BOOKER'S PLACE: THE REVIEWS ARE IN

The Tribeca Film Festival is officially over and our film, "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" is in mid-theatrical run in Los Angeles and New York. We were delighted with the entire experience and I thought I'd share a pile of reviews. We currently have a 100% Tomatometer rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Thanks to their aggregating the reviews, I won't have to cut and paste every single link.

Click here to go to the official Tomato page for Booker's Place. This will lead you to all the necessary reviews that are out there.

And click here for a Vimeo link to an appearance that Yvette Johnson and I did on Democracy Now this morning.

Finally: below is the official trailer for our movie. But don't just watch the trailer. Read the comments thread below the trailer. The level of discourse we seem to have inspired is at once hilarious and appalling. As the headline in an English newspaper put it after George W. Bush was re-elected: HOW COULD SIXTY MILLION PEOPLE BE SO DUMB?





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BOOKER'S PLACE PREEMS AT TFF--LINK MADNESS ENSUES

 "Booker's Place" preemed (as they say in Variety-speak) yesterday afternoon at Tribeca and I couldn't have been happier with the reception. A ninety-minute black and white documentary about racism in the south isn't exactly a cinematic anti-depressant but the audience was rapt throughout and responded emotionally at the end.

Saturday the New York Times ran a thoughtful and well crafted article on the film and the story behind the film. Click here to read it.

Marcos Bernal Salas's fine review for Examiner.com appears here.

Ronnie Scheib's Variety review is well worth reading. If it wasn't, would I have linked to it?

You can here the audio of our interview on Leonard Lopate's radio show by clicking here.

Here are some Zimbio photos of our red-carpet moment at yesterday's premiere. The lovely woman with me is, of course, Yvette Johnson--Booker Wright's granddaughter and the films "star" (and she IS a star). The guy in the Tom Wolfe suit is my producer, partner and friend David Zellerford.

Yesterday, a piece I wrote for the Huffington Post the implications and connections that the tragedy of Trayvon Martin has on my film (and vice versa I suppose) was...er, posted. Click here for HuffPo magic.

And finally, dig the below. You do so many of these sit-downs on a given day that you can't quite remember when it happened. But given that I'm wearing my favorite blue striped shirt and that I inadvertantly left in LA (I'm in New York now for the festival and press) it has to have been two weeks or so ago in LA. She was a very nice interviewer. And my shirt is custom-made.


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Los Angeles Showtimes for Booker's Place

As some of you may already know, Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story opens in Los Angeles on April 25th - less than a week away! We'll be running the film at the brand new Laemmle Noho 7, so invite a friend, or ten.

Showtimes will be as follows:
1:00pm; 3:30pm; 5:40pm; 8:00pm; 10:15pm


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FOR THAT MATTER, WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT MOE AND LARRY?

Here's a terrific 1960 interview with the Stooges--more accurately with Moe and Larry--conducted by Jack ("not Art") Linkletter. It's always odd to see actors who only ever appear as one character suddenly appear as themselves and Moe especially comes off as different as he could be from his screen persona: thoughtful, articulate, giving considered and measured answers to questions he must have been confronting for the first time. (I doubt very much that in all the years of their Columbia short-stardom they ever did press like conventional celebrities. The Stooges were like the mutant child who is kept locked in the upstairs closet, to be trotted out for the guilty pleasure of sadistic visitors). Among the subjects discussed are how Larry's hair got that way, how Moe commits violent acts on his cohorts but doesn't really hurt them (you get a complete education in the eye-poke--a Moe specialty) and a reflective moment wherein Moe discusses his lost theatrical past as a legit actor. Indeed he gets a little misty eyed and says that, in effect, he did the comedy for the money but would have preferred to be a "real" actor. Sigh. Does any man know when he has it well off? Finally there's a clip from a Mike Douglas TV show with Moe--spry and grey haired in his late seventies--performs the "Niagara Falls" routine with the host. Apropos of the Stooges not really hurting each other when they did all those pokes, slaps and socks: I was once talking with my late friend Ed Bernds (who directed and wrote at least two dozen of the Stooges best post 1945 shorts) about the violent gags. I guess I'd heard this bit about how well it was all faked and said: "It's amazing that they never got hurt while doing all those things." Ed laughed and said "Oh they got hurt plenty."

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WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT JOE DE RITA?

In the wake of the Farrely Brothers new Three Stooges movie opening this Friday, I thought a little Stooge-ology might be in order. I've posted about the Stooges quite often over the years, discussing my favorite shots featuring Curly Howard, my friendship with Stooge writer-director Edward Bernds, the appearence of "Fake Shemps" in later Shemp movies (a double deployed when Shemp was either ailing or dead). But I've never gone into the declining years--the post-Shemp Joe Besser/Joe De Rita years--since it's just too, well, depressing. The truth is the Stooges should have hung it up when Shemp turned up his toes in 1955. But they didn't. A handful of awful shorts finished out their Columbia years, using comedian Joe Besser as the third Stooge. Besser felt about as comfortable with Moe and Larry as a pork chop might feel in a kennel of rabid dogs. He wasn't a physical comedian and his petulance and lack of pleasure at being there are impossible to ignore. He seems more like their gay cousin who they're forced to put up overnight then a third stooge. Besser was out of there after a dozen or so shorts. But Moe Howard wouldn't give up. The explosion of interest in the Stooges once television started airing the old shorts--kids from a new generation discovered Curly and wouldn't stop "whoo-whoo-ing!"--convinced Moe that the act had one more drop of juice to be squeezed from it. So they went looking for a third stooge and turned up a comedian/actor named Joe De Rita, who was dubbed "Curly-Joe".

The shorts period was over--Columbia actually persisted in the making of shorts longer than any other studio and the Stooges were the last guys standing (barely). But the Stooges began another phase of their career in feature films, mostly directed by Norman Maurer who was Moe's son-in-law. They also developed a cartoon series for kids, where the living, breathing Stooges appeared in live-action bumpers only. These features and cartoons are among the most disgraceful examples of once-great careers going on to long in show-biz history. It's not just that "The Outlaws Is Coming", "The Three Stooges In Orbit" and "Snow White and the Three Stooges" are dismally unfunny...it's that the Stooges are step-by-step wrecking their glorious past by carrying the act on long beyond its expiration date. So why I am posting about this dark period in Stooge history? Because I found a short that "Curly-Joe" made at Columbia more than a dozen years before his involvement with the boys which shows him to have been a talented, funny, boistrous and enjoyable comic personality of his own. Generically titled "Slappily Married" (there must be at least a dozen short comedies with that title--mostly made by Columbia...a few made by the Stooges?), it was directed by the Stooges frequent collaborator (and my pal) Ed Bernds. I make no great claims for what follows, but Joe De Rita certainly deserved better obits than the one's he got a few years ago when he died at eighty-three in the Motion Picture Country home. After a career that began in vaudeville and burlesque, after a pile of appearances in movies and after much television work, his claim to fame remained his stint as "Curly-Joe" of the Three Stooges, the second-lousiest third stooge. Which proves that even being a second-rate Stooge is better than being the a first-rate unemployed comedian.

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ADVERTS: THE EMPIRE GOES MAD

I'm hopelessly addicted to old television...well, crap. Commercials, station ID's, bumpers, end credit rolls, etc. Here's a compilation reel somebody --um--compiled of British mid-sixties commercials. The theme is MOD. Everything advertised--stockings, cigarettes, mens clothing--is shot, discussed and displayed through the lens of the then very vogue mod-ish-ness thing. Richard Lester seems to be peering over the shoulder of whomever the actual directors of these commercials are. Were. Whatever. BTW, the last cigarette advert allowed in Great Britain appears in this reel. (It's from 1965. The British were way ahead of us in banning cigarette advertising...I wonder why?) It features a bride lighting up at her wedding, literally moments after she's been married. Or is it moments before?

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