you to read this but what the hell. This isn't your everyday, garden-variety good review. By the way, you guys are champs--you're finding stuff on line (like this review which was brought to my attention by an anonymous poster) before my producers or PR people are finding them! Keep it up. This review should, I hope, seriously aid our search for a distributor. And when you're done reading the below, click on a clip that will make you smile all day--Groucho singing "Hello I Must Be Going" from "Animal Crackers". City Island By RONNIE SCHEIB A CineSon/Medici production, in association with Lucky Monkey Pictures/Gremi Film Production/ Filmsmith Prods. (International sales: West End Films, London.) Produced by Raymond de Felitta, Andy Garcia, Lauren Versel, Zachary Matz, Exe...