We welcome ourselves to our new entity…Citizen Cinema… morphing on from the Tenderloin yGroup which will continue to exist as we complete the 9 @ Night Film Cycle. But now we are broadening our approach, working with new visionaries and old pioneers, seeking new audiences we invite to explore new ideas in new countries, new artistic borderlines to be crossed with epiphanies and technologies of an oncoming age. Chikara and I welcome Producer Michael Edo Keane who is designing and creating new ways to engage the 15,000 (which we hope will soon become the 150,000) and a new audience of cinema seekers. You will be seeing his designs, ideas and initiatives in our new Podcast, our re-designed 15,000 newsletter and in other communications we devise in order to spread our ideas and present our films to the world. You will continue to receive my thoughts, rants, opinions and perspectives. You will also receive more information about our activities and editorial views from Michael, and also, from other bright lights around the world.

We haven’t changed. We think the cinema can be better than it is. We are committed to push past the conventional solipsisms and accepted bromides of an industry towards horizons more appropriate to a movement. We can’t say where we’re going but but our faith is in visions as yet unseen. We hope our films will provide sight as well as insight, as our eyesight improves and our daring intensifies.

Hello to the 15,000,

As always, it seems more important to be making films than writing about them. If everyone secretly thinks they are film directors, how much stronger the illusion that they’re film critics. Film bashing and hyping are twin American pastimes. What would happen to cocktail parties if there were no movies to pan or praise? But the real work is harder, both more social and more solitary, a plunge down a deep well, or a leap into space with waxen wings rapidly heating.

There’s no safety in film which dares the visions and verges because to succeed is often to be praised for the wrong reasons, and the failure of a film which dares greatly brings no distinction. I think that the ancient Goddess of Art is uncompromising and grim in her judgments. No one knows who is right about a piece of work. That’s up to critics to ramble on about. But there’s a place in the collectivity of a culture’s thoughts about itself and the world where space curves in on itself and withers all pretenders, a place where undeniable work takes its place in the on- going mosaic of human inspiration.

This is where serious artists hope to be remembered. Of the many aspirants, few arrive. Yet this is the game, the gambit, the highest reaching, the richest imagining, but tenuous and limited in the face of a universe we hardly understand at all. Still, to me, this imagining is the root of science, the content of religion, the reality of the one thing I find where I start to want to use the word “true”. The thing is called poetry. This is the root which tunnels down into the DNA, the ganglia, the nerve center and radiates outward to the furthest reaches of whatever space is. I call it poetry, but of course that’s just a word. It signifies something for me which carries the secret genetics of whatever humans are, or are becoming in a mysterious ground made of energy and light… physical, sensual, palpable, but also, nothing at all, the sounds of strings, or horns or flutes echoing down an intertwining dark night alley of time, space, and the human ability to wonder about it all. So we’re out there wondering again.

More on our producing collaborators:

The San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking teaches an immersive year-long curriculum as well as shorter project - based courses on creating high definition digital video. Their film school has a powerfully simple philosophy “the best way to learn the craft of moviemaking is to make movies!” Part of their mission is to lead by example and produce 2 original features a year, and we are honored to be working with them on this maiden voyage.

San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking

The Pixel Corps is a “guild of media developers”, and they offer training and resources to anyone interested in the digital arts. The Pixel Corps community has a global constituency and their VFX teams are going to contribute some truly magical realism to the visual palette of Presque Isle.

Pixel Corps

PRESQUE ISLE, a screenplay I wrote several years ago, has become a co-production between our new production entity Citizen’s Cinema, and the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. Set on a remote island on a lake in Northern Wisconsin, PRESQUE ISLE will be shot on forest and lake locations in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A man returns to the island summer cabin paradise of his youth. The place is now abandoned but the memories, dreams and fantasies of deceased ancestors, current friends and ex- lovers seem to inhabit the untouched forest, long ago preserved as a sanctuary by his grandparents. A man who has lost his way in modern urban culture, now seeks it again in a place which seems untouched by time and progress.

This story came to me unbidden, almost like a poem. It appeared and I wrote it down. I trusted it because it seemed like automatic writing, a gift from the Slipstream. I’m going to take on this complex and challenging film in collaboration with the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking run by Jeremiah Birnbaum and Stephen Kopels and the Pixel Corps, an international Computer Graphics Guild headed up by Alex Lindsay, an ex ILM honcho. I think with these collaborators we can make a unique amalgam of pre-conception, computer magic and Direct Action spontaneity. Both Chikara Motomura (Sound) and Michael Edo Keane (Co-producer), principals in our new Citizen Cinema venture will play prominent roles in the production, and longtime friend and fellow traveler, Mickey Freeman, will be the Director of Photography. Filmmaker James Savoca will co-produce and Nancy Hayes Casting has led the way in finding local actors. Lead players are Kieron McCartney, (also lead in the 9 @ Night production PAN and a character in the 9 @ Night films USED and GO TOGETHER), his wife Kara McCartney and Robert Viharo long time friend and featured player in almost all of the 9 @ Night films.

We are about to dive into a chasm of mutual imagining and collaborative effort to make something emerge on a bright screen, somehow on some small someday out there somewhere, where we hope it will thrill some, outrage others, and make the sun burnt souls we seek feel a little less lonely.

R.N.