Q&A

Sid Ganis on Hollywood South and North

From his modest start as a staff writer at 20th Century Fox, Sid Ganis has built an uncommonly long and successful career in Hollywood. The well-liked Brooklyn native gravitated to marketing and publicity, eventually working his way up to the Warner Bros. executive suite in 1977. At George Lucas’s behest, he moved to the Bay Area to spearhead Lucasfilm’s marketing of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983) and the first two Indiana Jones movies. Ganis returned to L.A. to assume the presidency of the Paramount Motion Picture Group, and subsequently joined Columbia’s senior management team before striking out on his own as a producer. His credits include the Adam Sandler flicks Big Daddy and Mr. Deeds, and Akeelah and the Bee with his wife Nancy Hult Ganis, a former journalist and documentary filmmaker. As a sign of his respect in the industry, Ganis served four terms as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science from 2005 through 2009. Ganis divides his time between Southern California and the Bay Area, where he sits on the boards of the San Francisco Film Society and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. We spoke on the phone in mid-December.

topics: bay area, hollywood, san francisco film society, world cinema

Steven Severin on his silent spring

It’s been roughly a decade and a half since the breakup of Siouxsie and the Banshees, the influential and audacious punk band that Steven Severin founded with the iconic Siouxsie Sioux in 1976. Once known primarily as a bassist, Severin now follows his muse in many directions. His most recent work has consisted largely of film scores, including several for silent cinema. In a rare San Francisco appearance, Severin will perform his scores live to screenings of rarely seen silent shorts, including Germaine Dulac’s avant-garde work The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) at SF360 Film+Club Tuesday, January 12. Dulac’s surrealist classic—a lunatic tale of the delusions of a priest—was met by antipathy on its original release by the British Board of Film Censors, which wrote that it is “apparently meaningless. . . . But, if there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.”

topics: composers, music, san francisco film society, silent film, world cinema

In Production

Legal eagle eye Kristine Enea zooms "Off the Grid"

The very short list of lawyers-turned-documentary makers includes Frederick Wiseman, Abby Ginzberg and a handful of others. The tally of filmmakers elected to public office is even shorter. Now contemplate for a moment making two documentaries while running for San Francisco Supervisor and holding down your day job. It’s no exaggeration to say that Kristine Enea is charting a unique course, one that combines activism, journalism, new media and politics. “People are craving information,” she declares, “and the boom in documentary filmmaking is evidence of that.” To hear someone with such deep connections outside the film community make that observation is particularly gratifying, and bodes well for independents (albeit less so for television news).

topics: activism, authors, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary film, san francisco film society

Experience

New Italian Cinema's fact, fiction, fascination

Is it soccer or politics that is Italy’s reigning national sport? Certainly the former is more beloved—but the latter arguably offers even more unpredictably suspenseful gamesmanship. The Italian political landscape frequently makes our own look flat as a Kansas cornfield. Unsurprisingly, then, that the 13th edition of San Francisco Film Society’s New Italian Cinema festival, finds the political and personal mixing more frequently than you’d find in any assortment of U.S. narrative films.

That’s certainly personified by this year’s tributee, mid-career writer/director Marco Risi. Son of the late Dino Risi, popular craftsman of robust comedies, Marco has demonstrated a strong social consciousness in the diverse projects he’s produced since the early 1980s.

topics: art film, audiences, italian cinema, san francisco film society, world cinema

Platform

Russell Merritt animates the archives for SF International Animation Festival

Celebrating the Bay Area’s status as a hotbed for animation creators as well as enthusiasts, the now annual San Francisco International Animation Festival kicks off Wednesday, November 11, with an historic live event that features Lawrence Jordan among others. It then officially opens Thursday, November 12 with the premiere of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s fantasy featuring George Clooney. And it continues through the weekend with experimental shorts, commercial features and family cartoon classics that push the boundaries of the medium. Among them are rarities gleaned from the archives: Walt Disney’s Alice Comedies, a series of Disney shorts produced between 1923 and 1927, in which a live-action girl is inserted into an imaginary cartoon world. J.B. Kaufman and Russell Merritt, authors of Walt in Wonderland and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies will introduce a selection of films and lead the program, presented with the help of the Walt Disney Family Museum. Merritt, a lively raconteur and Professor of Film Studies at UC Berkeley, where, for over 20 years, he has taught animation, art-house cinema and film history, will share a portion of his vast knowledge of film lore, Disney and otherwise, with the audience. First, he offered a preview for SF360.org readers. (SFIAF runs November 11-15; the Alice Comedies program takes place November 14, 1 p.m. at Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema.)

topics: animation, archives, avant-garde, music, san francisco film society

Experience

A tour through Taiwan Film Days

For the regular film festival attendee, Taiwanese Cinema has been associated with three names: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and the late Edward Yang. But for three days starting November 6, the San Francisco Film Society offers a chance to see contemporary Taiwanese cinema beyond the work of those three masters.

Two of the films screening in Taiwan Film Days were official Oscar entries for the Best Foreign Language film from Taiwan. Opening-nighter Cape No. 7 (Wei Te-sheng, 2008) was 2009’s submission; it follows an unlikely rock band—unlikely in that the ages of the members range from about that of the Jonas Brothers to about the Rolling Stones.

topics: art film, asian cinema, authors, bay area, san francisco film society, world cinema

Experience

SFFS's first annual Cinema by the Bay festival spotlights local talent

A film festival that’s long overdue arrives tonight with San Francisco Film Society’s first annual Cinema by the Bay. A wide-ranging showcase of local filmmaking, as well as a forum for the region’s influence as subject and setting in the work of filmmakers beyond the Bay, it runs through Sunday, October 25, and encompasses the straight-ahead to the avant-garde to the tantalizingly difficult to categorize (I’m thinking Etienne!) in a four-day program of features, shorts, docs and multimedia live performance from established and emerging artists.

topics: actors, audiences, avant-garde, bay area, curators, digital filmmaking, diy, documentary, dramatic films, exhibitions, experimental film, film arts foundation, film festivals, film history, filmmakers, independent film, san francisco film society