Austin Film Society

There is so much I love about being a member of Austin Film Society, but high on my list is the Essential Cinema film series, which often features films that haven't been made widely available in the United States. The latest series, "Children of Abraham/Ibrahim 4: Films of the Middle East and Beyond" provides insights into Middle Eastern history and culture. From Chale Nafus, AFS Director of Programming:

"Our fourth annual series will continue looking at films from the Middle East and beyond -- an area rich in tumultuous history, wonderful art and literature, but often mired in war and misunderstanding among the three religions which all trace their roots back to Abraham/Ibrahim. This is our local attempt to bring human faces and individual stories to the statistics and overwhelming images seen on TV and computer screens daily throughout the world.

"Our four contemporary films and two classics will take us to Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, and Pakistan. We will see unrequited love in a train station, struggles over ownership of land, the troubles a father has just getting home to a birthday party, a son struggling with his father over education, the ethnic and religious divisions within an Israeli neighborhood, and the lengths to which a politician will go to avoid responsibility for his actions."

The series starts tonight and runs through February 16, and screenings for this month include:

Of all the Austin red carpets and gala events I've been fortunate enough to attend in the past few years, my favorites have been at the annual Texas Film Hall of Fame. The red carpet is actually the entrance to the event, so I not only get to take photos of the honorees, but anyone I recognize who walks in, and sometimes people I don't recognize but who look fabulous, or whom everyone else is photographing. (Then I find out later who they are.) It's a long red carpet with enough room for just about everyone, the lighting is pretty good, and most of the familiar faces are willing to stop and be photographed.

Austin Film Society has just announced three inductees into the Texas Film Hall of Fame for 2010: Quentin Tarantino, Michael Nesmith and Bruce McGill. In addition, actor Thomas Haden Church will again emcee the event -- he did a great job last year, displaying a deadpan and slightly twisted sense of humor.

After the jump, I've added brief explanations of who the honorees are, in case you aren't acquainted with them. The awards ceremony will be on March 11, 2010 (the night before SXSW starts) at Austin Studios. Expect AFS to make a few more announcements about Texas Film Hall of Fame awards and presenters before then.

Here are a few news items related to Austin films and filmmaking from this week. Well, I say "a few," but once I started digging them up, it's actually been a pretty busy week! The news includes updates on local filmmakers' projects, awards, casting news, and other useful info.

• Austin company B-Side Entertainment has just announced that Sundance Film Festival will use the company's scheduling engine for its 2010 online film guide. If you're going to Sundance next year, you'll get to use the very helpful Schedule Genius program to fit all the movies you want to see into the most efficient time possible. B-Side also powers the film guides for local festivals Fantastic Fest, Austin Film Festival, Austin Asian American Film Festival and aGLIFF, and provides an unofficial guide for SXSW.
• Bad news for local filmmaker Richard Linklater (pictured at right): As part of Miramax's big cost-cutting drive this month, they have put his romantic comedy Liars (A to E) on hold. Movieline reports that Linklater doesn't have another project currently in the works yet, although we suspect it won't be long before he's his usual busy self. [via Austin Movie Blog]
• Speaking of Linklater, Austin Film Society would like you to know that tickets are still available to the Austin gala screening of his latest film, Me and Orson Welles, on Monday, November 30 at the Paramount. Linklater will be in attendance along with two of the film's stars, Zac Efron and Christian McKay.

A new video spot produced by the City of Austin features the Austin Film Society After-School Film Program. The video promotes the Grant for Technology Opportunities (GTOPs) program. GTOPs is a City of Austin program that provides matching-fund grants to local groups that create digital opportunities and promote digital inclusion.

The city currently is accepting applications for the 2010 GTOPs cycle. For more information, visit www.gtops.org.

Prospective GTOPs applicants can attend a free seminar today -- Wednesday, Oct. 21 -- at 3 pm. The seminar will explain how the GTOPs program works, and provide assistance for writing a successful grant. Advance reservations may be made at http://gtopsseminar.eventbrite.com/

Austin Film Society starts a new Essential Cinema series tonight: "Censors, Drop Your Scissors! Billy Wilder's Later Comedies." The series runs on Tuesday nights for the next five weeks. I couldn't be more thrilled.

The films scheduled in the series are not the best-known films from writer/director Billy Wilder, like Some Like It Hot, Sunset Blvd., The Apartment, or Double Indemnity. You've probably heard of those and hopefully seen a few of them. These are the films he made after The Apartment, collaborating with his co-writer of the time, I.A.L. Diamond. Some might say Wilder's films declined starting in the mid-1960s  -- you'll have to see all of these films and decide for yourself.

I confess that if I were programming a Wilder retrospective myself, I would be tempted to pick the films Wilder co-wrote with Charles Brackett before starting to direct his own films, those witty, frothy 1930s comedies that I especially love. I'd include Ninotchka, Ball of Fire, Midnight, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife … and possibly some of the more dramatic films that I've never seen, since they're not on DVD, like Arise, My Love and Hold Back the Dawn. (Wilder and Brackett also wrote the first Henry Aldrich film -- a sort of cut-rate Andy Hardy -- called What a Life, which I've not been able to see.)

While Wilder's early screenplays are interesting and certainly entertaining, I appreciate AFS giving us the chance to see the films he made later in life, at a time when the Hollywood Production Code crumbling. Wilder and Diamond pushed the envelope as much as they could in these films, trying to make adult movies about relationships and sex.

Be Here to Love Me, by Austin-based filmmaker Margaret Brown, documents the life of Texas singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt through a series of interviews with family and friends along with his own home footage. This film screened at the 2005 SXSW Film Festival as part of the 24 Beats per Second Series. Several Texas musicians contributed to this film, including Guy Clark, Joe Ely, Willie Nelson, Kinky Friedman, and Lyle Lovett. I've not seen the film yet, but there's a great opportunity coming up to watch the movie and benefit a local organization.

The screening on September 10 at 7 pm at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz is a benefit for Austin Bat Cave (ABC), a nonprofit organization that provides children and teenagers (ages 6–18) with opportunities to develop their creative and expository writing skills through their free programs. Their volunteers provide one-on-one afterschool tutoring and support local schools through programming.

This event includes a post-screening party and 'A Conversation with Filmmaker Margaret Brown' for attendees, so get your tickets online now before they are sold out.

Check out Joe O'Connell's review of Be Here to Love Me from the Austin Chronicle.

The world premiere of Mike Judge's new film Extract took place on Tuesday night in Austin at the Paramount Theatre, with star Jason Bateman (pictured above with Judge) and others attending. The premiere was a benefit for the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. It's been a big week for Austin Film Society (AFS), with the recent announcement as reported by Jette of the TFPF grants awards announcement and now a major premiere benefiting the fund. I spoke with actors from Extract as well as AFS founder and filmmaker Richard Linklater, who was in attendance supporting fellow Austin filmmaker Mike Judge and the TFPF benefit. 

Jenn interviewed Mike Judge for Slackerwood earlier that day, so rather than inundate him with questions I did ask him the one question that was in the back of my mind:

In most posts, I try to be as objective as possible. I'm not even going to attempt it in this account of Cinemapocalypse, Saturday's all-night movie marathon. It is not complete, but it should be enough to help you live a little vicariously, if only to build your DVD queue or library. Those of us at Cinemapocalypse were very, very lucky, and the rest of y'all have a right to be jealous.

Earlier this year, Alamo programmers Zack Carlson and Lars Nilson took 18 exploitation films on an eight-night West Coast tour and called it Cinemapocalypse. Apparently it was so successful the Alamo gang decided to incorporate elements of QT Fest and have a dusk-til-dawn film fest in Austin, kicking it off with Quentin Tarantino's latest, Inglourious Basterds. Only one of the films from the original tour made it into this weekend's marathon.

Despite only knowing that the first film would be Inglourious Basterds, that Tarantino would then program the next two films, and that none of the films besides Basterds would be known in advance, Cinemapocalypse Austin sold out in a record minute. The tickets went on sale at noon, and people who tried to start buying at 12:02 pm were out of luck -- and only Fantastic Fest 2009 badgeholders and AFS members could even try the first day. And yes, Alamo was verifying every single purchase.

Austin Film Society has just released the list of grant recipients for the Texas Filmmakers Production Fund grants this year. The total amount to be awarded in grant money and products/services is $102,000, with an additional $10,000 in travel grants for Texas filmmakers who travel to major film festivals.

The list includes a number of familiar names on the list as well as some interesting new filmmakers. And the really cool thing about this list? It's a tantalizing sneak peek at what we might be seeing from Texas filmmakers in the next year or two. For example, I've been wondering what Kyle Henry's been doing after his film Room, which premiered at Sundance in 2005, and now I know he's working on Fourplay, a four-shorts-in-one feature ... for which he received a $7,000 grant.

Zombie Girl: The Movie, the documentary about young filmmaker Emily Hagins, is available on SnagFilms for free this week ... and the doc's co-director Eric Mauck just received a $7K grant for his next film, The Road to Livingston, about family members visiting death-row inmates. He and Chelsea Hernandez are co-directing The Road to Livingston and received the award together.

The last week or so has been crazy with announcements for red-carpet film events in Austin, so much so that keeping them all straight is enough to keep your eyes crossed. Count 'em, no less than three in four days in August:

• Saturday, August 15: Cinemapocalypse kicks off with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds
• Sunday, August 16: Austin premiere of Robert Rodriguez's Shorts
• Tuesday, August 18: World premiere of Mike Judge's Extract

To ease the vertigo and help you schedule your ticket buying, we've compiled the relevant information below. You will notice that there are benefits to membership, as AFS members and Fantastic Fest 2009 badgeholders have an advantage over the general public.