Movies Til Dawn

Right, then. Salt Lake City. Sundance 2000. The story of selling "Two Family House". Anybody still care? Anybody reading this? HELLO!!! The guys from USA films were very enthused about the movie and naturally this alerted the other distributors, who showed en masse to our second screening the following night, this time in Park City. We'd planned a little post screening party at the dreadfully Park City-ish house we were renting, figuring on twenty or so people dropping by. The film played very well but it was hard to judge if we were going to get any more offers. Until we got back to our house. To our astonishment the party had already started, prior to us even getting there. People were pouring into the place, I imagine having been told that the new 'hot' film at the festival was throwing the evening's 'hot' party. Sundance is one lousy party after another--crowded, loud, filled with bloodsuckers and wannabes--and there we were, purveyors of one of th...

One of these days I will finish the "Two Family House" story and discussion.--if popular demand were a reliable indicator I would have by now happily abandoned it. But in my super-controlled, need-to-tie-everything-up-and-turn-it-into-a-self-aggrandizing-story way, I will pursue it to the end. On another day, that is. Today, though, I will take questions from the audience. You, sir, in the yellow hat with the pink hankerchief and the walker by your side. Your question? What's that? How do I feel about a 'smaller' company like Anchor Bay buying the film instead of a big studio? Good question. The answer is: excellent! Firstly because there really are no more "big studios" buying finished, independent movies--the occasional fluke notwithstanding. The amount of indie films made every year is actually GROWING--unbelievable until you factor in the phenomenon of people shooting movies on their cell phones and cutting them on their Macbooks...and then burning a...

Below I've pasted today's Hollywood Reporter piece. My producer Lauren Versel tells me that today last year was the first day of pre-production on the movie. What a cycle... Anchor Bay sails to 'City Island' Picks up rights to the dramedy from Raymond De Felitta By Steven Zeitchik June 18, 2009, 09:32 PM ET Anchor Bay is taking a trip to "City Island." The Overture sister company has picked up all rights in the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand to the Tribeca Film Festival breakout from writer-director Raymond De Felitta. Paradigm packaged and repped rights to the pic, which stars Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies and Emily Mortimer in a dramedy about a family on the quiet island off the New York coast. The movie centers on a repressed corrections officer (Garcia) who harbors acting dreams but who gets caught in a series of misunderstandings when he brings home his secret adult son from a previous marriage to live with his family. The film's centerpiece ...

Click here to find out what promises to be excellent news for those of you who've been following the up/down in/out whirl of activity surrounding our movie. More later...much more. Meanwhile, dig the "Closet Killer" Paramount Logo, as good a way to celebrate as a shot of methamphetimine.   Subscribe in a reader

All right, so I got busy and have only posted intermittently. And what the hell of it? Heres a nice link to a nice review of "Tis Autumn" (available now on Amazon!). And here's another one. And now we'll wrap up this mini-history of "Two Family House" which all began due to the stage musical version of the movie being put on in Connecticut. The show closed last night--which either means that this blog series outlasted the show...or that the show had the good sense to get its work done while I dilly-dallied. We finished shooting "Two Family House" in the early summer of '99, cut and posted the picture in New York through the fall and sent it off for submission to the Sundance Film Festival. We got a call around Thanksgiving of that year--an oddly apologetic kind of call. It was Rebecca Yeldham, then one of the programmers of the fest. They wanted the film but were asking for it to not be entered into official competition. Rather it would be ...

Okay. So I skipped a week. Would you like to know what I've been doing all this time? If only I could remember... But I digress. And whatnot. When was Columbine? April 20, 1999. Why do I care? Simple. Because that dates when the pre-production phase of "Two Family House" had begun. We'd been in prep for approximately two weeks when the Columbine massacre was suddenly being reported on the news. So that means we started our prep in the first week of April--or close--leading us to mid-May start of priniciple, in turn leading us to wrap before the fourth of July weekend (for some reason movies are always backing themselves into schedules by choosing outside dates that they arbitrarily need to beat...on "City Island" we had to wrap by Labor Day--a fact which drove more business and artistic decisions then a normal person might find healthy...) Anyway, Columbine was dead-center (pardon) in our prep process and provoked one of my friend/editor David Leonard's,...

So it's late 1998 and I've heard from Al Klingenstein and Jim Kohlberg (via Anne Harrison, my producing partner) that they want to make the film. This is the problem with show business. The least likely things happen and the most obvious ones don't. Which leads you to keep putting coins into the proverbial slot, waiting for the payout. In a sense I'm still waiting...though I have the feeling that even those who have hit the jackpot are still putting coins in, waiting for an ever bigger payout... I told them that the film was makeable for the money they had, although probably not with big stars. They won my heart by telling me that they thought the script was so strong that it didn't need stars--it needed the perfect actors to play the lead roles. (I hope like hell they still believe this unconventional bit of wisdom...) After flirting a bit with Anthony La Paglia and getting turned down by the onerous Vincent D'Onfrio, I saw tape on a character actor who was one...

The main character in the film "Two Family House" (and our new musical "Buddy's Tavern") is a kind of mid-century, outerborough everyman named Buddy Visalo. Oddly, ever since I made the film, people have asked me if I "knew the real Buddy"--as if there was something about him and his story that couldn't have just been made up. And I always answer thusly: yes, I knew Buddy. He was my uncle. His name was Dan (birth name: Donato--meaning Donald, which he apparently didn't like) but always, familiarly, "Buddy". Or, to me, "Uncle Buddy". Buddy was an Italian-American, born in the Bronx and destined for a life of manual labor--my grandfather was a housepainter and early on he hired his second born (age 10? 12?) to be his assistant and helper. Never finishing school, Buddy kept working--doing construction, working in factories, doing woodwork etc. All the while he had an intense need to express himself artistically--in his case it ...

Onward, blog-ho. Here's how we got here, re: this musical of ours, "Buddy's Tavern", now playing in Norwich, Connecticut. But first, click here for Wikipedia's unexpectedly informative page about my film "Two Family House" , on which the musical is based. "Two Family House" began life as a screenplay which I wrote at the end of 1993. The previous year I had won a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for a screenplay I'd written called "Begin The Beguine"--twenty large was bestowed upon me as a gift for having been one of the best five scripts picked from a few thousand. The deal was, you couldn't just collect your check...it had to used as a STIPEND while you were producing new material. "Two Family House" was the script I chose to write during that stipend period. Why? Simple. It was the least commercial idea I had in my drawer. Since there was plainly no way in hell such a script would ever get sold, much less made ...