Dallas VideoFest's AltFiction goes online

I'm getting almost daily notices of film festivals pushing back to at least the summer. More interesting in the here and now are the fests that are going online. The latest is the Dallas VideoFest's AltFiction which will be online for FREE.

Here's the skinny from the press release:

Dallas VideoFest’s Alternative Fiction (http://videofest.org/Alternative-Fiction/ April 2-5) partners with Falcon Events, Dallas-based event producers, which specializes in producing live online and virtual events, to deploy the latest live online technology via a secure and robust platform to create a virtual film festival experience in your living room.

“We are recreating the festival experience, showing films, and connecting filmmakers with their audiences, with technology that is just right for the moment,” said Bart Weiss, founder and artistic director of Dallas VideoFest.

Alternative Innovation

Falcon Events has the technology and capability to include film introductions from the Festivals’ film hosts as well as Q&As following films. Viewers will be able to hear and potentially see the filmmakers as they answer the viewers’ questions. Falcon Events has very strict protocols in place to ensure each film’s content is not copied, and each film will only be available live.

Dallas VideoFest has been innovating with technology since 1987, such as showcasing HDTV and VR in 1988,  exhibiting interactive media, and pioneering using files instead of videotapes. We are constantly looking for new easy to connect with audiences, and this is the technology perfect for this moment in time.

“In this time when we are literally homebound, we are looking to be inspired. AltFiction’s narrative films will prove entertainment, inspiration and will be the cure for cabin fever,” Weiss said.

Movie lovers can go online and watch great films at specific times.  Like traditional film festivals, there will be questions and answers and intros to the films from hosts and from the filmmakers, but these will be done on video (and unlike the films themselves will be viewable later online). Audiences can ask questions of the filmmakers and have them answered in real-time. 

Here's how you do it:

 

1. Sign up at OnlineFest.us 
2. Browse content
3. Register for screenings you want to watch
4. Log back in before the event start time to begin viewing (an email reminder goes out 30 minutes prior to the start time)

In addition, viewers can expect a seamless switch into a filmmaker Q&A using a text-based tool that allows attendees to submit questions online.

The new reality for independent filmmakers

 

Painting: Camilo Esparza. Poster: Casey Hunter

In 2001 I talked to producer Scott Perry about Jet Blast, an Austin-made, low-budget comedy about a future time where airlines got super competitive. An evil rogue group armed their planes to take out the other guys. Some planes crashed into buildings. It was clearly a goofy joke. Jet Blast was set to premiere at the Austin Film Festival. Then 9/11 happened. No festival screening. No much of anything for a long time.

"We had somehow managed to find the exact wrong film to make at the exact wrong time," Perry told me then.

Also in 2001, a Spider-Man trailer that showed Spidey swinging from a web between the Twin Towers was pulled. There was talk of shelving terrorist-themed movies. It was a tough time for the movie industry.

OK, as filmmakers today we need to lighten up. Things are not nearly as bad. Yes, festivals have been cancelled. Yes, many more have been postponed. But, like with 9/11, the bigger picture shines through as we huddle in our houses and get back to basics. My family watched Onward on overly expensive pay per view just days after its release in theaters. (It was great.) Screening parties are happening on Facebook. Classic films are being rediscovered. This time film is our escape. It just isn't happening in the normal way.

 

For example, where I am in Austin, Texas, the documentary Also Starring Austin is screening for free online here for a short while. The Austin Chronicle is asking readers to watch Texas Chain Saw Massacre along with them at home and engage in a running commentary. Film is bringing isolated people together.

 

I've been quiet lately about the release of my documentary Rondo and Bob, which is about Texas Chain Saw Massacre art director Robert Burns and his obsession with '40s actor Rondo Hatton whose iconic face was twisted from the effects of acromegaly. Deeper down it's about the love Burns searched for and Hatton found. It was set to premiere April 17 at MegaCon in Orlando, with attendance of about 100,000 one of the largest fan conventions in the country. But I knew it wouldn't happen. It had become a rare holdout to the cancellation list.

Word came down Monday that the fest has been pushed to June. Rondo and Bob is the feature screening on June 5. Will it actually happen? Will life be back to normal by then? I'm still not sure. Perhaps it takes a great re-imagining of the film release process. I'd love ideas on that.

In the meantime I want to share this amazing poster based on a painting created by tattoo artist Camilo Esparza and realized by Casey Hunter. It's an homage to a poster for the 1946 film House of Horrors featuring Hatton as the Creeper.

Stay safe. Go watch a movie.

Austin is the best city for indie filmmaking?

That's the word from MovieMaker Magazine's latest ranking of the top 10 cities for independent filmmakers. Austin ranks No. 1 followed by New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles and Portland.

The criteria include: “Film Community” (scored on a 10-point scale), “Access to New Films” (10-point scale), “Access to Equipment” (7-point scale), “Cost of Living” (reverse 5-point scale), and “Tax Incentives” (4-point scale).  Austin got 32 point out of a possible 36.

New Orleans, last year's No. 1 on the list (Austin was No. 2 in 2012) dropped out of the top five. 

The reaction among Austin filmmakers on Facebook today wasn't that rosy. "Wait, WHAT? Is this from 5 years ago? I'm so confused! Or maybe it's the best place to be a moviemaker because there is so much amazing behind-camera talent looking for work here these days?" one industry insider said after Gary Bond of the Austin Film Commission posted a notice of the list. 

Another called it nothing but hype. "Actors, in particular, need to get themselves to a bigger market and fast. Great talent pool, absolutely. Opportunities for said talent to make a living in the biz... little to none."

But the comment that got the most notice came from major Hollywood producer Lynda Obst, who brought Hope Floats to Smithville in the late '90s and Heartbreak Hotel to Taylor before that. "It's certainly my favorite place to make a movie but it's rebates are too far below the norm to compete with the bad places to make a movie," she wrote on Facebook. "If you match NM everyone, but everyone will be back in tonnage."

So why is Austin No. 1? Bond points to the currently in action at the Sundance Film Festival which is teeming with Austin (and Dallas) filmmakers this year, both fairly new faces and the old standbys of Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez.

Viola Davis as Barbara Jordan?

I got to see Barbara Jordan talk when I was in college and was blown away by this very powerful congresswoman from Texas. Now comes word that Viola Davis, Oscar-nominated for The Help, is considering playing Jordan in a biopic. That's a film I want to see.

Shot in Texas: '12 Mighty Orphans' first up for new film company

By Joe O'Connell Special Contributor
The Dallas Morning News
filmnewsbyjoe@yahoo.com
joeoconnell.com
@joemoconnell on Twitter

Todd Allen hopes Fort Worth’s Mighty Mites are the start of something big for the Texas film scene.

Allen, an Austin native who has worked for decades as an actor, has formed Presidio Pictures. The company plans to first shoot 12 Mighty Orphans, an adaptation of Jim Dent’s true story of the Masonic Home of Fort Worth’s Depression-era Mighty Mites football team.

Preproduction for a spring Fort Worth shoot would start a string of Texas-made Presidio features with budgets ranging from $8 million to $30 million.

“The financing for most independent films is cobbled together with duct tape,” said Allen, who is raising funds in Texas for not just the cost of film production but also much of the distribution. “I think [Presidio] will have a substantial impact on the industry here. If it works, it’ll put a lot of people to work.”

Robert Duvall , Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Aaron Eckhart and Andy Garcia are already attached to a planned second Presidio feature, The Last Full Measure, a true story of a father’s efforts to honor his son killed during the Vietnam War.

Presidio — with former Sundance Institute chairman, Orion Pictures director and Imagine Entertainment chairman Jack Crosby on its board — could prove a shot in the arm for the Texas film industry as major films choose locations offering larger financial incentives. Jerry Bruckheimer told The Hollywood Reporter this week that his revived The Lone Ranger movie starring Johnny Depp will shoot in New Mexico and possibly Louisiana because of those states’ heftier incentives. Texas had been looked at as the movie’s shooting location.

“My fear is it’s going to be a hokey cartoon,” Allen said of The Lone Ranger. “It’s going to cost $200 million and, if it doesn’t make its money back, it’s going to be another nail in the coffin of the genre.” (Bruckheimer says it will cost $215 million to be exact, trimmed back from $260 million.)

Allen knows the Western genre well, having acted in such films as Wyatt Earp and Silverado. “I can’t think of a single actor I’ve met who didn’t want to do a Western,” he said. “I think that’s where my mojo is at.”

Thus he’s also planning Rio Grande, a feature adaptation of Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson’s memoir co-written by David Marion Wilkinson; a television miniseries of Wilkinson’s early-Texas novel Not Between Brothers made in partnership with Kevin Costner; and the big-screen film noir Western The Deserters based on Luke Short’s novel.

Allen got his start when he happened upon the ranch set of Honeysuckle Rose (1980) in Johnson City and was mistaken for the ranch owner’s son. Director Jerry Schatzberg asked if he wanted to be an extra, and Allen caught the acting bug.

Throughout his career, Allen said he tried to stay out of his trailer and on the set figuring out the film business.

He moved back to Austin from L.A. with the expectation that acting would take a back seat to producing. But Quentin Tarantino, whom he met in a Los Angeles acting class 25 years ago, tapped him for a role in Django Unchained, a Western about slave traders featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell.
“When I first talked to Quentin he said he wanted to shoot in Texas,” Allen said.
But his acting gig starts in February in Louisiana, the land of attractive film incentives.

Friday Night Lights: Book, movie, TV series, movie based on TV series?

Yes, there is still serious talk about a movie based on the Austin-shot TV series Friday Night Lights, which is based on the big-screen Friday Night Lights, which is based on the book Friday Night Lights, which is based on a real-life high school football team.

Read more about this latest development here, with details on the cast's reunion at the Emmy's after party celebrating the series' writing Emmy and Kyle Chandler's nod--held at a place fittingly called Dillon's.

Joe's personal film festival

I was tagged by Kat Candler who was tagged by Lazy Eye Theatre on the following fun assignment: the 12 Movie Meme. Program a weeks worth of films at a local theater in your town.

Here are the rules:
---
1) Choose 12 Films to be featured. They could be random selections or part of a greater theme. Whatever you want.
2) Explain why you chose the films.
3) Link back to Lazy Eye Theatre so I can have hundreds of links and I can take those links and spread them all out on the bed and then roll around in them.
4) The people selected then have to turn around and select 5 more people.


Monday: Aussie teen night

I have a thing about high school movies, and two of the best are by John Dungan:

The Year My Voice Broke (1987). The first part of what was said to be a coming-of-age trilogy starring Noah Taylor. The third part was never made.



Flirting (1991) Duigan’s followup has a young and very hot Nicole Kidman as the bitchy girl at an isolated boarding school.


Neither of these films has been released on DVD, but apparently something is in the works.

Tuesday: Not gangster night

When I was 18 I got seriously addicted to gangster movies, which are really, really out of vogue now. You all need more vintage gangsta in your diet. Here are a few on the edges of the genre that you’ve probably never seen that I wish Austin’s Paramount Theatre would program one summer.

Brother Orchid (1940) is a gangster film for people who don’t like gangster films. It’s stars Edward G. Robinson, my favorite gangster next to Bogart, as a mug who hides out in a monestary. Yes, it’s a sweet little film, and the only one featuring both Robinson and Bogart where neither is killed!




They Drive By Night ( 1940) Humphrey Bogart and George Raft are long-haul truckers aiming to succeed in a crooked business. Tragedy and murder ensues. And it has Ida Lupino in it!



Wednesday: American teen night

Like I said, I love the teen film, and these two particularly do it for me.

The Last American Virgin (1982) is an odd remake of Boaz Davidson’s autobiographical Lemon Popsicle about growing up in Israel. Only he moves it to California and adds a great New Wave soundtrack. What’s even more interesting is the sharp turn the film takes. A goofy comedy at the beginning, it turns deadly serious and the ending is earned but surprising.




Foxes (1980). Jody Foster and Cherie Currie (of the all-girl band The Runaways) star in this very realistic film of growing up amid drugs, sex and all the rest in an era that was a whole lot more permissive than today. Totally high Currie staggering down the middle of a freeway is spot on perfect.



Thursday: Peter Sellers night

Being There (1979) says more about U.S. politics than any other film. Period. It also speaks volumes about class and illusion. I like that the original story came from foreigner Jerzy Kosinski, who puts a laser beam on our screwed up values. Peter Sellers fought to do this role and then died shortly after making it.


The Party (1968) displays Sellers’ comedic genius. The film is said to have had no more than an outline for a script. Sellers fills in the blanks with incredible physical comedy. The target of humor this time is the movie industry itself at a big party that quickly turns to chaos.



Friday: Bud Cort night

The perfect odd bug of a boy, Bud Cort made two films that are gems.

Harold and Maude (1971) is a sweet film about death. So what if the filmmakers chickened out on an actual love scene (they found the biggest damn bed I've ever seen and put them at opposite ends of it!) between a young man and an old woman? It's funny, quirky and stands the test of time.



Brewster McCloud (1970) features Cort flying around the Astrodome wearing giant wings. It's directed by Robert Altman, weirdly moody and thoroughly fascinating.



Saturday: Two from Texas

Sure, you know the legendary Texas films like Giant and The Last Picture Show, but these are odd little films that you may have missed.

The Hot Spot (1990) is one of the underrated and forgetten Texas-shot films. Directed by Dennis Hopper, it's a modern noir with a very interesting storyline and a very young Jennifer Connelly exposing her assets. Ah, the intrigue of used car lots. And it was filmed down the road from me in Taylor!



Roadie (1980). It's not a masterpiece, but Meatloaf stars as a stumbling, bumbling Roadie and we Roy Orbison singing "The Eyes of Texas," Blondie singing "Ring of Fire," plus Austin new wave legends Standing Waves and swinging Asleep at the Wheel just singing. The most truly Austin of any film ever. Was cowritten by Big Boy Medlin and Michael Ventura.



OK, now to pass on the favor, I tag Ms. Pierson, Mr. Egerton, Ms. Schoolfield, Ms. Marsh and Mr. Kent.