Experience

Darkness lights up the Castro screen with Noir City's return

Every year at the end of January, many in the Bay Area film community tune their radar to the snowy, showy glare of the Sundance Film Festival. For anyone not actually attending, however, there’s a big, contrastingly “dark” consolation prize: The virtually simultaneous Noir City festival. Who’s to say those stay-at-homes aren’t the luckier ones?

Now in its eighth year, Noir City takes over the Castro Theatre for ten days January 22-31. The theme is “Lust and Larceny," and there are a number of nights paying tribute to particular stars and directors.

topics: actors, castro theatre, film festivals, genre films, hollywood, noir

Experience

Columbia Pictures' noir lights up the Roxie

Founded in 1924, Columbia Pictures spent some decades just below the top echelon of Hollywood studios. It didn’t own its own theater chain, or otherwise command the resources that MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers or Fox could apply in lavish displays of star power, production scale and promotional oomph.

When the business began changing in the 1950s due to TV, new antitrust laws and other factors, the playing field leveled in ways that benefitted Columbia more than its glitzier, top-heavy rivals. But before then, with the occasional prestigious exception—notably Frank Capra’s films—its bread-and-butter product leaned toward the less pricey ends of the entertainment spectrum. That meant away from spectacular production numbers, costume epics and all-star ensemble pieces and toward such humbler but reliable amusements as a girl, a guy and a gun.

topics: bay area, genre films, noir, roxie

Beyond Words

Understanding backstory

Behind any narrative for the screen is the story that came before it —the life that shaped the central character, who arrives fully formed as your story opens. Your screenplay may reveal only well-placed hints of the back story, or whole formative episodes in flashback. But you, the writer, have to know what that backstory was, before you can show your audience what drives your characters and what they are capable of.

topics: authors, bay area, comedy, directors, diy, filmmakers, genre films, hollywood, independent film, noir, screenwriting

Platform

Berkeley-based writer Barry Gifford's wild screen-rides continue

A peripatetic childhood laid fertile ground for the heated imagination of Berkeley-based author Barry Gifford. His father was in the rackets and Gifford grew up in hotels, rarely attending school, while traveling through the South with his mother. The characters he met during his formative years may not have been as lurid as those who populate his fiction, but his early experiences no doubt shaped his sensibility. A prolific novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright, Gifford may be best known for his fruitful collaborations with David Lynch. The pair met in 1989 when Lynch decided to adapt Gifford’s Wild at Heart, one of the Sailor and Lula novels. The relationship continued with Hotel Room, a movie Gifford wrote and Lynch directed for HBO (1993) as well as Lost Highway, a film they wrote as a team. Since then, Gifford has traveled extensively and, to some extent, lived out the Kerouac myth while continuing to turn out screenplays, fiction and short stories that are irresistible to filmmakers. The Hughes Brothers (The Book of Eli) have committed to The Old Days, based on Gifford’s short story. Gifford co-wrote the script for The Phantom Father, a film adapted from a memoir about his father, slated to make the rounds of the festival circuit early next year. The Imagination of the Heart, the seventh and final installment of the Sailor and Lula books, was published in May and a compendium of the entire series is due out next spring. More info on all of it at Gifford’s own site. I got a chance to catch up with him for SF360.org last week.

topics: art film, authors, bay area, directors, genre films, hollywood, noir, screenwriting

Platform

Elliot Lavine, revisiting the old haunts

Elliot Lavine, who’s been a fixture on the Bay Area film scene since moving from Detroit to San Francisco in 1975, returns to his old stomping grounds at the Roxie to guest curate "I Wake Up Dreaming: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir." The program of 28 obscure, bona fide film noir that Lavine affectionately describes as "cheap, lowdown and tawdry," coincides with the underground publication of his book of the same name. The series, which includes Blind Alley, one of two noir shorts that marked the beginning and end of Lavine’s foray into filmmaking, runs May 15-28, with a pre-opening bash on May 14.

topics: authors, bay area, noir, roxie

Insider

Danish "Just Another Love Story" offers shock treatment

A title like Just Another Love Story is its own disclaimer, hinting there will be nothing “normal,” or very loving, about this story.

[SF360.org editor’s note: Some plot points are revealed in this preview.]

Indeed, within the first five minutes we’ve witnessed two deaths, coitus interrupted by curious tot, and a gruesome domestic crime scene’s aftermath. An opening this flashy, this determined to provoke, raises both expectations and apprehensions: Will the movie end up justifying its extremes, or turn out to be an exercise in trying too hard?

For a while one isn’t quite sure—but this twisty latterday noir by writer-director Ole Bornedal (of the period epic I Am Dina and ghoulish Nightwatch’s dual Danish/U.S. versions) on SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki this Friday turns out to be headed somewhere other than the gratuitously pyrotechnic. Indeed, for many it might be the 2009 equivalent of last year’s French import Tell No One as a genuinely complicated thriller that offers pulp satisfaction without ever collapsing into the preposterousness or testosterone excess of a typical Hollywood suspense gizmo.

topics: actors, noir, reviews, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Platform

Eddie Muller, Noir City and the lure of troubled times

Author, raconteur, commentator and former newspaperman Eddie Muller launched Noir City, an annual San Francisco-based festival of noir, seven years ago, and it’s attracted an avid following, both in the Bay Area and beyond. (It now tours many U.S. cities). A self-described “second generation San Franciscan, product of a lousy public school education, a couple of crazy years in art school and too much time spent in newspaper offices and sporting arenas," Muller has built a small empire around his passion for this dark, cynical, highly stylized brand of storytelling. He says his career as an "ink-stained, fourth estate wretch” sidetracked his early ambition to become a filmmaker, but this year, he brings the two worlds together with "Newspaper Noir," a tribute to and lament for the heyday of print journalism. The films, presented in nightly double bills, feature the usual suspects: an assortment of criminals, hard-bitten editors, lethal femme fatales with betrayal and skullduggery on their minds and ordinary Joes, losers driven by despair and sucked into a vortex from which there’s no escape. For Noir City 7, which runs January 23-February 1 at the Castro Theatre, Muller and co-curator Anita Monga acquired several one-of-a-kind 35mm prints struck by the studios especially for the festival. SF360.org got a chance to speak with Muller this past month, after he’d returned from a film-scouting mission to South America.

topics: actors, bay area, castro theatre, cinephiles, film festivals, genre films, hollywood, noir, performance, producers, world cinema