The folks at the Austin Film Commission were find enough to hire me to
shoot the "step and repeat" at their opening party for the Austin Film
Festival. In case you're unaware of the term, it's the red carpet-ish
procedure where folks step in front of a backdrop, a photo is snapped
and you move on. I brought my able assistant Drew Thomas along and we
shot a few hundred photos of the night.
Drew Thomas snaps a cell phone shot for attendees.
Austin Film Society head honcho Gary Bond (r) with attendees.
Lost in Austin is in low-budget film in pre-production for, naturally, an Austin shoot soon with a cast that is knee-deep in comedy cool: Linda Cardellini (Mad Men, Freaks and Geeks), Craig Robinson (The Office), Kristen Schaal (30 Rock, The Daily Show) and quite possiblyJane Krakowski (30 Rock).
Producers include Austin Film Society board member Suzanne Weinart, who was talking up the film as a Parker Posey vehicle a little more than a year ago. Will Raee will direct from a script he co-wrote with Brenna Graziano. The plot goes something like this: "A woman who is fed up with her mundane lifestyle hatches a scheme to make her family instant celebrities by having her ex-boyfriend kidnap her 11-year-old daughter for a month."
Don't confuse this indie with the micro-budget Lost in Austin, a series of vignettes put together by UT film students. Their version was completed in 2013 and is being submitted to film festivals as we speak.
And really, truly don't confuse it with the potentially sleazy Lost in Austin reality show that was dubbed the Austin version of Jersey Shore back in 2011 when it cast twentysomethings who "rule the bar scene, rope in the hottest of the hot, drink anyone under the table."
And it's surely not the song--tip of the hat to Gary Bond of the Austin Film Commission--by Tommy Hancock or an album by Marc Benno (see above).
Maybe they could rename this new film something more unique like Austin Stories?
My report for The Austin Chronicle on NBC's Texas-shot second season of Revolution:
Evan Cauduro, 11, heard about it from friends at school. Then his
family was at a dinner party where a woman talked about the call for
"weird people." At home, Evan rushed to the computer and began to sign
himself up. His father Paul uploaded two photos – one of Evan in his
baseball uniform and another from the boy's school science fair. Soon
Evan was staying up all night in grungy clothes. He ran dangerously
close to an oncoming horse. And you might just see him as a background
extra on Sept. 25 when the NBC series Revolution debuts its second season, its first as a Central Texas-shot phenomenon.
The show is headquartered in Austin for a 22-episode sweep that will
continue into May, says Gary Bond, head of the Austin Film Commission,
but cameras have been popping up at Decker Lake and in Maxwell, downtown
Taylor, Cedar Park, and elsewhere. The conventional wisdom is each
episode results in $1 million in local spending. "That's the wonderful
thing about television," Bond says. "It's the gift that keeps on giving.
The potential for them to be here five years is there."
I'm a writer, documentary filmmaker and photographer. My novel Evacuation Plan is about life/death in a residential hospice and is inspired by time spent observing an actual hospice. This is my older blog. See more about me at joeoconnell.com
"Tales alternately gentle, dramatic, surrealistic, that collectively affirm the beauty of being alive, even as they acknowledge that all of us face the necessity of making our own 'evacuation plan.' " -- Brad Buchholz, Austin American-Statesman
" The chapters about Matt and the short stories demonstrate O’Connell’s ability to develop sympathetic, true-to-life characters using intriguing details and compelling dialogue. The stories remind us of those times when a brief encounter with a stranger left us wondering about that person’s past. In Evacuation Plan, O’Connell satisfies that curiosity. " -- The Texas Observer
"It was very hard for me to put this book down. It carries us through the deepest meaning in life and most painful, most hopeful memories for a wide range of fascinating characters. Based in a hospice, this book could have easily resorted to cheap sensationalism, or whacked us upside the head with stereotypic melodrama, but instead it was respectful, honest, and tender. The characters will stay with you - you may even recognize some of them within your own life. " -- Award-winning author Carmen Tafolla
"An excellent, thought-provoking diversion from our own inevitable plummet toward the grave, and we highly recommend it to you, the living." -- Wayne Alan Brenner, The Austin Chronicle
"O’Connell has drawn some colourful and believable characters. The material relating to the hospice and terminal care rings true, all the way to reconciliation and forgiving." -- Dr. Roger Woodruff, International Association for Hospice & Palliative Care
"The tales are nicely written, and some are quite compelling; “The Male Nurse,” for one, is a dreamlike reverie." -- Texas Monthly
“Evacuation Plan: A Novel From The Hospice by Joe M. O'Connell is nothing short of remarkable … a novel that walks hand-in-hand with death and yet, somehow, the reader finishes the book feeling inspired to live.” – The Paisano
"A wonderful blend of lives ordinary but with sometimes extraordinary elements. We all share these stories of life in some way, despite moments of harshness or unforgiving pain. There is always a common thread of humanity and ultimately forgiveness to be found, even if it's in the last moment of life." -- Elaine Williams, author of A Journey Well Taken
"Reading Evacuation Plan is akin to unwrapping a series of small perfectly-chosen presents. Both human and humane, The book resembles a modern Spoon River Anthology with its vivid, touching glimpses into the lives of those in and around a hospice." -- Tim McCanlies, screenwriter The Iron Giant, writer/director Secondhand Lions
"In Evacuation Plan Joe O'Connell does for the process of dying what Sherwood Anderson did for middle America in Winesburg, Ohio--he shows us in brief flashes the aching beauty of the grotesque, and shows us how extraordinary small lives and quiet deaths can be." --John Blair, Drue Heinz Literature Prize winning author of American Standard
"Here's a book so rich with stories of the living, so filled with people's bountiful problems, as well as incidents of wry forgiveness, one realizes over and over the circling forces of life's completeness. It's not a sad tale nor a needless feel-good account but a balanced, sometimes comic, affirmation of what is here and what we all know is waiting." -- Carolyn Osborn, award-winning short story writer
"The broken, the hopeful, the frustrated, the clueless, and the forgiving touch one another with words, remembrances, and hands. Inevitably, readers will quietly wonder about their own evacuation plan." -- Will's Texana Monthly
O'Connell's protagonist skillfully navigates under the guise of a writer seeking raw materials for his craft in the stories of the dying, but mines and refines instead the stuff we're all made of. In this finely crafted novel, we come away with much more than the astute observation that many of the best stories begin at the end. But, then again, that notion is also worth a lot. --Jesse Sublett, cancer survivor, rocker and author of Never the Same Again
"Joe O'Connell's Evacuation Plan--this Decameron of the hospice--encompasses a paradox. Death comes for everyone, but death is the only human universal because everyone dies, and witnesses dying, with private, unspeakable shame. Yet there are a few minutes left to speak. As people die, they tell stories which spawn new stories, which remind us that death is agony, a violent struggle, but so is living." -- Debra Monroe, Flannery O'Connor Award winning author of Newfangled and Shambles
