The film screened to a full house of the cast and crew along with friends and family. Local attendees also included producers Patrick Roddy, Brian McLaughlin, and Victoria Westover; Brian’s partners in film finance company Emerald Elephant Trudy Brands, Melissa Mitchell and Robert E. Fee; Talent agent Fosi Burritt and her husband Warner; Tucson Film Office Director Shelli Hall and Production Coordinator Peter Catalanotte; Chuck Graham of the Tucson Citizen; Jeff Yanc of the Loft Cinema; as well as several members of the University of Arizona School of Media Arts including Yuri Makina and Lisanne Skyler.

The film was well recieved and the audience cheered, laughed and groaned in all of the right places. After the screening, attendees were invited to a post screening party at local watering hole Olive R’ Twist.

Red 71 has been submitted to the Sundance Film Festival and will be submitted to various festivals around the country in 2008. DVDs of the film should be available for purchase in early 2008.

Filmmaker Jay Craven has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including two Film Production Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for Where the Rivers Flow North and Disappearances. His films have played 345 U.S. cities and towns, 52 countries, and more than sixty international film festivals.

In 1975, Jay Craven founded and directed Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, which grew into New England’s largest independent film and performing arts presenter. In 1991, Craven left Catamount Arts and founded Kingdom County Productions, a nonprofit media arts organization. He is currently a tenured professor of film studies at Marlboro College and continues to direct Kingdom County Productions in Barnet, Vermont, where, in addition to producing feature films, he oversees the Fledgling Films program for teen filmmakers.

Disappearances is based on the award-winning novel by Howard Frank Mosher. “I was attracted to Howard Mosher’s tall tale for its mix of hair-raising adventure, laugh-out-loud humor, compelling emotional drama, and magical realist whimsy,” Craven says. “The history and imagination of this outlaw legacy is deeply rooted in the North County — as much as any enterprise in the old west that triggered literally hundreds of movies about outlaws and the fading frontier.”

Disappearances completes Jay Craven’s trilogy of “Vermont frontier films.” Like many westerns, it explores characters and themes related to a fading frontier where an outlaw culture survives in the margins. In 2006, Disappearances was selected by the American Film Institute to be one of 8 US and 11 international films for its first ever AFI: Project 20/20 — a year long global and cultural exchange including workshops, seminars and appearances at film festivals, cultural centers, and museums.

From AFI:

DISAPPEARANCES is a powerfully mysterious film. The story is set deep in the rural Northeast and features excellent ensemble performances by legendary actor/songwriter Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold and newcomer Charlie McDermott.

Kristofferson stars as schemer and dreamer Quebec Bill Bonhomme in a spellbinding taleof smuggling, a family’s mysterious past, and a young boy’s rite of passage. Bill, desperate to raise money to preserve his endangered cattle herd through a long winter, resorts to whiskey smuggling, a traditional family occupation. He takes his son, Wild Bill, on an unforgettable trip that will long remain etched in the viewer’s mind.

Palpable, intimate and magical with the vivid textures of rural outback life, Craven’s delightfully simple narrative operates on powerful metaphorical levels.

Official Movie Website.

Disappearances is presented by the Lake Area Film Group, in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Council of Southwest Louisiana and the City of Lake Charles. The Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers is a program of the Southern Arts Federation. Check out the Southern Circuit Tour Blog.

–Julie Fay, LAFG Screenwriter

Anecdotes. That’s what road trips are all about, and our excursion to the Austin Film Festival is certainly no exception.

After spending a day attending panels with directors, producers, screenwriters, video game developers, and other professionals from the entertainment industry, I may have picked up a few helpful tips on writing successful screenplays and breaking into Hollywood, but far more valuable (to me) are the stories that I’ll always remember. Such as:

• The Transformers producer explaining why the movie wasn’t as popular in Japan as one might expect, since Japan is largely a female-driven film market, and giant robot fans are still considered geeks there, just like in America.
• Or screenwriter Scott Alexander explaining that some of the scenes in 1408 were in-jokes based on his experiences in hotels while working on earlier films.
• Or getting Scott Alexander to admit that Andy Kaufman enjoyed Man on the Moon, even though he supposedly died 15 years before the movie’s release.
• Or hearing Oliver Stone’s personal recollections from his long and fascinating film career.
• Or the quote at the top of this post from our very own Julie Fay, which I jotted down in a notebook as we sat waiting for Oliver Stone to arrive for his Q&A. Would it make sense in context? Sure, but where’s the fun in that? (If you really want to know what she was talking about, you’ll have to wait for AFF: Julie’s Take.

Most of the stories we heard in Austin are too long to do justice in a blog post (and as Ken suggested, the best ones all came from screenwriter Scott Alexander). But they’re fun to repeat when you’re hanging out with fellow movie geeks.

Also wonderful are the projects I would never have known about if panelists hadn’t mentioned them, such as Atom Films’ Possum Death Spree, or InSex, a short film from Project Greenlight winners Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin.

The problem with these AFF panels is that there were so many good ones scheduled at the same time, making it difficult to pick and choose. Thankfully, Cinematical covered a couple of the panels we missed, including this one with the writers of the Harold & Kumar movies, and one on Writing Family Films.

The festival was hosted at several locations in downtown Austin as well as other venues around the city. The beautiful Driskill Hotel seemed to be the primary venue for most of the programs on Saturday with a few others within a block of that location. The weather was perfect, we got a great parking space and we got to hear from some amazing filmmakers.

Christy and I attended the Writer-Director: Creative Compromises panel at 9:00am. This panel was made up of Terry George (Hotel Rwanda, Reservation Road), Harris Goldberg (Numb), Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno) and Robin Swicord (Memoirs of a Geisha, The Jane Austen Book Club) and was moderated by Andrew Shea.

These auteurs discussed the transition from writer to director and shared some of their personal stories about their first time directing. They entertained a variety of questions from the audience. The collective message they delivered was that directing what you’ve written may be the ultimate form of both creative expression and creative control.

At 10:45 Christy and I joined Julie and Corey at A Conversation With Oliver Stone. Moderated by Jane Sumner and featuring the legendary writer-director Oliver Stone, this program was standing room only. Mr. Stone discussed several of his films, shared his very well known political views and awed us all with his vision. It was an extraordinary session with an extraordinary man.

After a nutritious lunch of burgers and tasty beverages at a nearby sports bar, all five of us attended Tell Your Story: Scott Alexander. Scott Alexander (Ed Wood, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, 1408) entertained us for well over an hour with tales of his adventures in screenwriting. The session was very relaxed. The questions from the attendees were very relevant and Scott’s answers were detailed, relevant and entertaining. Of all the sessions on Saturday, this was my favorite.

Overall, I enjoyed my first visit to the AFF. The only downside, and it almost became a big one, was the total lack of organization we experienced several times during the day. Sessions were moved and times were changed. To accomodate these changes, the festival organizers printed a schedule correction sheet they conveniently passed out that morning. Unfortunately, the schedule correction sheet was also completely wrong. We were also unable to find a consistent answer from the staff who appeared to be as confused as we were. While we did find sessions to attend, we did not attend the ones we originally planned.

I’ll attend again next year. Christy and I are planning to attend the entire festival rather that just the Saturday. I’m confident that the quality of the individual programs will be as excellent as this year. Hopefully, it will also be better organized.

The sound of a camera shutter on a film set tells you the Unit Photographer is close at hand. On the sets of independent films Mercy and Red 71, that click was from the camera of photographer and actress Hilary Bronwyn Gayle.

A Lake Charles native, Hilary graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia with a B.F.A in Photography in 2006 and has worked as a professional photographer in the lake area. She is pursuing a career in Motion Picture Still Photography and recently attended the Still Photographer On Set workshop with Unit Photographer Kerry Hayes at the Maine Media Workshop.

Her first stint as Unit Photographer came in 2005 on the production of Patrick Roddy’s independent horror Mercy. In addition to her role behind the camera, Hilary was cast in a small role in front of the camera as a prostitute in the hellish world of John Mercy. Her extraordinary photos were shown in 2006 as The Mercy Stills, Solo Exhibition at the Central School Arts and Humanities Center in Lake Charles.

Hilary’s second foray into filmmaking came in June of 2007 on the set of the modern noir Red 71. Another Patrick Roddy project, Red 71 was shot in Tucson, Arizona. Hilary was again called on as Unit Photographer and as an actress in the production itself.

Hilary’s still photographs capture the dark, bleak feel of both films exceptionally well. If you need a top notch Unit Photographer or would like to see more of Hilary’s work visit her website at HilaryBronwynGayle.com.

This is part one in an on-going series to highlight the talents and personalities of Lake Area Film Group members and other filmmakers in southwest Louisiana.

Principal photography stretched over 15 days at a variety of locations in and around the city of Tucson. The film starred Nathan Ginn and featured performances from Michelle Belegrin, Ted Parks, Brian Mulligan, Melissa Aguire, Justin Kreinbrink, Howard Allen, Greg Sweet, Jon Proudstar, Ed Keeylocko, Jonathon Northover, Eddie Serrano, Jamarlin Fowler, and Nick “Bear” D’Andrea. It also include performances from LAFG members Hillary Gayle, Josh Marcantel, and Carol Anne Gayle. Cult favorite and horror acting legend Angus Scrimm also appeared in the film.

The film was Directed by our own Patrick Roddy and was written by LAFG member Ken Henderson. Other LAFG crew members included Scott Waldrop - Assistant Director of Photography, Carol Anne Gayle - Production Designer, Hilary Gayle - Set Photographer and Chuck Turner - Grip.

The film’s producers, Brian McLaughlin, Patrick Roddy, and Vicky Westover have announced a screening for cast and crew on October 25th at the Grand Cinemas Crossroads 6 in Tucson. Red 71 is also currently being submitted to major film festivals.

Wolf’s brother Jace Johnson, also a native of Lake Charles, co-wrote and co-produced Little Chenier, and appears on-screen as the character Chute.

“It wasn’t my intent to make a scary film,” explains Roddy. “The initial idea was for a noir. As I wrote the script, it became an art film with surreal elements. It seemed like a nightmare and that’s what I tried to conceive once we started shooting.” Link.