Movies Til Dawn

Splendid news: AARP has selected "CIty Island" as Best Comedy of the Year for their "Top Ten Movies For Adults " awards. Apparently there's an actual ceremony attached to this honor, this February at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Thanks, AARP. And screw the Independent Spirit Awards. And we're on a number of year-end ten best lists. Click here for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. And here for the St. Louis Post Dispatch . And now for something completely different. I'm taking a vacation from this blog. Not retiring it. But not planning on posting anything in the immediate future. The reason is simple: I have a shitload of new writing projects to attend to in the new year and simply don't have the time to continue my increasingly infrequent posting. Even though it takes me no more than an hour per post and I seem to be posting at the shameful rate of once every two weeks, there's the "I have homework" factor. In other words, a lot of the time...

Lou Lumenick, film critic of the New York Post, has weighed in with his top ten best films of 2010 and you can click here to see "City Island's" appearance at number seven on the list. Thanks, NY Post--you've been so in our corner since last March when our movie opened. Award season, such as it is, is underway and we'll see if catch any luck or if we're a "just missed" kind of movie. But one way or another the movie has had an amazing life and the fact that its touched as many people--and critics, for that matter--as it has is reward enough. And anyway, what was Montaigne's brilliant quote about awards? "How modest is he who is honored by honors." Great writer Montainge. I wonder if there's a movie in his life. Starring Jackie Gleason, perhaps...   Subscribe in a reader

Congratulations to my friend and partner Andy Garcia for the first of his nominations for his work on "City Island". He's been nominated for best actor in a comedy by the International Press Academy , for their "Satellite Awards Show". The winners will be announced on December 19th. The fact that I've never heard of this particular awards show bothers me not a whit; I have heard of (and have been nominated for and attended) the Independent Spirit Awards and I was relieved to hear that they failed to recognize our movie; the food at the one I went to was lousy and it was held in a cold tent on the beach in Santa Monica. Here's an incredibly nice appearance Andy did on a local LA talk show earlier this week--the hosts couldn't be more complimentary about our film and Andy is quite suave given that it's 7 something AM in the morning. You may have to search the site a bit for it--don't know if this will take you directly there. And now, contin...

This week has been spent--by me and Andy Garcia anyway--in New York promoting "City Island" for awards season. Three screenings in a row followed by q&a's--the Writers Guild (last night), Screen Actors Guild (night before) and the Variety Screening Series (tonight, natch). Julianna Margulies joined us for the SAG screening. Swinging chick, that JM. But Andy has been busy independently of me, appearing on at least three talk shows, two of which are posted below (I believe Martha Stewart is running tomorrow--Friday). What's of particular interest here is the story that's being pitched: "City Island" is now a movie that attracts the phrase "oscar buzz" to it. You can't get people to say that. It has to be something in the air that somehow transmits itself to the way people frame the interviews they're about to conduct. Both of the below interviews are awash with the use of the phrase. Needless to say I'm delighted, whether anythin...

Hollywood's hometown paper, the Los Angeles TImes, published a "Word Of Mouth" column by John Horn yesterday that spells it out in black and white: "CIty Island" is an Oscar contender. Click here to read the entire article, which is actually about our releasing company Anchor Bay Entertainment and how they have unexpectedly emerged from the pack of players (Searchlight, Sony Classics, Focus) to have two awards contenders on there hands this season. (The other one is "Solitary Man"). More from New York, where I (and Andy Garcia) will be going next week for more screenings, lunches, award stumpings...   Subscribe in a reader

Let me go on record right now and say that exhausting as I find the whole concept of "awards season", and hopeless though it is to even think about your own chances of being nominated for any award, I predict "City Island" will get ONE nomination. I don't know which awards show it will be and I don't know which category. But I hearby go on record. We will receive one major award nomination. Now this will look pretty silly sitting out their in cyberspace if I'm wrong. But screw it. Isn't the internet all about misinformation ? And it's not like I'll be disappointed if I'm incorrect. This isn't me grasping desperately for recognition. This is simply an intuition I have that our movie has one final lap to run in its race through the zeitgeist. What's making me feel this way? Well for one thing Anchor Bay got our DVD out to voters early--and that's always a good thing as the general feeling is the glut of end-of-the-year awards c...

Arthur Penn, who died last month at the age of eighty-eight, was, among many other things, a very nice man. I suspect you thought I was going to call him a visionary filmmaker but if you read this blog, you probably knew that. For that matter I probably can skip the professional stuff (or redirect you to his Wikipedia entry for a brush up) and jump to the personal--heading for the category now known in computerland as "My Arthur Penn." I knew Arthur on and off for twenty-five years, ever since I was an undergrad at Bard College. He came up to the school to teach a course one spring and I was one of the handful of students selected to participate in the class. (It was quite a fussy deal, as I recall--he met with a number of students, interviewed us, and picked who he wanted in the class). The focus of the class was on screenwriting and he made copies of a few of his scripts available to us in the library--one of them was Calder Willingham's adaptation of "Little Big...