Festivity

Remember the name Elaine Tang. The Harvard-Westlake student’s very impressive accomplishments suggest we’ll be hearing a lot more from her in the coming years.

This enterprising 17-year-old interned in Beijing last summer with animation firm Xing Xing Digital, while also studying advance Chinese at Peking University. With the help of company CEO Lifeng Wang, she made El Monte, an animated short about the true 1995 story of 72 Thai and Hispanic workers held captive and forced to work 18-hour days at a Southern California garment factory. Her film has just been accepted into the 2012 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, where it will screen May 10. From the press release:

Spending her mornings in class and her afternoons interning at Xing Xing, Tang was not only learning the animation process, she was also translating technical cinematic terms while also explaining the significance of the El Monte story to her production team who only spoke Chinese. Tang and her team created the storyboards, contacted the actual garment workers from the El Monte case to do the voice-overs, and produced the short animation recounting the El Monte story.

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There’s a Starbucks down the street and another a few blocks west on Los Feliz Blvd. But since this particular version of the java-sipping-screenwriter-makes-good panned out at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, it seems only appropriate that the coffee house in question is the more independent Kaldi Coffee & Tea in Atwater Village.

Per Kurt Streeter‘s report in the LA Times, that’s where then-40-year-old LA writer-director Nicholas McCarthy retreated last winter for six weeks after the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, to expand his short The Pact into a feature-length project. Following this year’s triumphant feature screenings, Kaldi is where McCarthy will be cranking out his next coveted project. Per the article:

On Monday morning [January 30], he returned to Kaldi Coffee & Tea. When he walked through the door, he saw Clay Tarver, one of the regulars. Tarver’s screenwriting credits included Joy Ride, a thriller co-written with J.J. Abrams, creator of the television series Lost, and he is viewed with admiration at Kaldi. McCarthy had leaned on him for so much advice that he had included Tarver in the credits for The Pact.

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Movie producer and Film Independent Board of Directors member Stephanie Allain has been named the new director of the LA Film Festival. Allain was the producer of Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan among other films and founded the production company Homegrown Pictures.

“My passion for Film Independent has only grown over the years, and I couldn’t be happier to become even more involved in an organization that puts filmmakers first and supports them in specific and tangible ways,” Allain said in a release. “The Los Angeles Film Festival is a unique celebration of cinema and a hub for filmmakers and film lovers, especially for those of us who live and work in the film industry. I can’t wait to dive in and develop creative ways in which we can expand the Festival and its programs.”

Allain takes over for Rebecca Yeldham, who had held the position since 2009.

There is always, at Richard Rushfield‘s blog Rushfield Babylon, the guarantee that the author will tell it like it is, or was. Be the topic Nikki Finke, network TV singing competitions or, in this case, the Sundance Film Festival.

Rushfield is not in Park City this year. However, when he was covering Sundance a few years back for the Los Angeles Times, he managed to rub Pierce Brosnan the wrong way. Per his blog post:

Since the paper’s big serious film critics had decreed that only they were allowed to issue opinions on the films screened (even if they could only be bothered to grace us with their opinions of maybe five percent of the films shown at the festival), that left the rest of us to fill in gaps where we could… Largely with “scene” coverage…

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When San Luis Obispo International Film Festival director Wendy Eidson originally floated the idea of a first-ever screening of Citizen Kane at the Hearst Castle, she was actually joking. But as she told LA Times reporter Steve Chawkins, after she made the historic suggestion to the keepers of the state park, the reaction was anything but what she expected:

“They didn’t laugh,” Eidson said. “I was sort of floored.”

Steve Hearst, the mogul’s great-grandson, said the event will present the film as a work of fiction rather than as a documentary about the life of the patriarch known to family members as W.R.

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Orem, Utah celebrity fan Scott Jessop has already triumphed in a way that Sundance Film Festival cognoscenti can appreciate: he was the star of his very own indie documentary. But that was 2010 and this is now.

Tomorrow, Jessop, a.k.a. “Sundance Skippy,” will descend on Park City to begin his eighth year of attempting to be photographed alongside as many celebrities as possible. He hopes one day to turn the hanging-with-famous-people thing into a full-time journalism career, and tells a student reporter at Brigham Young University he boned up for 2012 via an unlikely source:

When asked how he is able to spot the celebrities so well, Jessop said he watches a lot of TV and watches TMZ every day. He also suggests going through the [Sundance] film guide and knowing what celebrities are going to be there so one can keep a lookout for them.

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Film Independent, which puts together the LA Film Festival as well as the annual Spirit Awards, announced today they were taking the usual step of naming two presidents of their organization. Film Independent senior director Sean McManus and director of artist development Josh Welsh were both promoted and will help run the organization jointly. The pair are taking over for Dawn Hudson, who left Film Independent in June to become the CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

McManus has been with Film Independent since 1998, as has worked as senior director for the past six years. Welsh, meanwhile, has been running the organization’s various labs and development programs for the past decade. He also, according to the press release, moonlights in an alt-country band called Meatyard. They have an artsy video featuring sad mannequins if you’re curious.

For whatever reason, Nikki Finke has recently been posting news of major Deadline.com hires on holidays. As we previously reported, it was on Thanksgiving Day that she announced the recruitment to her PMC flagship of a pair of HollywoodWiretap.com veterans.

And via a subsequent Christmas Day blurb, Finke tipped that Brian Brooks (pictured), the longtime New York-based managing editor of Indiewire, will be joining Deadline.com as LA-based film editor later this month. Just in time to cover the very familiar Sundance Film Festival beat alongside new colleague Michael Fleming.

The vacancy left open by Brooks is one of the best film beat journalism gigs in the U.S. Indiewire editor-in-chief Dana Harris confirms to FishbowlLA that the position will remain based in New York City, but that the title has changed. They are now looking for a news editor.

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Days after her friend (boyfriend? ex-boyfriend?) Justin Timberlake accompanied a fan to the annual Marine Corps Ball in Washington, D.C., Mila Kunis took Sgt. Scott Moore to his Marine Corps Ball in Greenville, N.C.

The 28-year-old actress was asked out via YouTube by Moore in July from Afghanistan.

Shortly after accepting, Kunis had to shoot down rumors she was backing out of her date due to a prior movie commitment.

Kunis, wh0 briefly attended Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (shameless plug of my old high school) before That’s ’70s Show fame, spoke to E! Online prior to the ball and said the one thing she was looking forward to the most was “talking to people and hearing their stories.”

November 17th marks the 2nd annual “National UnFriend Day,” or NUD, a holiday invented by Hollywood’s own Jimmy Kimmel Live. Last night the show took the celebration to a new level with the video below, because as Kimmel himself said, “No holiday is a real holiday until it has it’s own Peanuts special.”