Cinema of the Forgotten
Hello to the 15,000,
You haven’t heard from me much in the last months. But silence on the page does not mean silence in the field. It has been an amazingly productive year. But first things first.
At long last! We are ready to open the 9 @ night film series in San Francisco! The 9 films play in their intended order at both the Roxie Film Center in San Francisco and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael with selected shows at both the Cerrito Speakeasy and the Parkway Speakeasy Theaters.
Now is your chance to support us. Please note down the dates, please send our literature to your mailing lists and ask them to pass on the news.
The 9 @ Night SF Premier kicks off with a free event on Aug. 28, learn more and RSVP for the 9 @ Night Pre-Opening Event »
For the complete 9 @ Night Film Series screening info and dates, visit the official premier page »
Nothing Left to Lose
Our long stint in the Tenderloin, the landfills, the homeless encampments, and other urban battlefields is over. We’ve been working towards this moment since the early 90s and this is our chance. For 14 years hundreds of people came to our weekly free actor’s workshops in the Tenderloin and South of Market areas. Scores stayed the course and became featured players in films which are unique in the history of cinema. They are closer to the ground, more truthful and emotional than most, and have a commitment to life as it is lived, to “the way things seem to be.”
They don’t have name actors (although you will see Ron Perlman in one of them) but they have the genius of engaged characters experienced in the emotional and inventive purposes of the Direct Action way. They have contact with locations and street situations which are filtered out of most movies, and they mine moments lived by players closer to the truth of character and circumstance.
But most of all they have commitment to a cinematic cause. The 9 @ Night Film Series is a 15 year experiment, a collaborative effort with the players of the Tenderloin yGroup Player’s Ensemble, local filmmaking talent, supporters, backers, fellow travelers and friends of every description from every walk of life from all over the world. This is an ad hoc community of the committed, working to hone cinema down to basic elements: engaged characters and charged circumstances in real locations featuring “a hard run into the muck.”
But along with the muck, there is redemption. No one in a 9 @ Night movie says, “Oh, woe is me.” The characters meet their obstacles, endure their suffering, engage their manias and grapple with their destinies using the same tools as Marin ridge dwellers. There is sufferingin the world’s condos and laughter in its homeless encampments. But there is something to the phrase ”nothing left to lose” which gives the 9 @ Night films its special claim to authenticity. The 9 @ Night films are about survival, featuring those survivors, visionaries, and engaged artists who make up the Tenderloin yGroup Player’s Ensemble.
Studio of the Streets
What is a film studio? An organization which makes films. Not talks. Makes. Not one film. Many. Hollywood studios spend millions. The Studio of the Streets spends hundreds. But we have a secret weapon: the enthusiasm and passion of players, artists, film technicians, friends and supporters who have decided to take filmmaking into their own hands. These people are the secret and the proof of their power can be seen in our current line up of productions.
FRANK DEAD SOULS, produced by Resfest South Africa and Citizen Cinema
featuring Denny Dey and a multi-ethnic troupe from South Africa, is finally finished. A few music cues and nips and tucks and we’re there. Thanks to Drow Millar, editor. May his tribe increase. Well maybe he doesn’t have a tribe. May his checking account proliferate! And so off to the film festival world with FRANK DEAD SOULS.
PRESQUE ISLE, produced by the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking and Citizen Cinema. We are inching forward with distribution plans. This is a beautiful film featuring the best of local acting and filmmaking talent with a great High Definition look created by DP Mickey Freeman and a beautiful score by Kit Walker. It has a home somewhere in this chaotic world where the Humpty Dumpty of film distribution has fallen off the wall and no one knows how to put him together again,( let alone fertilize a new egg.)
IMBUED was written by Denny Dey and myself, and features Stacy Keach, Liz Sklar and two members of our new Citizen Cinema Player’s Workshop, Michelle Anton Allen and Nancy Bower, IMBUED is a departure from our Direct Action 9 @ Night mode. Although the script was written as a guide for improvisation, Stacy liked the lines. And Mickey Freeman, who created a gorgeous High Definition look, wanted to put cameras on a tripod for a change. So Direct Action, the art of making film with the inspiration and materials at hand, led to a more formal approach this time.. The location was the 32nd floor of an unfinished condo in the Infinity Towers near the Bay Bridge and the film is about one night in the lives of a gambler who can’t bear to take people’s money and a high priced call girl who comes to the wrong room. Stacy Keach showed us why he is one of the best actors in the world and Liz Sklar stayed with him all the way. Now in post production , look out for it in the coming months.
MAELSTROM, SISTERS AND SAND- Our new Citizen Cinema Player’s Ensemble, ably produced by Michelle Anton Allen (also one of the producers on IMBUED) has created three new feature films featuring members of the group.
MAELSTROM was co-produced by Marshall Spight and his company Meets the Eye Productions and shot in HD by Adam Wilt. It features workshop members Samantha Van Steen, Ed Ferry, Dan Silva and Deniz Demirer. A French woman and her Portuguese boy friend who speak a patois of four languages arrive at a Marin County bed and breakfast on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais. She has come to confront her father who denied her after the alleged rape which led to her birth. He doesn’t know that she exists. Revenge and humiliation ensue.
SAND, as with all the workshop productions, was co- developed and written by the cast, in this case William Martin and Irit Levi. Zelda, an older woman meets Snake, a younger man who has come to paint her room. As their relationship develops she wants to get a face lift so she can look less like his mother and he likes her the way she is and wants them to escape to New Mexico and live in the desert. Conflicting passions confront limited means. SAND is being shot by Aaron Brown and Deniz Demirer and edited by Michael and Karen MacBroom and Rafael Matos.
SISTERS features Cathy Leritz and Nancy Bower in a story about the good sister who stayed close to home and now takes care of a mother with Alzheimer’s and the wayward sister who has pursued a career in advertising home for a visit. The responsible and the profligate clash, and secrets are revealed. As with all workshop films, dialogue is improvised by the Cast and the stories developed by the participants. Shot by Aaron Brown and Deniz Demirer.and being edited by Arthur Vibert.
And so:
Here are the reasons why I haven’t had much time to communicate. Better to make films than talk about them. Somehow, due to good friends and able collaborators such as Michelle Anton Allen, Aaron Brown, Ana Traynin, Ron Perlman, our friends from Northern Ireland Michael and Karen MacBroom, and stalwarts such as Joel Simone, Chikara Motomura and Mickey Freeman, new comers to our circle such as Stacy Keach and Liz Sklar as well as producers David and Carol Richards and Marshall Spight and forward looking institutions such as BAVC, the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking, the Hemmerling Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Cine Source magazine, and others equally important and valued, we have been able to continue with our mission. Don’t ask me how. But I guess the how and the why sort of collaborate to create each other. Amazing, hair-raising, and endless fun.
One more thing:
One would have thought you would have to die to have a highway named after you. Or a bridge. Or an airport. Maybe you could get an alley up in the Mission if you were about to kick off. But surely not an award. To have an award named after you, your ideal state should be pond scum in a swamp, dust swirling over the Mojave, or maggot food in a potter’s field.
But there’s been an exception made in my case. Imagine my surprise when I got a call from Jacques Thelemaque, head of the Filmmaker’s Alliance of LA telling me that they had decided to give me a new award. And, you guessed it, they’re calling it the Rob Nilsson Award. And living or dead, they’re going to give it to me at the Director’s Guild in LA on Aug. 20 and to other filmmakers in the future.
We’re all supposed to be above caring about things like this, but I was not blasé. I was moved to be thought of. Touched to get such notice from real filmmakers. And blessed to have had the friends, collaborators and sun burnt souls to enable me to survive making films all these years. I thank the Filmmaker’s Alliance. I thank every last soul on every credit roll at the end of every film I’ve made. You have made my life difficult, stormy, contradictory and impossible. You have set the creditors on my heels and they pursue, baying like wolves. You have drained my bank accounts and caused my growing baldness. And the joy of it all is just too much to recall in an ordinary 24 hour day. Thank you. Thanks to everyone. And also, thanks to Blind Joe Death for holding off at least until Aug. 20.
