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...