CITY ISLAND GOES WIDE--WITH LA TIMES BEHIND IT...

The week has practically vanished, and so did I. Apologies and whatnot.

Welcome, readers of this mornings terrific LA TImes article which makes some pretty heady predictions for "City Island". We
couldn't be more pleased with John Horn and his Word Of Mouth piece, which describes the gradual groundswell our movie is experiencing. If you're a vet of this little experiment in self-promotion 21rst century-style (i.e. this blog) and don't usually read the LA Times, allow the above link to take you into the world of one of the country's best newspapers.

Want more? Click here to read my latest Salon article--the penultimate one, as I've decided to only post one more which will go up this weekend (so I'm told).

Bored? Interested? Killing time waiting for a bus? Click here to watch a video we made that's going on the DVD extras disc--a conversation (over Italian food, natch) between me and the cast. Present among them are Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Dominik Garcia-Lorido and Steven Strait. Thank you, movieweb, for previewing this. Unless of course you somehow got ahold of it illegally and just threw it up on your site. In which case, thanks anyway--all publicity is good publicity.

Our movie is TRIPLING THE NUMBER OF THEATERS IT'S SHOWING IN. This is all due to the audience of course. And the audience is influenced by what others tell them...and those others began with you, dear blog-followers. Thank you for your existence.

And oh! Happy birthday, Duke Ellington. I believe he'd be turning 111 years of age today. Duke is, to my mind, the greatest composer of the twentieth century as well as one of my three cultural heros. The others are Orson Welles...and you'll have to guess the third.

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We passed the million dollar mark at the beginning of the weekend and appear to be doing extremely well in both old (continuing) markets and new markets. Next week, 4/30, "City Island" expands exponentially to a few hundred theaters and if things hold up--people keep going in old markets and word of mouth travels in new markets--we will have a certifiable "sleeper hit" on our hands.

Or, perhaps it'll be "hello HBO" time...either way, the movie's being talked about and much of it comes as a result of you good readers of this blog and your efforts to get the word out. Keep coming back. It works if you occasionally work it...

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CITY ISLAND: ME ME ME ME ME ME ME...

Below, part two of my Backstage interview. Oh, and by the way, there was a Volcano that exploded somewhere...or so I've heard...

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CITY ISLAND: YES, IT"S COME TO THIS...

I blog. I blog about my film. I blog about myself. I post articles about me and my film. And now, just in case the solipsistic nature of this weblog hasn't been fully understood, I offer...

...an interiew with myself. Forgive me. I can't help it...

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COCKTAILS ON CITY ISLAND--PLUS ANDY GARCIA DALLAS INTERVIEW PART TWO

Above, dig the drink specialties of the house at the very nice bar adjacent to the theaters in the Westside Pavillion where "City Island" is playing in west LA. Yesterday afternoon I stopped in for a "Rizzo On the Rocks". Very nice. Twelve bucks.

Below is the rest of the interview which I posted yesterday--Andy Garcia in Dallas--a very nice, relaxed conversational vibe. He talks about "Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead" which I remember quite liking back when I saw it in '95. And of course the "boat drinks" reference--his characters verbal picture of the paradise that awaits him if only he could get out of
the "life"--fits nicely with the City Island cocktail offerings...

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CITY ISLAND: SUPER DAME

Click here to view some of the most deeply, persuasively, fabulously hip, slick and hot shots of the dame of all dames, Julianna Margulies. These are from W magazine and are quite something. The accompanying article isn't half bad either.(Rather like that it references this blog and names the names of the actresses who very fortunately turned down the part that became--thank God--Julianna's.)

Guess what? "City Island" is expanding to more screens this weekend (see twitter link on your right--or go to the Facebook page to find out where) with an even more ambitious expansion program planned for the following weekend, 4/30.

And as long are you're killing time reading this silly blog, why not click here and read my new Salon.Com article which posted yesterday? The subject is...oh, hell, if I tell you you probably won't read it. But I promise that its one of my better efforts.

Now for a really shameless plug. Are you a reader based in LA? Doing anything Friday night? No? Well, why not go to a restaurant/jazz club in Sherman Oaks called Spazio's on Ventura Blvd. and here a great jazz vocalist named Janis Mann...accompanied by yours truly on the piano? Yes, I'm diving back into the jazz world (I'll also be at Vibrato, Herb Alpert's club up on Mulholland and Beverly Glen next month) and would be pleased to see a "City Island" fan or near-fan show up and say hi. And don't be scared if you think you don't like jazz: it isn't really like that screeching "free jazz" stuff that people think is jazz...or the Kenny G. stuff that often gets mistaken for jazz. It's wonderful songs from the Great American Songbook--standards--delivered by a superb singer backed by what I sure hope is a more than competent trio.

Here's part one of an interview Andy Garcia did during our Dallas press junket--I just found it and, even though the camera work is strictly hand-held-home-made, it's a very nice, relaxed glimpse of Andy--this is very much what he's like to hang out and jive with over lunch.

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CITY ISLAND: $$$$????

Anchor Bay’s “City Island” - starring Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies - continued to be an under-the-radar success story. Going from 45 to 57 screens, the film grossed $259,000. That made for a 30% increase, seeing its per-theater average actually rise despite a higher screen count ($4,544 vs. $4,422 last weekend). After five weeks, “Island” has taken in $842,858, and should soon become the first $1 million grosser young Anchor Bay’s history.

Indiewire

Our fifth weekend has continued our pattern of successful expansion and I can only say that all of us--the film's makers, producers and distributors--are humbled and thrilled at what is clearly happening. Which is what?

"City Island" is proving itself to be the people's movie. Those of you who followed the making of the film and the long, arduous process of getting it sold and released over the past year, are the true winners here. Your perseverence and non-stop good will and interest were felt in the "air that we breath..." And that attitude seems to have transmuted to the people who are selling out our shows--I keep hearing reports of the theaters being packed and people having to settle for buying advance tickets for the next show.

And for what? A movie about people, families, lies, truth, humanity. And it's not even in three-D! Have an goldstone, Mr. Eggrol, you deserve it.

Oh--and please, PLEASE, continue to forward these blogposts--and links to our Facebook page and the movies page (which can be found in the right column) to your friends.

Below, a little treat: one of our most "verite" outtakes--Andy Garcia warming up for a scene that seems to be something of a favorite for those that have seen the movie: his "audition" for Martin Scorcese's casting director.

Pass it forward!

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A CITY ISLAND DELETED SCENE: THE "ACTING CLASS MONOLOGUES"

A large plot point in "City Island" (no spoiler, no worries) has to do with an acting class that Andy Garcia's character is attending and the assignment for the week, which is for the actors to think of their worst personal secret and turn it into a monologue for the class to hear. In due course, Andy does so. But so did the other acting students. So, in due course, I filmed monologues--mostly improvised by the actors--with the intention of showing bits of them strung together, leading up to Andy's big moment.

Guess what? IT ALL GOT CUT. All of it. The below edited "class monologues" sequence once again proves the futility of trying to anticipate what should be dropped from the script prior to shooting; I actually fought hard for all of the actors seen below to be hired, insisting that the sequence was of dire importance to the climax of the movie. Frankly, it didn't even make it past the first assembly--as soon as I saw it (and at that time the film was running well over two hours) I said goodbye, never to cast a backward glance.

Still, the actors involved all did lovely jobs. Matthew Arkin tells the wonderful story centering on the cross-dressing boy who's discovered by his farmhand father while in mid-Barbara Streisand impersonation. Louise Stratten in the blonde knockout who had an affair with her girlfriend. My sister, Eileen De Felitta, is the woman who finds herself without any secrets worth telling. And the great Marshall Efron is the man whose father shot his dog.

Marshall has been in every feature I've made, save for my documentary. A brilliant, versatile humorist/actor/writer/social observer/voice over artist/childrens book author, you may remember him from a wonderful PBS program of the 1970's, "The Great American Dream Machine", on which he wrote and performed in a variety of topical, satirical and sometimes plain nonsensical sketches. I remember this show from my youth--and thus was delighted to meet Marshall in the mid 1990's and cast him in my first feature, "Cafe Society". Since then, a movie isn't complete for me unless Marshall turns up in it. He turns up in my movies "Two Family House" and "The Thing About My Folks". Alas, in "City Island' his speech has been cut. But he's on view as one of the acting students and, thanks to YouTube, is now on-line giving his speech as well.

Additionally, a handful of other Marshall Efron video's seem to be popping up on YT, so I've taken the liberty of posting one that appears to be recently made--a typically Marshall-esque send-up of the Food Network in which he creates a truly vile sounding meal and teaches you how to make it. In the comments section, I was surprised to read an angry viewer's comment that they actually made the entire meal and tasted it before realizing that the whole thing was a joke. Have we stopped thinking and simply begun responding to any sort of input that comes our way on-line? The answer would seem to be yes, which was probably Marshall's point in making the video in the first place. N'joy...

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CITY ISLAND GOES TO PALM SPRINGS (among other places)?

Anchor Bay's Andy Garcia starrer "City Island" added 18 theaters for a total 45 and grossed $211,000. That represented a sturdy $4,689 per venue ahead of a scheduled expansion to 60 sites, with cume now sitting at $522,896.

Hollywood Reporter.com

And now for a song.

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

Happy biiiirrrrrthday dear...



Happy birthday to you...

(It was April 12th.)

More screens being added this weekend for CIty Island: the new markets are: San Diego, Phoenix, Austin, Charlotte, Detroit, Hartford, Kansas City and Palm Springs. Palm Springs? Why do I dig this so much. The desert heat, the retirees mixing with the young swingers...Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra...or have I lost track of time? Hm...maybe I'll drive down for the day and check it out...

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CITY ISLAND: DC (AMONG OTHERS) WELCOMES US...

"City Island" opens in another pile of theaters today as we enter weekend four--click here for a complete listing of cities and theaters. We did strong business all last week (just got the B.O. report) but one keeps ones fingers crossed as the weekend approaches: after all, there is "Date Night"...

Still, our tortoise seems to be winning the race and this morning the Washington Post gave us what's known in old show-biz circles as a "money notice"; the last line will explain why. Cheers to you, John Anderson--glad you enjoyed the pic.


Isolated in a sea of secrets
By John Anderson
Friday, April 9, 2010

The real City Island is a fishing village in the Bronx, which makes it almost as unlikely as the characters who populate Raymond De Felitta's dark-edged comedy. No man is an island? In this story, everyone, man or woman, is a walled fortress of paranoia, secrecy, unsatisfied yearnings and anger-at-low-tide, all of which will rise and collapse over the course of what is a very funny film, and one that operates at the sea level of humanity. Quaint. Slightly peculiar.

What seems to attract De Felitta as a writer-director is eccentricity and fractured urbanity; over the past two decades he has made a handful of charming films, including the memorable "Two Family House," most of which deal with characters who cultivate anxieties and predispositions into full-blown catastrophes. It's no surprise, therefore, that native New Yorkers are De Felitta's collective muse.

Vince Rizzo (played by Andy Garcia, who also produced) is a corrections officer, wannabe actor and beleaguered husband. Domestic relations being what they are, he tells his wife, Joyce (Julianna Margulies, looking as hard as press-on nails), that he's going out to play poker rather than admit he's taking an acting class. For her part, Joyce is the personification of matrimonial displeasure: With a hair-trigger temper and an adversarial relationship with cosmetics, she puts all her hopes and dreams into her college-student daughter, Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido), who, unbeknownst to any other Rizzo, has dropped out of school and is working as a stripper.

Not enough? The Rizzos' acerbic son, Vince Jr. (the hilarious Ezra Miller), provides a sarcastic Greek chorus to his family's inanity while running his own clandestine operation: After spying on his rather large neighbor, Denise (Carrie Baker Reynolds), he learns to his delight that she has a chubby-chaser Web site. He's in heaven. But even Vince Jr.'s fatty fetish pales in comparison with the baggage that Dad's towing around: a son he has never met named Tony (Steven Strait), who has just become a guest of the state, inside Vince's place of employment.

Garcia is quite moving as Vince, who's barely in the acting game; his teacher (Alan Arkin) is cynical enough to deflate any aspiring thespian. But he goes on a fateful casting call because one enthusiastic classmate, Molly (Emily Mortimer), neutralizes his innate pessimism. The Molly-Vince equation is refreshing: a romance-free relationship that's about sharing one's secret self. But all the Rizzos have the same problem. One of the amazing things about "City Island" is the realization -- during its small-caliber apocalypse/climax -- of just how many enormous secrets are being harbored by so few people. A stripper. An illegitimate son. Forbidden lust. Illicit smoking. It's enough for a whole season of "All My Children," without the bad acting.

The acting is, in fact, superb and, given the amount of drama per frame, the best current buy for one's movie dollar.


And so, in honor of all things Washingtonian...

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CITY ISLAND: FURTHER BOX OFFICE, FURTHER REVIEWS, ANYTHING FURTHER FATHER?

Recent alternative fare entries including Greenberg and Chloe already appear to be losing traction while The Runaways skidded off the cliff. However, the slow, steady build of City Island has been working and the big winner in multis is unquestionably Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Movie City News, 4/4/10

Well all right then. And whatnot. Our next weekend has more theaters being added and can I tell you exactly which ones and where? Certainly not! But go to our fabulously updated theater listings section of our Facebook page and dig.

And have a look at a perfectly lovely review of the film, this from the on-line Big Hollywood site, and written by Carl Kozlowski.

And now lets dip a toe into the production waters of the past. This returns us to the blogs primary purpose--the documenting of the films actual making. Much is made on DVD's these days of deleted scenes. Why are they cut? What would the movie have been like if they'd kept such and such a scene in? (Answer: longer). Usually the director on the DVD commentary explains the reasons for the dropped scene.

But what if the director (in this case I) doesn't even remember the scene?

I just discovered among my copious download filed an utterly forgotten, unposted but fully edited little scene between Ezra Miller and Carrie Baker Reynolds. Where was I when this was shot--in the can? Apparently. Anyway, a cursory glance at my shooting script brings it all back to me now. This scene didn't make it past the first assembly--not due to quality but simply because we streamlined the timeline of the story and this connecting moment no longer was needed to connect anything.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy Denise's "Chocolate Death Cake".

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CITY ISLAND: 197% INCREASE???

From Indiewire:

Finally, Anchor Bay’s “City Island” - starring Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies - continued a promising expansion. Going from 7 to 26 screens, the film grossed $144,000. That made for a whopping 197% increase in grosses, hanging on to a very sizable portion of its per-theater average. After three weeks, “Island” has grossed $256,387, making it the highest grossing film in young Anchor Bay’s history.

Well, what a surprise. The movie continues to pack houses--firsthand reports from San Francisco, Miami, LA and the New York suburbs plus the actual numbers which we received over the weekend point to what appears to be possibly a genuine groundswell--not a movie that is going to be in the top ten, but a movie that is going to stay around a good long time. Who knows, maybe long enough to get into the top ten?

On Box Office Mojo we've jumped from #41 (on three screens) to #32 on ten. And many more are coming.

By the way, did anybody bother reading A.O. ("they call me Tony!") Scott's sad little piece in the New York Times yesterday? Bemoaning how film criticism just doesn't matter anymore? And what does he base this on? Apparently he got booted from his Ebert-esque television show due to low ratings. Oy vey. These critics wouldn't last an hour in the real world if they were obliged to stick there neck out, like creative people do, and very possibly get it chopped off. What if every filmmaker wrote a self-serving piece explaining away the failure of their latest venture? And what if the fast-fading New York Times gave each one front page Arts and Leisure space on Sunday?

But all is not too dark with the New York Times. Click here to read the readers reviews of "City Island"--almost unanimous in their praise, it makes one wonder which movie "Tony" (see above) saw..

And my new Salon column posted this morning. I'm really digging writing these columns--especially now that I've more or less run out of material from this blog to recycle and so am forced to actually dig deep and do some more...writing. BTW, dig the first comment on the thread--a wonderfully spiteful spewl of invective from somebody who, um, just isn't that into us...notwithstanding this, the comments and response have thus far been helpful and supportive.

Apropos the new Salon piece (which is about the controversy that briefly surrounded the posting of outtakes on this blog while we were shooting), from the archive:

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CITY ISLAND EXPANDS QUIRKILICIOUSLY!

"City Island" is on 27 screens starting today in a total of 10 markets. The new markets added this week are: Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis and San Francisco. For more theater info, go to the movies ubiquitous Facebook page. It's link can be found in the right column of this blog...yeah, over there...keep going...it says "City Island's Facebook page..." You got it!

Good reviews are coming in from each city and more theaters have been added in the New York and LA suburbs. But instead of linking to a bunch of reviews (best ones, if you're interested, are Ebert in the Chicago Sun Times, Time Out Chicago, Boston Herald and Minneapolis Pioneer Press), allow me to print one in full that particularly pleased me.

In the San Francisco Chronicle. Amy Biancolli wrote such a nice goddam review, that I feel like printing it out rather than just linking to it. Clearly the movie surprised her--and hopefully her fine words will roust her local San Franciscans out to the theater this weekend. Dig:

"City Island" is one of those movies about big, screaming New York working-class broods, who deep down love each other like mad.

You'd be hard put to find a movie in current release with more characters yelling more loudly and more often than the totally bananas Bronx Italians in this noisy, eccentric, bizarrely lovable film. Begin by quadrupling the idiosyncrasy in "Moonstruck." Then move the setting out of Brooklyn onto a picturesque spit of land previously featured in "Long Day's Journey into Night" and (briefly) "A Bronx Tale."

Now fill it with a bunch of total flakes: Vince, a Brando-obsessed corrections officer (Andy Garcia); Joyce, his angry wife (Julianna Margulies); Vivian, his stripper-daughter (Dominik García-Lorido); Tony, his illegitimate convict-son (Steven Strait); and Vinnie, his snarky teenage son with a mostly benign obesity fetish (Ezra Miller). As if that isn't nutty enough, they're all keeping secrets from each other. No one knows about Vivian's pole-dancing, or Vince's acting class, or Vinnie's furtive thing for feeding heavy ladies.

Written and directed by Raymond De Felitta, "City Island" seems devoted, at first, to the sort of quirkalicious comic melodrama that can turn unpalatable fast. But then something special occurs: The script defies expectation. Every device that seemed awful and doomed to failure becomes a cause for hilarity and joy, all of it romanticized in Vanja Cernjul's twinkling cinematography.

The cast proves game for anything, from Emily Mortimer as Vince's floridly English acting-class partner to a beleaguered, bewhiskered Strait, here displaying a comic prowess and fond knack for exasperation. As for Garcia, he digs hard into a regional working-class character bit and comes up with a fine, sympathetic, captivating turn as a humble man with enormous dreams. You needn't have colorful Italian relatives, like myself, to enjoy this boisterous and warm-hearted film, which sidesteps cliche while embracing the hope and love in loony dysfunctional families everywhere.

Thanks, Amy. And now, dig a video review from Boston Latino TV...see you with the weekend grosses on Monday!

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