It's Party Time Independent Lens Style - Plus Julie-Zooey-John News

(l to r) Doug Blush, Lois Vossen, Paul Mariano and Christine O'Malley.

These Amazing Shadows will have a national broadcast on the PBS series, Independent Lens on Thursday, December 29th at 10:00 pm.

We had a blast at the Independent Lens (IL) season 10 launch party at Monty in Los Angeles last week. The series producer, Lois Vossen, really made us feel welcome and part of the IL family. Monty is a cool-hip bar in downtown Los Angeles and was jammed full of IL staff, IL alum filmmakers, members of the LA doc community and a live performance by The Bricks. The music was loud, drinks were flowing and the food pretty darn healthy and tasty. It was one of those parties that with the loud music you had to really lean into the person you were talking with and listen/focus carefully in order to hear anything - which leads to a kind of fun intimate conversation that you don't often get in everyday life.

TAS producer Christine O'Malley and International Documentary Association president Eddie Schmidt.

Paul and I were joined at the soiree by TAS producer Christine O'Malley and TAS editor Doug Blush. Christine and her husband, Patrick Creadon, previously had their doc, Wordplay, broadcast on Independent Lens in 2007. Doug was the editor on that show, so he and Christine felt right at home hobnobbing with all the film folk. It was Paul and I who felt like fish out of water as we have little experience with attending "launch parties." The IL staff made us feel really comfortable. They are really quite a talented and fun bunch (see below).

IL Staff: (l to r) Krissy Bailey, Voleine Amilcar, Lois Vossen, Dennis Palmieri, Richard O'Connell, Desiree Gutierrez.

The only difficulty of the evening was that IL asked us to say a few words about our doc to the crowd. As Paul and I divide up this type of responsibility - it was my turn to be the public face of TAS. I am not exactly sure what I said but Paul assured me that I didn't embarrass us. Chris Paine, the filmmaker responsible for Who Killed the Electric Car? also spoke. He is a very nice man and just the kind of person you would imagine that would make a doc about electric cars. He has followed up that doc with a new one called The Revenge of the Electric Car, which will be released theatrically beginning on October 21st. The trailer looks great.

A buffalo head and Lois Vossen look on as Kurt Norton says a few words about TAS, IL and PBS.

IN OTHER NEWS:

- These Amazing Shadows was selected as Best Documentary at Louisville's International Festival of Film. We are honored and appreciate their wonderful taste.

- One of our favorite TAS interview subjects, Julie Dash, is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her breakout film, Daughters of the Dust.  Julie is currently developing two projects: a mini series on the little-known 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was the only all African American, all female battalion during World War II, made up of 855 women, and a cyber thriller called, Cipher, a story centered on a young African American woman who’s an encryption specialist, who “holds the keys to our digital liberty.”

- Another favorite TAS interview subject and It Girl, Zooey Deschanel, has scored a big hit with her new TV show, The New Girl. It scored remarkable audience numbers making it the first new sitcom in 20 years to win it's first three nights in the highly valued adults 18-49 demographic (why do they call it "adult 18-49." Are there kids that are 18-49?) Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of television programming her show will not be on the air again until early November. So much for letting a show develop it's audience. If only our producer Christine O'Malley was in charge of all TV programming this sort of thing wouldn't happen!

- Yet another favorite TAS interview subject (okay, almost all our interview subjects are our favorite) John Waters is touring Australia (October 19-29) with his one-man show, This Filthy World. It is a vaudeville act covering his unusual obsessions and film career. John says, "I invite Australian moviegoers into my cinematic world to show them radically intelligent and disturbing movies that will push them closer to the edge of cinema insanity."

These Amazing Shadows Poster, People, Places and Things

Screen grab from the moviegoods.com website.

First it was Peter Golub's score available on itunes...now it's our Brian Oakes designed poster for sale on moviegoods.com...what could possibly be next? Dr. Billington and George Willeman lunchboxes, bobbleheads and mousepads? Gift giving becomes simple for Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah/Winter Solstice (for our pagan fans) 2011. Here comes the vast merchandising of These Amazing Shadows!
These Amazing Shadows Poster: http://www.moviegoods.com/these-amazing-shadows.asp
(in addition to standard sizes our poster is available in bus shelter poster size 43' x 62" for those of you that live in a warehouse size home)
These Amazing Shadows score on itunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/these-amazing-shadows-original/id435119696

In the fall the DVD (and hopefully Blu-ray) of These Amazing Shadows will be released by PBS Video. We spent the past week putting together our DVD bonus features. We're quite proud of the extensive DVD extras that will include:
- Lost Forever, a 25-minute short on film preservation and restoration. It's quite entertaining and educational. Seriously, we're not kidding.
- A behind the scenes look of our score being recorded in Prague, Czech Republic. It includes an interviews with composer, Peter Golub, and score mixer, Scott Johnson, that are inter-cut with actual footage of the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra performing/recording Peter's score.
- A behind the scenes look at our week at the Sundance Film Festival 2011.
- Outtakes from our interviews with John Waters, Christopher Nolan and Tim Roth.
- Deleted and alternate scenes. Example: one of our favorite people, Mick LaSalle, film critic and author describes what makes Gold Diggers of 1933 so great.
- And, a short fun piece on "My Favorite Movie" in which you will find out the answer to the burning question: Who does Christopher Nolan identify with - Han Solo or Luke Skywaker?

(l to r) Alex Calleros, Christine O'Malley, Paul Mariano and Doug Blush pose in front of the giant head of Leo.

Los Angeles is such a wonderfully interesting and challenging place. Paul and I live in different parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of the people we worked with on TAS live in LA so we have spent a lot of time down in the Southland. Paul and I just returned from a short trip to LA to work on the above mentioned DVD extras. We began our meeting with editors Doug and Alex and producer Christine with our traditional lunch at Fred62 located in the Los Feliz section of town. Super hip place - very LA. Right across the street is a gigantic mural of film stars that include Leo DiCaprio, Uma Thurman and Johnny Depp. If you keep your ears pricked up you can hear conversations during lunch of actors complaining about casting calls, casting couches and demanding directors.

Panoramic of Fred62

Panorama of mural across the street from Fred62.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences recently asked us to send them a copy of our poster for their collection. Very cool request. That lead us to discover a couple of fun videos on their site:
1) How a Oscar statuette is made - http://www.oscars.org/video/watch/making_of_oscar.html
2) The conservation process for a giant poster - http://www.oscars.org/video/watch/mhl_poster_restoration.html

We recently had the good fortune to screen These Amazing Shadows for employees at Lucasfilm and next week will do the same for the employees at Pixar. Stay tuned for photos and info from those screenings.