Celebrity Sightings

Last night, Austin Studios threw a big bash to celebrate the grand re-opening of their newly renovated facilities. The party started with a ribbon-cutting and christening ceremony for one of the redone studios.

Rebecca Campbell, executive director of Austin Film Society, started things off with some details about the renovations, but all eyes were on the two guys who would be performing the ribbon-cutting: Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater. Well, some eyes were off to the right to notice local actress Dana Wheeler-Nicholson (Friday Night Lights), who sat next to Austin City Council member Brewster McCracken. (She's not in the photo below, but look for her in her leopard-print coat in subsequent photos.)

I bought a new camera nearly a year ago, could you tell? Suddenly you could actually figure out who the people were in the photos I took in dark movie theaters. And now I've got lots of photos to share that I took during Austin movie-related events in 2008. I started an entry that turned out to be huge and unfocused, so I've broken it up into several sections. Today we'll start with my favorite photos of well-known actors and other film-related people. My very favorite is the one at the top -- Morgan Fairchild and ZZ Top at the Texas Film Hall of Fame. But I took a few more that night that I also liked.

Two movies opening in theaters today played at Fantastic Fest earlier this year, so it seems like a good time to share some photos from those events. (Yay, I have an excuse to post the photos late without looking like I procrastinated! Ahem.) Plus, some of us will use any excuse to post pictures of Paul Rudd. I am not ashamed to admit that.

Role Models was one of the "super-secret screenings" at Fantastic Fest, playing at midnight near the end of the fest. The movie stayed a secret for awhile because for whatever reason, a lot of people thought the screening would be My Name is Bruce with you-know-who in attendance. Something on Bruce Campbell's website sounded like a hint. But then the website changed, people In The Know hinted other things, and someone whispered the title to me about ten minutes beforehand. Even then, I didn't believe them until we were in the theater and the title was announced. Someday I should keep track of every rumor about secret screenings during Fantastic Fest, the wilder guesses are hilarious.

As I may have mentioned in passing, Alamo hosted some screenings of the film My Name is Bruce, which Bruce Campbell stars in and directed, late last month. Campbell attended the screenings and did some Q&As (as you can see in the above photo). I tried like crazy to find out if I could get an interview with Campbell for Cinematical, ultimately gave up, and then the night before, found out I would be able to interview him. I felt like I'd been given an early birthday present from the universe.

Cinematical published the interview last night -- you can read it here. It's not a short interview, but I hit a point where I simply could not cut one more line, because everything left was so interesting. (Thankfully, my editors agreed with that assessment.) Nonetheless, some good portions of the interview didn't make it into my final cut because they didn't work well with the general flow of the piece. I've posted those snippets after the jump for your reading pleasure, along with my favorite photo of Campbell taken during the Austin Q&A.

I'm very satisfied with the interview because it wasn't terribly fanboy-ish. I feel like I talked more with Campbell the filmmaker than with the guy who played Ash and Elvis, if you know what I mean. This may mean that I aimed for the wrong audience for the piece, but whatthehell. He's thoughtful about low-budget filmmaking and distribution while still using words like "dealio" and "blasteroo," so maybe there's something for everyone.

I also reviewed My Name is Bruce for Cinematical -- currently I'm the only critic giving the film a "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I hope that'll change as the movie progresses on its road tour around the country. My husband and I had a good time watching it, and I think it's best seen with as large and enthusiastic an audience as possible.

I just finished a review and an interview for Cinematical. The review is for the movie My Name is Bruce, which played at Alamo Drafthouse Ritz last weekend. The interview is with the film's director/star, Bruce Campbell. While I'm waiting for these stellar gems of writing to be published, here's a treat for the other Bruce Campbell fans out there: video from the Q&A session that Campbell held after the first Austin screening of his film:

Thanks to Anne Heller and Alamo Drafthouse for the clip. I'm hoping to share a photo or two from the event soon, as well as the outtakes from my interview, but we all know that my intent doesn't always align perfectly with my workload. Meanwhile, I did publish some photos to my Flickr page.

Austin Film Festival opened on Thursday night with an advance screening of Oliver Stone's film W., a colorful take on the life of President George W. Bush. The screening took place at the Paramount, which is in walking distance of the Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion.

James Cromwell, who plays former President George H.W. Bush, attended the screening and participated in a Q&A session afterwards. AFF held a small red-carpet for Cromwell beforehand; this is my favorite photo of the ones I took. (Boy, is he tall. Super tall. Wow.) I wish we could have blocked off Congress Avenue and shot photos of him with the Capitol in the background, but you can't shut down Austin traffic like that, even for James Cromwell.

Update, 10/6: Tickets to a third show, at midnight, were also added ... and all three shows have sold out. We sure love us some Bruce Campbell here in Austin.

Update, 10/4: Alamo has scheduled a second screening at 10 pm on the same evening. Tickets will go on sale online on Monday, October 6, at 3 pm.

Update, 10/3, 3:15 pm: It appears that the tickets sold out in under 5 minutes. Wow.

I probably shouldn't be telling you this, because it only increases the number of people who will be trying to get tickets. If I end up not getting into the event, I can only blame myself.

Alamo at the Ritz is screening the film My Name is Bruce on Sunday, October 26. The director and star of the movie, Bruce Campbell, will be in attendance. If you don't know who Bruce Campbell is, this may not be the best movie to introduce you to the actor -- go rent Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness instead. (Or go to Hulu and watch some episodes of Burn Notice.) But I know some of you are out there making little happy squealing noises, and I won't mention you by name because some of us may feel we're a little too old to get squeaky over actors coming to town. Ahem. See? I'm not making any squeaky noises whatsoever, at least not where any of you can see.

My Name is Bruce is about a town that is terrorized by a monster of some sort, and the townspeople decide that they should get Ash from the Evil Dead movies to fight the creature. So they track down Bruce Campbell, the actor, and get him involved. Reviews have supposedly been mixed but I am not reading any because I do not want to lose my enthusiasm for this film, despite the fact that I figure if I sat through The Man with the Screaming Brain and did not find it unentertaining, I will probably enjoy watching this film even if it's not spectacular.

Tickets go on sale online on Friday, October 3 -- tomorrow -- at 3 pm. My husband is threatening to bring a container of yogurt to the screening and asking Mr. Campbell to sign it. We'll see.

Meanwhile, if you are such a diehard Bruce Campbell fan that you can't wait until October 26, check out tonight's free Terror Thursday screening of Mindwarp at midnight at Alamo Ritz. If I didn't have to get up at the crack of dawn on Friday, I'd be there.

At the Fantastic Fest awards ceremony, every winner who is present has to chug a beer from their beer-stein award. If the winner isn't there, the awards presenter has to chug ... or else find a willing audience member to help them out. One presenter (not me) found help from Elizabeth Avellan, a local film producer and co-founder of Troublemaker Studios. She attended the ceremony because she was a producer on the Chilean superhero film Santos, which had its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest.

Ms. Avellan is a woman of many talents, but I didn't realize that one of them was the ability to chug a mug of Miller High Life. I am now even more impressed.

I haven't had time to post many details about my Fantastic Fest experience here, but (shameless self-promotion alert) you can read my thoughts on the first half of the festival in an article I wrote for The Circuit, Variety's film-festival blog. I've got tons of photos and some good stories, as well as movies to recommend, so keep checking back.

Photos of Matthew McConaughey, even when he's wearing a shirt, never do grow old, do they? Of course not. That's why I knew you wouldn't mind waiting for me to put together this little photo essay from the Surfer, Dude premiere.

The thing to realize about red-carpet events is that they truly can be a circus, but that this is not always a bad thing. Some people go to giant malls on the day after Thanksgiving, some people go to Mardi Gras in the French Quarter, and some of us go to red-carpet events. I have to wonder -- if they get this crowded and chaotic in Austin, how is it in New York or LA? Or perhaps in those big cities they're a lot more blase about it. This event was called a "green carpet" but it was as red-carpet-y as we get in Central Texas.

I arrived at the Paramount and was assigned a spot not far from the door into the theater, next to Cole and Bobby, who write for (natch) Cole and Bobby at the Movies, as well as Study Breaks magazine. We were joined shortly thereafter by Statesman arts and entertainment editor Michael Barnes, who positioned himself right next to the door, so he could do some short interviews for his Out and About column and blog. This was great for me because I could take photos while the guys were interviewing people.

For those of you who want a break from our Fantastic Fest coverage (which has only just begun, to channel The Carpenters slightly), here's a round-up of other film news and events around Austin:

• Catch the documentary Please Vote for Me on Wednesday night at 7 pm at Alamo Ritz, as part of the Austin Film Society's Texas Doc Tour. Doc Tour screenings often sell out in advance; get tickets on the AFS website. [via Austinist]
• You might spot celebrities in Austin from the production of Whip It during the next week -- keep an eye out for Ellen Page, Drew Barrymore, Juliette Lewis, and other cast members. My big question: Will there be Zoe Bell (shown at right)? [via the Statesman's Out and About blog]