Kenneth Strong, an actor and teacher with PlayMakers Repertory Company and the Department of Dramatic Art since 1979, died Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 12. Strong had fought glioblastoma brain cancer since 2007, a battle whose early rounds were documented by arts journalist Orla Swift in a Nov. 25, 2007 feature story in the Raleigh News and Observer.
Strong had achieved distinction for his memorable contributions to over 50 PlayMakers productions, including Pericles, The Little Prince, God’s Man in Texas, and Art. He also performed in a 1996 Broadway revival of “Inherit the Wind” with George C. Scott, in addition to roles off-Broadway, in television series including “Law and Order,” “Spin City” and “In the Heat of the Night,” and in films.
According to the biographical information on the PlayMakers company website, Strong had also been originally cast to play Newman Noggs in PlayMakers’ 2009 production of “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby.” Weston Blakesley appeared in the role instead.
Strong had been in hospice for just under a month at the time of his death. Heidi Reklis, PlayMakers general manager, posted on his hospice website that at the end, Strong “was very much at peace and had his [wife] Kee, his mother, his brother and Kee’s brother in the room with him. His very last moment was a brilliant Ken Strong smile and a quiet breath. While we are all very sad, you could not ask for a better moment.”
A memorial service will be held Mon. Jan. 18, at 1 p.m., at Paul Green Theater.
In lieu of flowers, Strong’s family has requested that donations be made in his name to the Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University Medical Center. Click here for a link to their online donation page.
Longtime Indy theater and dance critic Byron Woods has been invited to teach the National Critics Institute’s theater criticism intensive seminar and to serve as critic-in-residence for the 2010 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF). KCACTF serves more than 18,000 college and university theater students each year, in programming all across the country. Woods is one of eight theater critics nationwide chosen to serve this festival, and he will be the critic in residence in Region VI, which includes Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and New Mexico. The Region VI conference will take place at Amarillo College, located in Amarillo, Texas, from Feb. 22-28.
Jennifer Coolidge in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans, which plays its final Triangle engagement Thursday, Jan. 14, at the Carolina Theatre in Durham. (Photo courtesy of First Look Pictures)
It took one simple acronym to put Jennifer Coolidge in the public eye: “MILF.” Since her appearance as the teen-deflowering Stifler’s mom in 1999’s American Pie, the actress says she’s been inundated with scripts for “horny mother and trophy wife” roles. But she looks back on the part with fondness: “It’s gotten me a lot of dates.”
Coolidge will appear at Goodnight’s for a stand-up comedy show beginning tonight and continuing through Sunday, though she doesn’t quite know what her set will be: “Probably a lot of weird stories about being an actress.” She should have plenty of those, for the last decade has made her a familiar face in film and TV, particularly in such films as Legally Blonde, A Cinderella Story and Best in Show.
“Kids will go up to me who’ve seen Cinderalla and go ‘Are you a bad witch?’ Sometimes you’ll get someone who goes, ‘You’re the crazy evil lady in Pootie Tang! Someone said they loved the girl I played on an episode of Friends, and I forgot I did Friends. It all becomes a distant memory.”
In the past year, Coolidge has played a hooker on ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager, a plastic surgery addict on Nip/ Tuck, another mom in Gentlemen Broncos, and a small part in Bat Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans for Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage.
“It’s honestly my favorite film from last year,” says Coolidge, who that both Cage and Herzog were a pleasure to work with, despite their gonzo on-set antics. “I had no idea what it would be like working with Nic Cage, but he’s just such a nice person, a real professional.”
And she’s a big supporter of the film, which is still playing in the Triangle: “I think it’s one of the best movies of the year, and not just because I have a small part in it. Watching it, it was just brilliant. And I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen Nic Cage in. He takes such huge risks sometimes, and he just went for it.” She also praises Werner Herzog as “un-Hollywood,” and reveals that despite the outrageous content of his films, he’s “never taken anything stronger than an Aspirin.”
Who would she like to work with? “I always liked Jack Nicholson, and I always hoped one day to get in a movie with him. I’ve always been obsessed with him and Anthony Hopkins. I would love to be like the mother or mentor of Angelina Jolie, or some up-and-coming young actress and show her how to operate the high-powered guns.”
Despite her prolific output, Coolidge says her acting plans this year are unclear.” “I’m doing the standup so I don’t get bored with my life,” she says. “When you live in Hollywood, it’s like you’re behind a tall hedge, this life that doesn’t feel normal. When I started doing standup as a lark, you have to fly everywhere and hang out with people at hotels and get to know the area. I’ve gotten to see all these parts of the United States I never would have seen otherwise. It’s like there’s this whole life I’ve been missing.”
She’s looking forward to checking out the local sights in Raleigh, which could include the flea market. “I have yet to go to a city where they don’t have a good flea market,” she says.
“It’s hard to find places where people are enthusiastic about what’s local,” she says. “I went on a date with this guy at one stop, and he took me to the mall.”
Word to the slammers — and all of the other spoken word and poetry performance practitioners in the region: Following the Friday, Jan. 15 performance of The Big Bang by Universes, PlayMakers Rep will sponsor aspoken word performance competition in Kenan Theater. Prizes to be awarded include a 3rd-generation Apple Ipod Touch.
The three-round competition is for original works, performed by their creators, on any subject, in any style. Performances in each round will be timed, and must be under three minutes in length (with a 30-second grace period before penalties will be assessed). Each poem may only be used once during the competition. Contestants are advised to leave musical instruments, pre-recorded songs, props and costumes at home.
The competition will be hosted by CJ Suitt, a poet and facilitator with Sacrificial Poets, a youth performance poetry team in Chapel Hill, and judged by the members of Universes.
To register, email Jeffrey Meanza, PlayMaker’s Director of Education/Outreach, at meanza@email.unc.edu. Participants may also show up on the night of the event, but night-of competition spots will be held on a first-come, first-served basis.
Up in the Air likely will open in the Triangle Christmas week. (Photo by Dale Robinette/ Paramount)
Earlier today, the Southeastern Film Critics Association (SEFCA) released its year-end awards. Up in the Air, the acclaimed comedy adapted from the Walter Kirn novel, received three nods, including best picture, best actor (George Clooney) and best adapted screenplay (Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner).
Other top awards: Meryl Streep took best actress honors for her turn as Julia Child in Julie & Julia, Christoph Waltz received best supporting actor for his sensational turn as a Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds and Mo’Nique claimed best supporting actress for her role as an abusive mother in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.
Taking the Wyatt Award for best Southern film was That Evening Sun, with Hal Holbrook. Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo, which was shot in North Carolina and played in the Triangle last summer, was the runner-up.
The complete press release is below. Indy freelancer Neil Morris is a member of SEFCA and participated in the voting.
It’s easy enough to say that Gaspard&Dancers posted the strongest opening bid of any regional dance company in recent years in their Sunday, December 6 company premiere at Reynolds Theater. In a region where dance in general and modern dance in particular has waned over this decade, there’s been precious little competition for such a superlative. Still, if a Durham audience gave their opening work, Anemone, a somewhat subdued response, by evening’s end the crowd was on its feet in support of choreographer and dancer Gaspard Louis and his new modern dance group.
And yet, for a dance critic—and, I strongly suspect, for Mr. Louis himself—such accolades seem, in retrospect, a bit beside the point: If standing ovations in Durham are better than the proverbial sharp stick in the eye, they still don’t always indicate if dance creators have truly achieved their artistic goals.
In the “oh, no, not again” category of pop culture news, Kate Gosselin of “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ fame was spotted by WRAL “working” for a day in a Raleigh eatery this week, probably for some new reality show.
The hush-hush location shoot is not the only North Carolina showbiz connection for the octo-mom with the Flock of Seagulls hairdo. Her recently-canceled reality series on TLC was shot for three years by Figure 8 Films in Carrboro, which created the series. (Figure 8 did not respond to repeated requests by The Independent Weekly for an interview this year, when revelations of dad Jon Gosselin’s infidelity derailed the marriage, and, soon after, the series.)
UPDATE 12/4/09: Still no news of Main Street. Sundance announces out-of-competition premieres. Main Street not included. We’ll have to wait for a different occasion for this film’s emergence.
In the category of “the news is that there’s no news….”
We looked up the Sundance competition lineup, which was announced yesterday, with the eager hope of seeing MAIN STREET, the Horton Foote-scripted drama that was filmed last summer in Durham. There are some good looking films in the competition, but no Main Street. We don’t know if it was submitted to Sundance or not, but it would be unusual for a film of this profile—with a literary pedigree, a respected, well-known cast, a modest budget and no distributor—to not be entered into Sundance.
This year’s Sundance is under the leadership of John Cooper, after 19 years of stewardship by Geoff Gilmore. Cooper told The New York Times that he, naturally, wanted to put his own stamp on the festival.
“We really tried to hunker down and make some hard decisions,” Mr. Cooper said. “We tried not to be wishy-washy about what is independent, which I know has been a criticism in the past. We weren’t going to be swayed by the marketability of a film.”
This seems to mean that he wants the festival’s programming to be about the quality of the filmmaking, not the Q-rating of the casts (we’ll see what the sponsors say about that!).
On the documentary side (which is where the best films ALWAYS are), we see new work by filmmakers who’ve been fixtures at Full Frame and elsewhere in the doc world these last few years, including Laura Poitras (Flag Wars, My Country My Country and now THE OATH; Annie Sundberg & Ricki Stern (The Trials of Darryl Hunt, The Devil Came on Horseback and now JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK); Amir Bar-Lev (New Orleans Furlough, My Kid Could Paint That and now I’M PAT _______ TILLMAN); Jeffrey Blitz (Spellbound and now LUCKY) and Davis Guggenheim (The First Year, It Might Get Loud, An Inconvenient Truth and now WAITING FOR SUPERMAN).
Let’s hope Full Frame can land most or all of these films next April.
And let’s hope to see MAIN STREET emerge somewhere. All is not lost for Sundance, by the way: The festival has yet to announce its out-of-competition special premieres. These films tend to star-driven titles that already have distributors.
A week after the twin eruptions of cinephilia at the far corners of the state (Cucalorus in Wilmington and the Asheville Film Festival), the Triangle played host to a festival of its own last Sunday. In its fourth year, the Carrboro Film Festival is comparatively low-key, and strictly locals-only—all entrants must reside, or have at one time resided, or at least stopped for gas in or near Orange County (just kidding about the last part). Sure, the organizers may be a bit loose in their definition of “local,” but then, a loose, down-home atmosphere is part of the festival’s appeal.
In a compact, six-hour schedule—shorts only—27 films screened to a packed Carrboro Century Center. Hoots and whistles greeted the names of the usual suspects in the credits, as the familial Triangle filmmaking crowd gathered to celebrate their own. There was something for every taste—music videos, animation, comedies, dramas, the odd genre horror film, even a relic from the late ’70s that brought to light the considerable distance, for better and worse, between that era and our own.
The three filmmakers who won Indy Arts Awards this year, Nic Beery, Ajit Anthony Prem and Todd Tinkham, made a strong showing, with five films between them. Particularly impressive was Prem’s HELLO, SORRY, WHATEVER, a Cliffs Notes romantic tragedy built around snatches of dialogue consisting almost exclusively of the words in the title. Amory Casto, an actress from Wilmington who’s since moved to Austin, gives a deeper performance than one can reasonably expect from a short in any festival. Coupled with an impressive turn by her co-lead, Dan Kelly, the film reveals Prem’s deft hand with creating dramatic situations, and with spotting and harnessing acting talent.
Another outstanding performance, by local theater stalwart Mike Wiley, was recognized with the Craft Award for Best Actor. In EMPTY SPACE, Wiley inhabits several of the characters from his one-man stage show, Dar He: The Lynching of Emmett Till. Co-directors Rob Underhill and Aravind Ragupathi shot Wiley in a raw indoor space with a mattress and a chair, rather like a spare stage set, putting the focus squarely on Wiley’s performance. It’s the first time he’s brought his work to film, and he was impressed with the results.
“The film captured the grittiness and desperation of the characters,” said Wiley. “The proximity of the camera makes the experience in some ways more immediate. With close-ups and with the sound and the music, it puts it in your face more than I’ve been able to achieve so far on stage.” The screening was Empty Space’s premiere, and it won the audience award for best film.
The nonfiction contingent increased its market share over previous years, with more documentaries than ever, according to committee chair Selena Lauterer. Two docs addressed the hazards of mountaintop removal, the coal extraction process that’s scarring wide swaths of the Appalachians and endangering nearby communities. Another pair centered on the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, housed in a former thrift store in downtown Greensboro. George Scheer created the unlikely art space and “museum” in his late grandmother Sylvia Gray’s shop, which was stuffed with 58 years’ worth of accumulated cloth scraps and odds and ends.
The art space has been attracting attention around the state since it opened a few years back, and was irresistible material for film students Cara Clark of UNC-Greensboro and Natalie Fava of Elon University. Clark’s film, SYLVIA AND GEORGE, completed a North Carolina trifecta of sorts, having played last weekend in Asheville and Wilmington. It’s informative, well-paced and lively, and earned Clark the Student Award.
A notable theme in the festival was the number of films that straddled the line between cinema and graphic design. Software packages like After Effects have democratized access to high-caliber special effects, providing a great many new tools to artists working in the “experimental” genre. Visually dazzling, nonlinear films swept the first- and second-place jury awards: ICHTHYOPOLIS, a campy, surreal blend of opera, collage and, uh, fish, by UNC-Wilmington professor André Silva, took first. BLOOD AND THUNDER, a music video by Philadelphia-based stop-motion animator Tobias Stretch, took second.
Widely available technology has also made it easy to add jazzy design elements to straightforward narrative films. Perhaps the best example of the latter was the third-place winner, FAIT, by Charlotte filmmaker and NC State grad Chris Crutchfield. It’s the story of an adorable little girl who entertains a stranger on a park bench with a shaggy dog story, which comes to life in the form of CGI text and symbols that appear to hang in the air all around them. The catchy visuals are reminiscent of a big-budget commercial, but they’re the product of a one-man, 10-day project.
A good reference point for the profound changes that filmmaking style and technique have undergone in the last 30 years was provided by BALLERINA, a short with an intriguing backstory. Shot in 1979 by Miami-based cinematographer Kenneth Peterson, it sat in a box for 30 years, and aside from a few small screenings, it hadn’t seen the light of day until now. The original prints of the film were destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but a work tape survived. Peterson, who moved to the Triangle area 15 years ago, decided to submit it to Carrboro and hope for its first festival appearance.
Ballerina tells the story of an aging ballerina and her longtime admirer, who finds her living in an isolated manor decades after her career took a tragic turn. The film unfolds in a leisurely 20 minutes, and the shots are intentionally hazy and slightly dim. The unhurried pace and the distinctive soft focus clearly place the film in its era. “I was going for an almost film-noirish effect,” said Peterson by phone (he was away in California for the birth of a grandchild and couldn’t attend the festival). “I meant it to be dark and romantic in its look.”
Peterson has observed first-hand the vast changes in filmmaking techniques that separate his film from the other entries. Today, for instance, filmmakers can roll inexpensive videotape to their heart’s content, whereas Ballerina was carefully composed on scrounged “short ends,” scraps of film stock left over from larger productions—”150 feet, 100 feet, 350 feet, whatever we could get our hands on,” he said. “Shooting was different then. You didn’t have a preview screen on the camera. You had to have your act together—whatever came out of the lab is what you got, which was sometimes scary.
“Editing was a very physical process—you were marking the film with a grease pencil and cutting it with a razor blade,” he said. “Effects were done in camera. Now everything is done in post.” As for the blurry, dark, “romantic” effect, Peterson achieved it by using a stocking behind the camera lens. Keep in mind, the word “stocking,” as it’s used here, isn’t a technical term for a special piece of filmmaking equipment—it refers to a pair of women’s pantyhose, from which a circular section is cut, stretched tight and held in place behind the lens with a small rubber band.
Peterson fondly recalled the favored brand of stocking: “It was Fogal Noblesse noir,” he remarked, rolling the words off his tongue.
Remember all those Colin Firth and Orlando Bloom sightings last summer? Well, the movie they were shooting, Main Street, just made a stop at one of the stations of the indie-film cross by being screened at the American Film Market earlier this month. The AFM is an international film bazaar in which hopeful producers show off their finished (or unfinished) films; this year, more than 8,000 buyers from around the world viewed approximately 500 films. Most films at AFM will never see the light of day, but others could become the next Paranormal Activity or Clerks or — well, it’s hard to put a finger on what niche Main Street would occupy. Lil’ Abner meets The Trip to Bountiful?
It’s safe to assume that Main Street won’t be the next Reservoir Dogs or Sex, Lies and Videotape…, but as potentially the last new film made from a Horton Foote screenplay, it will definitely merit attention from film festival programmers. And if it’s good, well then it could end up in theaters.
The big announcement to wait for is from Park City, home of the Sundance Film Festival. If Sundance holds to its past form, we should know the first week of December if Main Street will play the festival (it’s entirely possible, if unlikely, that the film’s producers didn’t submit it for consideration). In fact, given the cast and the late screenwriter, who recently was the subject of a New Yorker appreciation as well as a biography by Wilborn Hampton, one would have to think that this film would have an edge on the thousands of films with minimal budgets and no-name actors that are submitted every year.
If Main Street turns up in Park City, that would give Durhamites a lot to be excited about in late January. If it doesn’t play Sundance, it could mean a number of things besides “the film wasn’t good and it was rejected,” although it could mean that, too. We’ll just have to see.
We found this poster on the Internets. It’s not, to be charitable, the most original design. In fact, some people might call it cheesy. However, it’s worth remembering the particular function of a poster used at AFM, as this evidently was. The important thing is to let potential buyers know who’s in your film and a rough idea of the genre (Driving Miss Daisy meets Pride and Prejudice meets The Lord of the Rings meets Baby the Rain Must Fall?). Click the link to see an alternate poster being used on the Web site of Myriad Pictures, the film’s producer.
Lisa Creech Bledsoe on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": "Speed dating for the tech set," funny! Nice write up of an incredible event. I'm voting for Scrubby next year. Scrub-by, Scrub-by, Scrub-by!
Lisa aka @glowbird (the boxing chick)
DK on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": Just moved back to the Triangle from Seattle, which is where Ignite started. It kind of caught on and blew up really fast, and organizers had to keep upping the venue.
I think people have been looking for this kind of cabaret for a while. They like going somewhere and being a crowd together, and it's
Christine Fawley on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": A fabulous night highlighting the diversity of talent and intellectual pursuits here in the Triangle. An event like this could be held every month and still barely scratch the surface of the passions of our community.
We were honored to be included and appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the crowd as we delivered "20
