Movies Til Dawn

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The first in a series of podcasts exploring behind the scenes footage of "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" with yours truly. In this episode, I delve into who Booker Wright was, and how he ended up in a position to anger an entire town with his interview on NBC in 1966. Subscribe in a reader

"Booker's Place--A Mississippi Story" will premiere internationally at the excellent Hot Docs festival --a Canadian festival that's become the first name in documentary must-see film events. What else can I say? What can I post? I know. Let's take a trip back in time to my favorite Canadian television show. SCTV was a Canadian sketch comedy show in the 1970's that occasionally leaked into the US on iffy early cable channels. In the late seventies the show went mainstream on NBC (I believe). It aired on Friday nights at midnight and me and several friends--then in high school--made it a ritual to watch it every week. John Candy, Rick Moranis, Joe Flahrety, Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis--the entire cast was brilliant and the sketches truly never missed. That's because when they weren't quite up to par the sketch became being about how the sketch wasn't really up to par. In the three sketches I've posted below you'll see Candy as Johnny LaRue, th...

Get this: Not only will "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" premiere at the TFF, it will be released day-and-date by Tribeca Films. In other words, we have a distributor--and a very fine one at that. Day-and-date means that the movie will be available on multiple platforms simultanously. You can see it, download it, stream it, I-tunes it, Amazon it etc. all as it premieres at the film festival. It will also play theatrically in New York and Los Angeles in order to qualify it for next awards season. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/risky-business/tribeca-film-festival-launch-four-movies-VOD-301661">Dig this excellent Hollywood Reporter piece giving the lowdown. One of the reasons I'm so happy about Tribeca becoming our partner in the film goes back a good number of years. In the early '90's, when I was just starting out, the very first deal I ever made was to develop my movie "Cafe Society" with HBO. We looked around for a good producer to ...

It's official. My new documentary, "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story", will premiere this April at the Tribeca Film Festival in good old New York City. This is the same festival that preemed (as they say in VarietySpeak) my recent feature "City Island", which wound up taking the festival's coveted Audience Award (and which came with a cash prize... a cash prize! Do you dig it?) I couldn't be happier with TFF as the venue for this very personal film, which centers on the appearance of a black waiter named Booker Wright in a documentary made by my father, Frank De Felitta, in the mid 1960's. That film, "Mississippi: A Self-Portrait" was an brutally honest look at the town of Greenwood Mississippi during the heated struggles of the civil rights era. Booker, who was employed as a waiter at a "whites only" restaurant, looked right down the barrel of the NBC news cameras and--in a startlingly provocative and emotional speech--...