PTFF News
Newsletter Archives
September 13, 2008
Contents
13 days and counting
to the
9th annual Port Townsend Film Festival
September 26-28
Piper Laurie, Robert Osborne, Sherman Alexie
Films from Argentina, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and the USA
Outdoor movies: The Mark of Zorro, The Black Stallion, Harvey
Independent films, first features, classics, documentaries, classics, cult favorites, shorts
Special programs: National Public Radio’s West Coast Live, short film competition Film 2880, and a live burlesque show
The 2008 official program will appear in the Wednesday, September 18 issue of the Port Townsend/Jefferson County Leader.
Passes and advance ticket sales now available online, by coming to the office at 211 Taylor St., #32-A, in downtown Port Townsend, or by calling 360/379-0198.
In the meantime . . .
if you want to keep up with the various activities and projects of Port Townsend and Jefferson County talented youth, please consider . . .
Fresh off her triumph in the self-produced, sixteen-character, one-woman play, “The K of D,” in Seattle in August, Renata literally closed one night and began rehearsals the next day for the title role in ACT’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” playing now into October. Unlike the fate of most struggling young actors in theatre today (and yesterday, and the day before that), Friedman seems to be forging a substantive career out of what the Seattle Times calls a “remarkable talent.” In its review of “The K of D” the Times wrote:
It is Friedman alone playing all these (characters), and more . . . . As the lead character, (Charlotte, she is a) storyteller, invoking the voices, mannerisms, emotions and unique mania of each individual in her tale. Director Braden Abraham proves a superb traffic cop helping Friedman keep each role clearly delineated. Describing Friedman's cracked-mirror performance as virtuoso is hardly adequate, especially since she isn't simply stepping out of one character into another but rapidly yanking feverish impressions from Charlotte — an identity she won't even embrace.
In “Eurydice,” playwright Sarah Ruhl retells the classical Greek myth of Orpheus, the greatest of musicians whose grief over the death of his wife, Eurydice, drove him to seek her in the underworld. His lyre music is so moving that the gods permit Eurydice to return to the upper world, but only on condition that Orpheus not look back to make sure she is following him. His trust is weak, and he loses her again, forever. Ruhl turns the tale around by telling it from the point of view of Eurydice, what she finds in the underworld and perhaps the real reason Orpheus looks back.
Tickets are available by calling 206/292-7676, or <acttheatre.org>.
The late Roddy McDowell, one of Hollywood’s most notable child actors and whose career extended to the end of his life, was quoted as saying: “I enjoyed being in movies when I was a boy. As a child you're not acting - you believe.” Belief is at the core of Port Townsend’s Javin Reid sense of himself. Several years ago, shortly after he began appearing on television and was hanging around with actor Peter Fonda during the 2003 Port Townsend Film Festival, Javin was asked by a bemused adult: “So, I hear you want to be an artist?” Unblinking, the then eight-year-old responded: “I am an artist.”
Son of Kristin and Tony Reid, and grandson of Port Townsend attorney (and PTFF board member) Karen Gates Hildt, Javin got the acting bug by watching Renata Friedman in some of her Port Townsend High School productions. “I want to do that,” he told his parents after watching Renata.
Auditioning in LA is not an easy task when living in Port Townsend. Call backs often come at a moment’s notice, so the family moved to Seattle where access to the airport makes possible quick response to calls. In fact, Javin and his mother live part of the year in Los Angeles to more quickly respond to auditions. (Show business has become a family affair with the Reids: father Tony is a contract attorney for One Reel Productions, the Seattle-based nonprofit that sponsors the annual Bumbershoot festival at the Seattle Center and the widely popular dinner theatre, Teatro ZinZanni, in both Seattle and San Francisco.)
Javin’s first feature film, “Ping Pong Playa,” is now in limited release, screening at three Seattle area theatres: Meridian 16 in downtown; Lowe’s Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood (South Snohomish County, not Bainbridge Island), and the Parkway Plaza Stadium 12, in Tukwila.
Directed by the Academy Award® documentarian, Jessica Yu, “Ping Pong Playa” is, according to a review in the September 5 New York Times: “A race-based comedy with a mischievous post-race sensibility . . . min(ing) hip-hop comedy gold from the least gangsta context imaginable: the assimilated Chinese-Americans of suburban California.”
The reviewer continues: “(Director) Yu’s visual flair enlivens the verbal panache of her feature debut; ‘Ping Pong Playa’ is a bright, nimble diversion, a quick-witted picture that’s fast on its feet.”
Although Javin hasn’t the lead in his first feature film, yet knowing him leaves little doubt about his determination and therefore his future.
A thirty-something (we know the exact age, but we’re not telling), a late 1980s graduate of Chimacum High School and childhood resident of Port Ludlow, Kirsten Smith (right) is one of the hottest comedic writers in Hollywood today. Her filmography (co-written with Karen McCullah Lutz, at left) includes: “Legally Blonde,” “Ella Enchanted,” “She’s the Man,” and newly-released, “The House Bunny”).
The two were recently featured in the Sunday New York Times. The August 24 article appears below almost in it entirety.
Women (Real and Fictional) Defying Expectations
By JOHN ANDERSON
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.
THE first screenplay by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, written on cocktail napkins and fueled by margaritas, was a female action-thriller about girls who kill members of the Navy Seals.
“They’re really mad,” Ms. Smith said demurely.
The script “never saw the light of day,” Ms. McCullah Lutz added, but it cemented a partnership that has made the pair that rarest of Hollywood commodities: a successful female writing team, one whose output ... has been frothily funny yet informed by female empowerment.
“I guess all our films have been about people learning they don’t need to be what others expect them to be,” Ms. McCullah Lutz said. “It just happens. We get to the end of a script, and I say, “Well, we did it again.’ ”
The latest example (is) “The House Bunny,” starring the “Scary Movie” star Anna Faris as a rabbit-ear-wearing beauty who gets kicked out of the Playboy Mansion. Ms. McCullah Lutz and Ms. Smith had sought out Ms. Faris, having admired her in films like “Just Friends.”
“We saw a beautiful actress who was weird and brave and bold in her comedy,” Ms. Smith said. “It didn’t seem like she was being hampered by vanity or likability. She was just kind of this hilarious, hot lunatic.”
So they asked her what she’d like to do. “I’d been thinking, ‘What happens to these women?’ ” Ms. Faris said by phone from New York. “L.A. is full of beautiful women, and what happens when they start getting older? Do they go into advertising? Do they go back to school? Do they go to IHOP?” In “The House Bunny,” the exiled cupcake Shelley Darlington (Ms. Faris) is adopted by the sorority women of Zeta Alpha Zeta, who give Shelley a sense of herself in exchange for tutorials on makeup and men.
The film, distributed by Sony, is part of a string of successful comedies by the pair, which began with their second script together and the first that they sold: “10 Things I Hate About You” (1999), a twist on “The Taming of the Shrew” that starred Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger, then unknowns. The writers followed up with “Legally Blonde,” in which Reese Witherspoon gave a career-defining performance.
“We’ve gotten very lucky,” Ms. Smith said. “With ‘10 Things’ there were a lot of different actors up for the two lead roles, actors you would know. But casting those fresh faces was such a blessing for the movie, ’cause if it were people from the WB, it wouldn’t have been such a classy film.”
Reminded of a “Dawson’s Creek” joke in “10 Things,” the pair laughed. Ms. Smith is curly-haired and petite and wore a festive black-and-white print dress to lunch; Ms. McCullah Lutz, in a form-fitting turquoise dress, suggested a blonde Valkyrie. Ms. McCullah Lutz seemed more serious, Ms. Smith more bubbly. But they said the key to their personalities is in their dogs: Ms. McCullah Lutz owns a Maltese; Ms. Smith, pit bulls.
In the mid-’90s, as a fledgling writer, Ms. McCullah Lutz was “between two bad agents,” living in Denver and sending query letters to Los Angeles film production companies. Among them was CineTel, where Ms. Smith was working as a “development girl.”
“I read one of her letters and said, ‘I’d like to read this script, and this script, and this script and this script,’ and I called her and said, ‘I like your writing,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “She probably imagined me as some extremely high-powered executive, sitting in my office on Sunset with a view of the city. I had a cubicle.”
But they met for drinks, and “kind of got pregnant on our first date,” Ms. Smith said. “We started writing a script that night.”
Their M.O. consists of writing beside Ms. McCullah Lutz’s pool (both live in neighborhoods on the funkier east side of Hollywood) and presenting a united front to those studio executives who would tamper with their work. But sometimes, they conceded, the questions can lead somewhere. When Disney asked for additional motivation for the comedian Larry Miller’s overprotective, pregnancy-obsessed father in “10 Things,” they made him a gynecologist. Other times, they said, studio participation can be perplexing.
“On ‘She’s the Man,’ ” Ms. Smith said of their “Twelfth Night” update with Amanda Bynes, “the male executive was like: ‘You know what, girls? Go crazy! I want it edgy, raw — ’ ”
“ ‘Dirty!’ ” Ms. McCullah Lutz said, picking up the story. “We said: ‘Really? Really?’ ”
They went away, wrote the script, handed it in.
“And he said, ‘I cannot show this to my bosses,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “ ‘This is a hard R. This isn’t PG-13.’ We said, ‘You told us to be dirty and edgy.’ ”
Ms. McCullah Lutz, referring to “Ella Enchanted”: “Miramax is the only studio that’s ever told us to add” a flatulence joke.
Ms. Smith: “Which I was very excited about.”
Caution, they agreed, is the enemy of comedy.
“If you watch ‘10 Things,’ it’s racy by today’s standards,” Ms. Smith said of the almost-a-decade-old film. “The most limiting thing in our genre is that the comedic window of what you can and can’t get away with has gotten smaller and smaller.”
Ms. McCullah Lutz added: “That’s why there are so many R-rated comedies now, because to be really funny for adults and older teenagers, you have to be R. ‘House Bunny’ is PG-13, but it’s aimed at that ‘Legally Blonde’ audience.”
“The House Bunny” is directed by Fred Wolf, who made his career writing sketch comedy for “Saturday Night Live.” “It was much more fun for me working with them than it would have been if I were the writer,” Mr. Wolf said. “They’re highly collaborative. I would say, ‘How about this?,’ and they’d get excited. They’d actually praise stuff I added. Which wasn’t much.”
Ms. McCullah Lutz and Ms. Smith are probably too busy to sweat the small stuff. Their next film, “The Ugly Truth,” for which they also serve as executive producers, stars Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler and is set to arrive in the spring. “Long Time Gone,” which Ms. McCullah Lutz adapted from the April Stevens novel about a young woman (to be played by Christina Ricci) who upends a dysfunctional family, will shoot this fall. And Ms. Smith’s first film as a producer, “Whip It!,” starring Ellen Page and directed by Drew Barrymore, is to be released next year. Their mission, “to make movies we want to see,” as Ms. Smith put it, resonates with their current star. “I don’t always want to be the straight girl to the zany guy,” Ms. Faris said. “It’s unfortunate that studios shy away from female-centered movies because there’s a huge audience for them. And what Kirsten and Karen are doing is part of our solution, I guess.”
Ms. Faris laughed. “I’d love to continue this, be a part of what they’re doing. The boys are doing it. Why not us?”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
And, of course, we still are recruiting volunteers for the festival weekend, mainly theatre and hospitality center volunteers (all the beer garden slots are filled, sorry).
Work a few hours and you earn a free voucher to attend a festival film. Please register online (even if you’ve done it before).
Many thanks. This festival would not be possible without you.