I screened two movies today. I am bone tired and was overstimulated from those two experimental theater pieces yesterday. after my anxiety dreams i dragged myself to manhattan, got on the wrong train and walked down 14th street to 3rd from 6th. the extra exercise would do me good i thought.. then i saw a man in METS jacket and baseball cap, no sunglasses.. Good morning sir i said.... to mr Morgan freeman as he walked down 14th street...
to the theater i went to get ready for the first film of the day...
Marvelous... MARVELOUS
Release Date: TBD
Director: SÃofra Campbell
Cast: Ewen Bremner, Martha Plimpton, Amy Ryan, Annabella Sciorra
Plot: A woman isn't happy when her flaky sister moves in and starts selling her talents as a mystical healer.
Genre: -
Review: no review
Official Website: no website
the plot was okay but it needed to be MORE MORE MORE over the top. there are many things to like about this film, the performances and soundtrack are excellent and Martha Plimpton says it all with a look. She could be Lucille Ball... one eyebrow gets raised and she has the audience eating out of her hands.. BRAVO martha Plimpton for this quirky performance...
then i took a break, went to get a susan werner ticket, went to mail a package. I have sold at least one cd a week on half.com since i have been out of work. This time i sold the crown jewel of my sales collection. a 20 dollar cd.. .i guess susan is paid for.
the i headed back to the theater. I knew that TV SET was a hot movie but the theater was crowded and i needed seats for Jurors and special guests.. MR DENIRO's daughter.
I reserved plenty and had to ward off people from the RESERVED SECTION.. the house manager, Ivana worked with me as and special badge holder thought htey were entitled to reserved seats... I heard that the special guests were there and it turned out to be ED BURNS. i put in the two seats and luckily i had two extra seats for Ms deniro was she arrived. the jurors never came .. so i had three extra house seats. people were miffed that they came in last minute and had to get front row seats.. people kept asking if there were other seats even when i told them NO NO NO.. there were only front row seats. some TFF program coordinator took my seat so i sat in the juror seats. the place was packed and its a great movie... ill see it again as the audience award winner i think ...
The TV Set' at the Tribeca Film Festival Sends Up the Making of Sitcoms
by DAVID CARR
Published: April 27, 2006
Where does bad television come from?
"The TV Set," a movie that has its premiere tomorrow night at the Tribeca Film Festival, considers the question of agency, or blame, for the dreck that generally passes for the modern sitcom.
As fate, or the process, would have it, everyone who touches the mythical pilot at the heart of the film manages to leave it a little worse for wear, most notably Lenny, the ferocious executive played by Sigourney Weaver. But there is enough complicity to go around: the sensitive but compliant director, the assistant director looking to make his own statement, the clueless actor who goes over the top and stays there. "The TV Set" manages to do for sitcoms what Christopher Guest's "Big Picture" did for the movie business: peel back the skin of the beast to reveal all its ungainly, moving parts.
This is a television industry where everyone smiles and wears earth tones while calmly tearing the arms and legs off a creative piece or work. "The TV Set" teeters on burlesque: a show called "Slut Wars" is held out as a monumental programming achievement. But the people who worked on the film swear on their next gig that a version of almost every vignette has happened to them.
"I don't think of this movie as strictly satire," said Jake Kasdan, a veteran of the pilot process and the writer, the director and a producer of "The TV Set." "Everything that happens in this movie is moved over just a couple of inches from what someone might say to you. I thought if we depicted the process in a very detailed, reportorial way, that the satire would be embedded within."
Lenny, who is a reprise of "Alien" — only this time Ms. Weaver plays the monster — is not a long walk from the real thing, Mr. Kasdan said.
"She is totally believable to me," he said. "She speaks her inner monologue in a way that is a bit stylized, but I can guarantee you there are people in the television business who think and act very much in the way she does."
David Duchovny plays Mike, a writer and director who has conceived "The Wexler Chronicles" as a cut-above sitcom premised on the young lead's struggle to get past the suicide of his brother. Mike has a good track record as a writer, and executives at the Panda Network like the whole gravitas-combined-with-giggles motif. Except that part about gravitas.
"There is a feeling among some of us — well, is it absolutely necessary that the brother committed suicide?" Lenny asks. Mike's manager, Alice (Judy Greer), who serves as translator and fulcrum throughout the movie, steps in to make sure it sounds as if all the people are on the same page when they are actually not in the same book. At one point he turns to her and asks: "Do you ever get tired of doing that thing? Bending the truth so it is less objectionable?"
Ms. Greer found that verisimilitude was not a problem, especially in a particularly uncomfortable audition scene that lays plain the differences between the director and the studio.
"The audition scene was so close to the money, it totally freaked me out," Ms. Greer said. "There's a part where they were talking about how the actress 'didn't let her cuteness get in the way of her prettiness.' They really talk like that. It's amazing."
Beneath the patina of civility — this is Los Angeles after all — the characters are going for the throat in the belief that there is some magic formula to get on the schedule and grind out ratings. But there is not a lot of suspense about which way things will turn out. By the time it is finished, the show is called "Call Me Crazy" and features comedic inflection points that include bodily gas.
With chronic back problems and a professionally hapless affect, Mr. Duchovny's character bears little resemblance to the mystical agent he played in "The X-Files"; instead he comes across as a decent man who ends up doing bad work because he is blown about by forces beyond his control.
"Each scene is a different version of the same lie," Mr. Duchovny said. "In show business everyone is trying to make it better, but the sheer number of people, plus the fact that nobody really knows what they are doing, makes it almost impossible to do something good."
At 31, Mr. Kasdan is already experienced at working in a medium that has a reflexive tendency toward bland, born of the need to reach huge numbers. He worked with the writer and director Judd Apatow on the series "Freaks and Geeks," which had critics hugging themselves and audiences staying away in droves.
As the son of the film director Lawrence Kasdan, he grew up with an understanding that doing creative work in a mass medium is sometimes akin to driving a race car through Jell-O.
"There has been a lot of material about the decadence and darkness in Hollywood, but very little about the average working writer or television executive," Mr. Kasdan said. "It is a very creative and chaotic system that is defined by the fact that no one is really making a commitment. At least with a movie, at some point, people agree to make it and it happens. With television you never get in the clear. You end up working to endlessly please everyone. A pilot is really a marketing pitch."
As a director he worked on "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared," a short-lived 2001 series. And he now has three films under his belt ("Zero Effect," "Orange County" and "The TV Set") at a very tender age.
"Jake is deceptively relaxed, but firm in what he wants," Mr. Duchovny said. "The movie does a great job of demonstrating that when you are making a pilot, the crucible is a lot hotter."
Ms. Weaver, who has worked primarily in film, said that she did not know much about the television world but sensed that Mr. Kasdan knew more than he wanted to.
"I had to rely on Jake," she said. "I watch a few television shows, but I had no idea what went on backstage in television the way it is now."
Ms. Weaver is the daughter of a former NBC executive who brought opera and ballet to the network. That is a long way from "Slut Wars," a hootchy-suffused reality show that she celebrates with gusto during the upfronts. (In interviews, everyone associated with the movie grimly wondered whether the name and/or concept for "Slut Wars" would be kidnapped and cross over into current reality programming.)
"This was a real eye-opener for me," Ms. Weaver said, adding that she based her maniacal studio executive on a friend who works for a nonprofit and is completely passionate about what she does. Lenny is no less passionate, but apparently has very little on that whole inner-life thing.
Mr. Apatow, who served as a producer on "The TV Set" and knows his way around an audience — he was a writer of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" — said there was an opportunity to sell out every single day a project was under way.
"It is compressed reality," he said. "All of those things in the movie have happened, maybe not on the same day or the same project, but we have friends who are working on pilots, and they call us everyday with a new nightmare."
After doing his own pilots in the last few years to very mixed effect, it must have felt nice to be part of a movie that renders those tiny horrors transparent, no?
"That's the terrible thing about television," Mr. Apatow said. "You never get your revenge. The person you feel slighted by ends up losing his job, disappearing or doing very well. Time goes by, and you lose all of your anger."
after my shift, i got a ticket to Jesus CAmp for friday and House of Sand for saturday night..
i see Just LIke son by morgan freeman
50 pills
Voice of Bam on saturday ...
now i get a break and have to work on my ACS training presentation as they called me for tuesday to present...
whoa.... a sudden rush of anxiety and a coaching lesson at adelphi tomorrow...and i should be good to go...
maybe
