Movies Til Dawn

My pointless obsession with movie director's houses (click here for more than you really need to know about Billy Wilder's apartment ) continues apace with the New York townhouse abode of one of the paciest directors known to man, the late great Sidney Lumet. A die-hard New Yorker who never shot anywhere else if he could help it, Lumet was pretty much half of the NYC film industry (the other half was Woody Allen) through the 1960's and early '70's. (Scorcese didn't really shoot in NYC with regularity until the late seventies). As befits local royalty, Lumet made his home in a townhouse on the Upper East Side which was--despite his proletariat personal style--quite ...well.. .royal.  Located at both 1380 Lexington Avenue and 135 East 91st Street, the house was, in fact,  more distinctive than simply lavish, partly due to the fact that it was that rare thing--a corner townhouse, meaning that it had windows on three sides rather than just the standard f...

NBC Archives has made available "Mississippi: A Self Portrait", the complete, original one-hour documentary that my father made which in turn inspired us to make the "follow-up" documentary "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story". Click here to legally view the entire 1965 film.  We're hoping to be able to include the original doc as an extra on the DVD of "Booker's Place", along with "The Streets Of Greenwood", a fine short film made in the early '60's which we were privileged to be allowed to cull invaluable footage from, showing Greenwood Ms. in the height (or depths) of the Civil Rights era. Meanwhile, "Booker's Place" is playing this weekend at the Little Rock Film Festival where it's competing for the "Best Southern Documentary" prize. More fests to follow, I'm sure. And our Dateline NBC segment is being moved around the calendar but will soon land, I imagine, on the appro...

In 1978, when I was a Junior High schooler at the disastrous San Fernando Valley prison camp known as Walter Reed Jr. High School, our English teacher (name and face a total blank to me at this date) selected a few students who seemed to have an aptitude for creative writing to join in a supplementary outside-of-class group where they'd focus on essay writing. I was one of the lucky few chosen--I say lucky because just the fact of being able to leave a classroom filled with thirty assholes and sit in a quiet group of five or six was a heavenly thought to me. The mini-class was led by an aging--all right elderly--gentleman named Mr. Pola. And "gentleman" was absolutely the right way to describe him. It wasn't just the double-breasted suit and the worn but still elegant silk tie that he wore. He had a bearing, a gentle dignity about him, that felt to me (a kid who truly didn't belong in the world he'd been born into) as if it belonged in another era, maybe...

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 MILLIO...

 "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 ...

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   Subscribe in a reader

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 theat...