"Dear Pillow" on DVD in November
I was at a party Friday night where somehow I ended up trying to explain what "mumblecore" is (and failing, I suspect) and someone said, "I remember liking this film I saw at Village a few years ago, what was it, Pillow?"
"Dear Pillow," I guessed.
"Yes, what happened to that, is it on DVD?"
"I don't think so," I said. "Too bad, I liked it a lot."
Less than 24 hours after that conversation, Dear Pillow producer Jacob Vaughn posted to his blog, e-Jake, that Dear Pillow will be out on DVD on November 13. How's that for coincidence?
Dear Pillow, which was made in Austin by writer-director Bryan Poyser and producer Vaughan, premiered at Slamdance in 2004, then played SXSW and a number of other festivals. The filmmakers were nominated for an Independent Spirit Award in the "Someone to Watch" category.
The film sadly never found theatrical distribution (the sexual subject matter might have been a difficult sell), but in the fall of 2004, Alamo Village showed it nightly for about a month, where it built on word-of-mouth. I remember that my husband and I went to see the film at the end of its run, having to push ourselves because we are not usually 10 pm moviegoers, even though we live around the block from Alamo Village. We were seeing it on the urging of friends (and John Pierson's persuasive article about the film for the Austin Chronicle) and weren't sure what to expect, but the film totally blew me away. I reviewed it later for Celluloid Eyes. [More after the jump.]
From the movie's MySpace page (which is one of the least irritating MySpace pages I've ever seen), I learned that the DVD will include deleted scenes, two audio commentaries, audition tapes, and two short films (I wonder if one is Pleasureland, Poyser and Vaughan's previous film).
The DVD is being released by Heretic Films, which also has released indie films like 24 Hours on Craigslist and Joe Swanberg's first feature, Kissing on the Mouth. (Speaking of which, Swanberg has a role in the short film Grammy's, also directed by Bryan Poyser, which is playing at AFF in the Houston Film Commission short series this week.) I haven't found Dear Pillow on Netflix yet, but it's already on Amazon as a pre-order.I like the original poster for the film (top image) better than the cluttered-looking DVD cover (bottom image), but I can see where the DVD image would be considered more commercial -- it also looks less mumblecore-ish, but I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.