Indie Film

The paths of Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken famously crossed in 1981 and have collided once again this fall, thanks to the re-opening of the police investigation into the drowning death of Natalie Wood. But did you know that the two also worked together in 2001?

NYU grad Tony Vitale‘s comedy Life’s a Beach (also known as Club Jungle Juice) is the only time Walken and Wagner signed on for the same film project. Among the movie’s producers are Paul Kessler and Diana Derycz-Kessler, the husband-and-wife couple that today own and manage the LA Film School. The comedy is set in a Club Med type resort and was shot on the island of Provinciales in Turks and Caicos.

A (very) belated October 2010 premiere is listed for the film, which seems to have never been released because of bankruptcy-related complications. While cynics will no doubt make untoward jokes about the original title and poster art (pictured), FishbowlLA prefers to focus on this IMDb discussion board comment:

I was the captain of the sailboat and never saw the movie… I would like to know how to get it as well

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LA Weekly film critic Karina Longworth has treated Elvis Mitchell to the cover story he deserves, a long, full-bodied look at a controversial career trajectory littered with catty, jealous colleagues.

After setting the scene of her mid-October lunch with Mitchell at LACMA’s restaurant Ray’s, Longworth does the same for the day in mid-June when his appointment as the museum’s new film programmer was announced by Film Independent. FishbowlLA was at the cocktail soiree in question, and we well remember the mood she describes:

It was hours before the Los Angeles Film Festival’s opening-night, open-bar party. Mitchell’s hiring quickly became a hot topic within a crowd thick with film journalists, curators and festival programmers–some of whom had applied for the job. Wagers were laid on how long Mitchell would last at the position. One friend joked that the hiring might be [LACMA director Michael] Govan’s attempt to take a page from The Producers–engineering a program destined to fail, so that he could kill off Film at LACMA once and for all.

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AFI Fest was not the only film action in town this weekend. Per an inspiring write-up in the National Catholic Reporter, there was also a memorable screening of the new Emilio Estevez-Martin Sheen drama The Way on Saturday atop the Chalon campus of Mount St. Mary’s College.

As Sister Rose Pacatte reports, a number of celebrities were among the 350-person audience. There was also this amazing post-screening Q&A tidbit, offered up by Reverend Scott Young, executive director of UCLA’s University Religious Conference:

Young shared that the day before, he had been at a restaurant in Seal Beach near a beauty salon where in October a gunman opened fire, killing eight people. Young began chatting with some ladies who were dining at the next table and found that they were close friends of the stylists who were killed.

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Talk about your unexpected indie movie twist!  Just hours after we reported yesterday’s news of Laemmle Theatres’ plans to shut down the Sunset 5 by the end of November, LA Times reporter Nicole Sperling blogged word of a most welcome and logical rescuer: Robert Redford.

The Sundance Institute has offices in Beverly Hills and just hired a new media relations director (Sarah Eaton) to be stationed there. So it makes a lot of sense for the Sundance Cinemas end of things to give the Sunset 5 location a go as its new LA beachhead next spring, following some on-site renovations:

“Ever since the Arclight and the Grove opened, we lost some attendance,” said Greg Laemmle, president of Laemmle Theatres…

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When’s the last time Life magazine broke news that did not involve photos of Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne or some other iconic, dearly departed Hollywood celebrity? We honestly can’t remember.

Fittingly perhaps, their new scoop* is about how Johnny Depp and his The Rum Diary director Bruce Robinson came within a Hunter S. Thompson smidgin’ of joining the dearly departed club. We are taking a humorous tone here, because that’s how Depp approached it in his Life article interview, describing what happened when the engines of his LA-bound private jet went dead:

“Bruce and I were looking at each other and I think I said, ‘Is this it?’ It was like this weird extended moment when you’re just floating for a second and you could feel this unpleasant descent.”

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Just in time for Halloween, Stuart Fischoff, emeritus professor of media psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, has put together a treatise on why some people are more attracted to scary movies.

It’s complicated. Depending on a person’s lifestyle, age, gender, personality, heredity and physiology, they may or may not choose to fork out premium first-weekend movie bucks. Fischoff found that older people prefer “haunted, existentially pained monsters” and that the way people behave in the movie darkness depends partly on who the make-up of those they brought along:

My students did several small samples on how the sexes behave in theaters while watching horror movies with the same or opposite sex. Males show more bravery and females more fear than they do when watching with the same sex. This is classic exaggerated and stereotyped gender role playing. It can also be viewed as a chance to enact tribal rituals and rites.

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The awards portion of the annual Hollywood Film Festival, running at the Arclight Cinemas October 20-24, has its fair share of detractors. Most notably MovieCityNews.com grand poobah David Poland, who each year takes a running jump at the ceremony’s transparent, self-serving mechanics.

But the wholly separate film festival has done a lot of good over the years, including way back in 2000, when the event showcased then-unknown Craig Brewer. With the Footloose remake currently in theaters, Brewer will be in town tomorrow night for a tribute Q&A and special screening of a restored version of his early drama The Poor and the Hungry. He spoke with Sean O’Connell, lead journalist for festival founder Carlos de Abreu‘s spinoff website HollywoodNews.com, about how critical the early HFF support was:

“I remember getting a call from Carlos saying that he wanted to show it in the digital showcase. It was a huge deal for me. Some people dream of Sundance and other festivals. For me, with the size of this movie, it just felt like some validation that somebody outside of Memphis saw it and appreciated it. It was a fantastic experience. Probably one of the best of my life.”

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Actor Zachary Quinto is the real deal. This was evident when he blogged about his personal life on Sunday, October 16, and it remains so today via a crisp Rebecca Keegan interview feature in the LA Times.

Of George Gershwin, the man he may or may not enact for Steven Spielberg, Quinto muses that the project celebrates an era “when celebrity was associated with people who were actually good at something.” The actor also explains how his latest film, Margin Call, took shape at Farmer’s Market and re-frames his headline-grabbing decision to publicly announce his sexual orientation:

“This decision was made with a tremendous amount of thought and introspection –in my own time, on my own terms and with my own words. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the scores of men and women who have preceded me to this action–both within the industry and in more intimate personal journeys throughout the world. Momentum builds in waves–and I am so grateful to be riding this wave of equality with more openness and integrity than I was ever able to embrace before making this declaration.”

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Karl Quinn, entertainment editor of Australia’s The Age newspaper, has authored a fascinating look at the latest business dealings of thirtysomething brothers Matthew and Richard Clapham. The trigger for the piece was an October 1 third-party blog mention of their company Movie Rights Group, which is going after illegal Internet downloaders.

Quinn details a massive Internet porn empire and suggests this nascent legal action may be a tactical prelude to going after U.S. surfers of free X-rated sites. He also reveals that a Santa Monica film distributor the brothers do business with, Lightning Entertainment, has a parent company in Colorado that makes most of its money from pay-per-view and subscription TV channel porn:

The Lightning website does not reveal that it is also a subsidiary of New Frontier Media, a publicly listed Colorado-based company… Lightning Entertainment promised a response from Los Angeles via its legal counsel, but after a week and follow-up approaches by The Age had provided none.

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Ha ha. In a blog post yesterday, indieWIRE’s Hollywood movie maven Anne Thompson suggested that publicists hyping the Oscar-qualified Sally Kirkland live action short African Chelsea should have stayed away from the word “sure fire.”

The expression appears in both the press release headline and body-text, although it turns out the real culprit looks to be populist film critic Leo Quinones. On one of his “Film Freak” KFWB-AM broadcasts, it was he who first deemed the short to be “a sure fire Oscar nominee.”

FishbowlLA took the time to watch the six-minute drama, which is available for free at IMDB.com. And we’re here to tell you that the Oscar hype makes as much sense as calling a movie about a Hollywood exotic dancer African Chelsea.

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