Photo of Dr. Roy Grundmann

Schedule | Fall 2007

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Screenings are held at the BU College of Communication, 640 Comm. Ave., Boston, Room B-05 (unless otherwise noted). Events are FREE to BU students and staff and their friends. Transportation: the “B” Boston College Green Line, the first stop at BU past Kenmore Square.

FLYING ON ONE ENGINE:
AN EVENING WITH JOSHUA WEINSTEIN
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 7 PM

A 2005 BU graduate in film production, Weinstein is premiering his extraordinary feature documentary, FLYING ON ONE ENGINE. In the filmmaker’s words, “It’s about a doctor who cannot walk or talk but has performed over 100,000 free operations for the children of rural India. Half the year, Dr. Dicksheet lives alone, eating Chinese take-out in a rodent-filled Brooklyn apartment. Then he travels to India, where people bow down to him - call him God - as he performs 50 free reconstructive surgeries a day.”

LIFE ON MARZ:
AN EVENING WITH MARIAN MARZYNSKI
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 7 PM

Marzynski was a distinguished Polish documentarian who, with little English or knowledge of America, was brought to teach filmmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1972. LIFE ON MARZ, which he will show at BU, is his new documentary memoir of those hilarious, post-hippy, film-school days when Gus Van Sant and other wild, idiosyncratic talents were his RISD students. See Van Sant’s actual student film within this wonderful movie described by the filmmaker as being “about the pain and joy of creativity, about friendship between a teacher and his students.”

WHAT A WONDERFUL PLACE:
AN EVENING WITH EYAL HALFON
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 7 PM

The acclaimed Israeli director-screenwriter, now visiting the US, shows his 2005 Oscar entry, WHAT A WONDERFUL PLACE, nothing less (or more unusual) than an Israeli cops-and-mobster movie, a multicultural feature set in a shady Israeli underworld, including forced prostitution of maids from the Ukraine; and Thais and Filipinos, too, are in the shadowland mix. Winner of the prestigious Special Jury Prize at Karlovy Vary, in the Czech Republic, WHAT A WONDERFUL PLACE was described in a rave review in VARIETY as “complex, hard-hitting, but leavened with poignant humor.”

PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND:
AN EVENING WITH JOHN GIANVITO
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 7 PM

The Emerson College filmmaking professor arrives after his triumph at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, where his PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND was one of the undeniable hits, much discussed and praised, even though it’s offbeat and non-narrative: a pensive, gorgeously shot ode to America’s forgotten activist heroes, and a filmic homage to Howard Zinn’s A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Also, Gianvito’s 2001 short, PUNCTURE WOUNDS (SEPTEMBER 11), which he calls “an imagistic evocation of the climate (emotional and otherwise) of the time.”

AN EVENING WITH LEW HUNTER
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 7 PM

The Chair Emeritus and Professor at the UCLA Department of Film and Television, Hunter will reminisce, and answer questions, about his life work: as an executive at NBC, CBS, ABC, and Disney, and as America’s most revered academic-based screenwriting teacher, whose famous UCLA course, Screenwriting 434, is also the name of his best-selling how-to book. Find out why Oliver Stone, Alexander Payne, and other Hollywood mavericks have consulted with Hunter about their scripts.

SHADOWS and PULL MY DAISY:
AN EVENING WITH RAY CARNEY
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 7 PM

A BU film studies professor, Carney is also, indisputably, the world’s foremost authority about the cinema of John Cassavetes, and the most impassioned champion of Cassavetes’ works. Tonight, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, Professor Carney has organized a monumental historic event. In 1959, at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 in New York, Cassavetes’ astounding first feature, SHADOWS, shared its world premiere with the Beat filmic manifesto, PULL MY DAISY, starring Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, and other Greenwich Village luminaries. At BU, we will repeat that 1959 night, maybe the first coupling of SHADOWS and PULL MY DAISY in 48 years!

HOHOKUM: AN EVENING WITH FRANK V. ROSS
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 7 P.M.

From Chicago comes prolific low-low-budget narrative filmmaker, Ross. A creative collaborator with Joe Swanberg, Ross has produced “mumble corps” features for the last few years, two of them by age 22. His films, willfully plotless, are a challenge (an affront?) to what is taught in screenwriting courses. Hohokum, which he’ll show at BU, follows two young people, boyfriend and girlfriend, as they spend time together in a desert town in Arizona. Ross describes it as “a movie about good moods, bad moods, varicella-zoster virus, and the in-between.” Boston Phoenix critic, Peter Keough, wrote: “Hohokum exceeds with humor and authenticity more than a half-dozen recent Hollywood comedies put together.”

AN EVENING WITH JAY COCKS
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 7 P.M.

Note: Event will take place in Photonics 206

We are honored to bring Cocks, a former Time Magazine film critic who turned successfully to screenwriting, including Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, the Cole Porter bio-pic, De-Lovely; and he co-scripted Gangs of New York for Martin Scorsese. (Also, there's an uncredited rewrite of Titanic.) At BU, Cocks will show and discuss his other commission for Scorsese, The Age of Innocence, his brilliant screen adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel of New York manners, starring Daniel-Day Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder.

AN EVENING WITH VERNA BLOOM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 7 P.M.

Bloom, married to Jay Cocks, is a versatile television and screen actress, with roles everywhere from The West Wing and Cagney & Lacey on TV, to playing opposite Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, to appearing in the teen favorite, Animal House, to starring in the 1960s classic, Medium Cool, to being featured as Mary, Mother of Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. For BU, Bloom has chosen to show the stunning revisionist western, The Hired Hand, in which she stars with the director, Peter Fonda.

AN EVENING WITH ROB NILSSON
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 7 P.M.

In the late 70s, Nilsson pioneered the American independent film movement with his acclaimed regional drama, Northern Lights. He's adhered to his credo of shoestring narratives, often using untrained performers, and shot, globally. in "real" spaces, including Jordan, Japan, and South Africa. At BU, Nilsson shows his 2006 feature, Opening, for which the filmmaker landed in Kansas City with a pre-selected cast awaiting him, but no story or script. With his actors, Nilsson, developed a movie about a yuppie art gallery opening disrupted by a cyclone: "Artistes, connoisseurs, philistines, and hangers-on are jammed together in a cellar with the forces of nature above their heads."

AN EVENING WITH ROBERT PATTON-SPRUILL AND PATTI MORENO
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 7 P.M.

In 1997, Patton-Spruill, an ex-BU film graduate student, thrilled everyone when his Boston-set, African-American crime drama, Squeeze, was picked for Sundance, then purchased and distributed by Miramax Films. Since, he's made two more features, and, with his producer wife, Patti Moreno, also a BU alumnus, he's overseen the New England Film and Video Festival. We are pleased to show their just-finished director-producer collaboration, straight from its world premiere at the AFI Festival: Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome, a feature music-doc tribute to perhaps the most sophisticated and politically astute of all rap groups. With Chuck D, the Beastie Boys, and Henry Rollins.