#in-person sundance festival

[suchananewsblog]

Sundance Film Festival celebrates the ‘magic’ of being back in-person

The Sundance Film Festival met the moment by going virtual for the past two years because of the coronavirus pandemic. But on Thursday, there was a palpable sense of relief from the festival’s leadership team at being in-person again. Sundance Institute CEO Joana Vicente, director of programming Kim Yutani, senior programmer John Nein and incoming Sundance Film Festival director Eugene Hernandez…

[thewaitisogre]

he loves a fun sweater

[shannendoherty-fans]

January 25, 2005 - Shannen Doherty with ex-boyfriend Julian McMahon (they acted together in the "Charmed" TV series and the "Another Day" film in 2001), ex-husband Rick Salomon, and Terrence Howard at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

[disarmluna]

Cast of Cat Person @ Sundance

Via Hollywood reporter

[themnmovieman]

MSPIFF 2024 Volume 2

It's Volume 2 of review from the 43rd Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival!!

The largest annual celebration of international cinema in the region MSPIFF43 Volume 2 Writing about film for more than ten years has allowed me to cover movies from blockbusters to indies. It’s also given me the privilege of attending major events like TIFF in Toronto and Sundance in Utah.  While traveling around the country is nice, it’s the ultimate thrill to be on my home turf, proudly…

[sweetsmellosuccess]

"Cat Person": When Kristen Roupenian's short story appeared in The New Yorker back in 2017, it caused a buzz massive enough that for a brief, shining moment, an actual literary piece became a viral sensation. Tapping into the modern romantic zeitgeist, in which a vast majority of communication between perspective couples occurs online, leaving up for doubt just about everything in terms of real-world commingling, Roupenian's story, about a college student who becomes briefly involved with an older man who proves deeply unscrupulous, added to that discomfort, the special double-jeopardy for women in this scenario, where one wrong turn could lead to lifetime of dread, or worse.

[thepeoplesmovies]

First Look At Sundance Film Festival Bound Cat Person

First Look At Sundance Film Festival Bound Cat Person #CatPerson #EmiliaJones #NicholasBraun @StudiocanalUK #Sundance2023

2023 is only a few weeks away  and the festival circuit will start once again. Sundance Film Festival is one of the big festivals and Cat Person will make it’s world premiere there. Studiocanal will be releasing the film in the UK and today we get a first look at a couple of the images. The genre bending thriller is directed by Susanna Fogel (The Flight Attendant, The Wilds). CODA star Emilia…

[robfinancialtip]

🏋️‍♂️🍽️Joseph Julian Soria shares his basic approach to training, which dates back to his active youth and a brief period of being overweight. He focuses on his former eating and exercise discipline and his present efforts to maintain it. He hilariously recounts how rapidly things can spiral out of control when discipline is lost, resulting in unforeseen effects such as eating oneself into a "food coma."

🏅🎬His transition from athlete to actor is examined, exposing how a college theater class influenced his career path. He discusses his competitive mentality and dealing with professional lows, highlighting the value of self-belief and self-awareness. JJ embraces discomfort, learning from past experiences, and her eagerness for future prospects. He encourages listeners to embrace their brilliance and not limit themselves from reaching their full potential.

💪👫His girlfriend's observation of possible body dysmorphia. Despite not being physically where he wants to be, he emphasizes the significance of attaining inner serenity. JJ addresses his addiction to difficulties, which extends beyond fitness and into other facets of his life, including relationships and performing. He recounts personal experiences about battling difficult circumstances and getting inspiration from motivational speakers such as Eric Thomas.

🎭🌟JJ Soria has received praise for his explosive performances, most notably as Private First Class Hector Cruz in the hit Lifetime series Army Wives and Pete Ramos in The Oath. His depiction of the major antagonist, MC Wyatt, in the Sundance Film Festival-premiered film Filly Brown, which stars Gina Rodriguez, demonstrated his range and talent. Soria's performances in films as disparate as All She Can (2011), High School (2010), and Fast to Furious (2009) have constantly been compelling. Notably, his major role in the independent film Mission Park (later renamed Line of Duty) cemented his place in the business. To learn more about JJ Soria's outstanding body of work, see his IMDB page or follow him on Instagram. He currently captivates fans as Erik Morales in the smash Netflix original series Gentefied.

🌱🌟Throughout with resilience, self-awareness, and self-improvement, JJ emerges from his experiences, both inspiring and a reminder of the necessity of facing adversity and believing in oneself. The discussion focuses on the fleeting nature of life and the importance of grabbing opportunities to grow and succeed. He provides insight into his attitude and path, with motivating undertones that encourage listeners to follow their goals with tenacity and self-confidence.

[therdjspectrum]

When it comes to presenting awards, Robert is all about being the perfect match for the person he’s honoring. || January 18, 2024

Robert Downey Jr. presenting the Trailblazer Award to Christopher Nolan at the Sundance Film Festival’s Opening Gala

[darerendevil]

*SPOILERS*

Aaron Schimberg kept it brief in his introduction before A Different Man had its world premiere January 21 at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival: “This is the one time I have to be able to show a film without anybody knowing anything about it.” A hush fell over the Eccles audience as the writer-director said that. It’s true. There’s before you see A Different Man, and then there’s after. The before is full of anticipation for the complex drama starring Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, and Renate Reinsve. The after is a rush of heart-clenching realizations about your own sense of self-worth, the true values of society, and questions about the ownership of your identity and story — even if you aren’t sure you want to own it yourself.

Edward (Stan) is an actor...

with a facial disfigurement who sticks to himself, doesn’t fix the leak in the ceiling of his apartment, and books parts in training videos for companies to learn how to treat people with disabilities just like everyone else. When his doctor tells him of a new experimental procedure that can “cure” his appearance, he decides to try it so he can be treated normally, like the people in the horrific training videos he shoots.

As Edward’s facial growths start to peel off — in a scene one can only describe as a moving Francis Bacon painting — instead of feeling relief, he still feels the need to hide who he is from everyone. That includes his playwright neighbor Ingrid (Reinsve), who has thrust herself into Edward’s orbit without fully letting him into hers.

His solution? To fake his own death and reemerge as a new “normal” guy hastily named Guy. This shedding of his skin seems to be working — he gets a new job as the most shiny of real estate agents and has a new, fancy loft apartment — until he sees that Ingrid has followed through on her goal to write a play with a part for him. Unfortunately, the play is about him, her dead neighbor, and their relationship through her eyes.

This is where A Different Man starts to fold in on itself in a brilliant meta statement about representation and authorization within the entertainment industry.

“[The film] is playing with various disability tropes,” explains Schimberg during the post-premiere discussion. “Like the sad disfigured man in his apartment, and playing around with those elements.” Since Edward’s story starts with that trope, it leaves the viewer uncomfortable and upset when we see Ingrid using these same tired storylines. It proves that she never really knew Edward, but had no problem using his disfigurement to push through a play about her being a “good person.”

But, wait, weren’t we introduced to Edward in the same fashion? The film doubles down on this complication by having Edward-presenting-as-Guy beg his neighbor to let him play her version of himself within her off-Broadway show. Even with the face of an actual Hollywood movie star, Edward is bending his life around the preconceived notions of others. His desire to be both the before and after Edward is complicated further when Oswald (Pearson), an effervescent and charming man with similar facial disfigurements as the original Edward, enters the theater during rehearsal and proceeds to take his role and his relationship with Ingrid away.

On the subject of casting this complicated weave of an identity story, Schimberg recalls how thorny that was even within his own singular vision: “I thought you’re caught in a bind because some people said that casting Adam was exploitative, and then on the other hand casting a Hollywood star and putting him in prosthetics is also the opposite of what we think of as representation, even though it’s still very commonly used. So I was caught in a bind and I just thought: I’m going to do a movie that does both. I’m going to have a Hollywood actor in prosthetics, I’m going to have Adam be Adam and see what comes of it and build some kind of path forward.”

That path forward is a masterful film filled with tension. But while it might seem like the struggle is going to be between Edward and Oswald, A Different Man’s only true tension is within Edward himself. Stan excels as he wrestles with embarrassment and longing for his former face. Every time someone comments on Oswald’s appearance to Edward while he’s passing as Guy, you can feel the hot anger within him because they assume he agrees with their vile opinions. “Suppression is a really bad thing,” Stan says, passionate about his character and this creative journey. “That was my take on [why Edward hid his true identity]. But I think, sometimes, when you spend so much time denying yourself you don’t have the courage in those moments to speak up.”

“That was kind of the hook we gave to Sebastian,” Pearson continues. “Yeah you don’t know what it’s like to have a disfigurement, but you do know what it’s like to not have privacy and to have your life constantly invaded, for better or worse.” Stan nods his head emphatically, “Public property, right?”Pearson nods back at him down the line. “Yeah, those are the kind of chats we had to get it right.” He pauses and chuckles.

“I’m glad it wasn’t a physical battle because I would have lost that one.”

[suchananewsblog]

Sundance 2023: After two virtual years, film festival returns to the mountains

Randall Park made a pact with himself some years ago that he wouldn’t attend the Sundance Film Festival if he didn’t have a project there. But the “Fresh Off the Boat” star never imagined that his first time would be as a director and not as an actor. His adaptation of “Shortcomings,” Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel about three young-ish Asian Americans finding themselves in the Bay Area, is among…

[iwanthermidnightz]

This was a very good article! I loved hearing Kristen’s (and Jodie Fosters) perspective as a queer trailblazer. Inserting some snippets below 🤍

To get to this point, Stewart’s weathered more than a decade of unrelenting media scrutiny, first about her straight relationships, then about her gay ones, as she figured out her own identity. She leveraged her global stardom from the “Twilight” franchise not to become a superhero or a lifestyle guru, but to fuel an astonishing run of acclaimed independent films, including “Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Still Alice,” “Certain Women,” “Personal Shopper” and the Princess Diana drama “Spencer,” for which she earned an Oscar nomination.

“Whenever I hear that she’s doing something new, I’m so curious to see what it is, because it’s going to be a movie that hasn’t been made before,” says Clea DuVall, who directed Stewart in one of her only Hollywood films during this period, Hulu’s 2020 release “Happiest Season,” the first lesbian Christmas rom-com backed by a major studio. “She really is so herself. And I think that’s why so many people respond to her the way they do — because she is so authentic.”

By the time Stewart stepped on the stage of “Saturday Night Live” in February 2017, she’d spent the previous two years trying to convince the press that it was OK to write about her relationships with women, rather than resort to the vexing practice of referring to her girlfriend as her “gal pal.”

“It wasn’t even like I was hiding,” she says. “I was so openly out with my girlfriend for years at that point. I’m like, ‘I’m a pretty knowable person.’”

But even with that posture, the media’s “gal pal” dog whistle triggered a deeper, more painful history of intrusive curiosity about Stewart’s sexual identity. “For so long, I was like, ‘Why are you trying to skewer me? Why are you trying to ruin my life? I’m a kid, and I don’t really know myself well enough yet,’” she says. “The idea of people going, ‘I knew that you were a little queer kid forever.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, you should honestly have seen me fuck my first boyfriend.’”

It’s worth dwelling on this point: For almost the entire history of Hollywood, queer actors dreaded the public discovering who they really were, and that fear kept the closet door firmly closed. “Because I was gay, I really retreated,” says DuVall, who came out publicly in 2016. “Even doing a teeny tiny movie like [the ’90s lesbian cult favorite] ‘But I’m a Cheerleader,’ people immediately were like, ‘She’s gay, how can we out her?’ I wanted to stay small.”

Stewart, though, went big, with a monologue on “SNL” about how President Donald Trump, in 2012, obsessively tweeted about her relationship with Pattinson. “Donald, if you didn’t like me then, you’re really probably not going to like me now, because I’m hosting ‘SNL’ — and I’m, like, so gay, dude,” she said to wild cheers from the audience.

“It was cool to frame it in a funny context because it could say everything without having to sit down and do an interview,” Stewart says before running through the kind of questions queer actors have had to consider before coming out publicly: “‘So what platform is that going to be on? And who’s going to make money on that? And who’s going to be the person that broke it?’ I broke it, alone.”

A few days later, I mention Stewart’s “SNL” monologue to Foster over the phone, and she lets out a big laugh. “I never knew that,” she says. “What a wonderful, funny, wry, modern way to be honest to the world. That’s just awesome.”

As Stewart talks about her “SNL” experience, I think about how no stars of her age and stature ever came out when I was growing up as a gay kid in the 1980s and ’90s. So to have her professional trajectory not skip a beat feels like real progress.

When I tell her as much, she takes the conversation in an unexpected direction. “Because I’m an actor, I want people to like me, and I want certain parts,” she says. “I have lots of different experiences that shape who I am that are very, very far from binary. But I did get good at the heteronormative quality. I play that role well. It comes from a somewhat real place — it’s not fake. But it’s fucked up that if I was gayer, it wouldn’t be the case.”

I try to clarify what she means: “So your career maybe would have suffered after coming out had you not affected a performative femininity …”

“… that I know works to my advantage,” she admits, nodding. “That’s why I’m fucking stoked about ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’”

Stewart didn’t let that scandal, as intense as it was in the moment, stifle her. Instead, she grew to fully embrace her queerness in her public life — like bringing her girlfriend, screenwriter Dylan Meyer, to the Oscars in 2022. “It’s not that I wasn’t scared,” Stewart says. “It was just that there was no other way to live.”

She’s even started to recognize that the most ostensibly heterosexual thing she’s done, “Twilight,” has its own queer sparkle. “I can only see it now,” she says. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie. I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”

I ask Stewart if she understands how much her decision to come out has also made her a role model for LGBTQ people. She cackles. “Oh, you have no idea,” she says. “Every single woman that I’ve ever met in my whole life who ever kissed a girl in college is like, ‘Yeah, I mean, me too.’ I’m constantly joking with my girlfriend. I’ll be sitting there and be like” — she whispers — “‘She’s gay too. Everyone’s gay.’”

It can be easy to forget just how rare this still is, a giant movie star living such an openly queer life. “It feels like a generational thing, where I’m watching somebody make the leaps that I didn’t think I could ever do,” Foster says.

After fiercely guarding her privacy for decades, Foster came out publicly at the 2013 Golden Globes, and has just now played her first explicitly gay character in the 2023 biopic “Nyad.” Talking about Stewart has put Foster in a reflective mood. As our call is coming to an end, she offers this unprompted insight: “I get a lot of questions about who I was and what I represented in the industry, and was I — I don’t know …” She exhales. “Was I helpful in terms of representation? I’m sure there’s a 12- or 13- or 14-year-old when I was making movies as a young person who said that I had something to offer to them in their life as a queer person. I had to do it my way. I had pioneers to help the way, who I’m grateful for. And now people can be grateful for Kristen for being the pioneer. I’m just — I’m grateful to her.”

This sense of communion with the wider LGBTQ tribe is why Stewart has dedicated herself to embracing the fullness of who she is as a bro-y, butch-y queer woman in her work as an actor and, come hell or high water, a director.

“I was like, ‘I would like to be on that team because we need each other,’” Stewart says. “I didn’t want to be left out anymore. It was this whole world that I didn’t realize I could explore.”

[moments-on-film]

The first images and trailer have finally been released for Fremont, staring Anaita Wali Zada and featuring Jeremy Allen White. I was fortunate enough to see Fremont in January at the Sundance Film Festival and can personally attest that it’s a very sweet and poignant film.

Anaita Wali Zada and Jeremy Allen White are great together and both made me cry with the depth of their performances, and their portrayal of aching loneliness. The story is unique, and those of you who are looking to see more of the softer, gentler side of Mr. White, on film, and in glorious black and white, are in for a treat.

[mrs-stans]

Meet the makeup wizard who transformed Sebastian Stan into ‘A Different Man’

By Josh Rottenberg

At the tender age of 5, Mike Marino saw “The Elephant Man” for the first time and his life was forever changed. When David Lynch’s haunting and heartbreaking story of the disfigured John Merrick would air on HBO in the early 1980s, Marino found himself horrified but unable to look away, sparking a fascination with prosthetics that would eventually lead him to becoming one of Hollywood’s top makeup artists.

“I was so afraid of it, but little did I know how beautiful that story was and how much of an imprint it would leave on my brain and soul,” says Marino, 47, who earned consecutive Oscar nominations in 2022 and 2023 for his makeup work on “Coming 2 America” and “The Batman,” the latter starring a totally transformed Colin Farrell. “If it wasn’t for that film, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”

But for actor, TV presenter and disability rights advocate Adam Pearson, Lynch’s film took on a more painful role in his life. Growing up in England with neurofibromatosis type 1, a rare genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow on his face, Pearson was often taunted by classmates who cruelly called him “Elephant Man” and other names. As he got older, he saw how movies routinely depicted people with disfigurements as freaks, villains or victims, stripping away their humanity. “There’s an element of laziness to it,” says Pearson, 39. “How do we show this character is evil? Let’s slap a scar on them.”

Now, through a twist of fate, the lives of Marino and Pearson have intersected on a very different project: the darkly funny, mind-bending psychological thriller “A Different Man.” Directed by Aaron Schimberg, the A24 film stars Sebastian Stan as Edward, a shy, disfigured actor working in New York City who undergoes an experimental procedure to transform his appearance, only to find himself losing the role he was born to play — himself — to a cheerful, outgoing man named Oswald with his same facial deformity, played by Pearson. Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) co-stars as a playwright whose latest work brings Edward’s identity crisis to a head.

“A Different Man,” which The Times called “a self-deconstructing meta-pretzel of a dark comedy” following its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, tackles complex themes of identity, beauty and disability with a blend of Charlie Kaufman-esque surrealism and David Cronenbergian body horror. Along with Stan’s performance, Marino’s meticulously crafted prosthetics are key to bringing Edward and his inner agonies to life, reflecting the deeper emotional anguish of a man trying to escape his own skin.

“The movie portrays how the shell of who we are should not dictate our spirit and our personality,” Marino says. “I think it’s a very important film, much like ‘The Elephant Man’ was.”

When Schimberg first wrote the script, inspired by his own struggles with a cleft palate and his experience working with Pearson on his 2019 satire “Chained for Life,” he initially had no idea how he would actually pull off the film’s demanding prosthetics work. “I was sort of blissfully ignorant,” says Schimberg. “After Sebastian came aboard, we started cobbling the film together very quickly. It was only about a month before shooting that I realized this film was going to completely fall apart if we didn’t get this right. It was very down to the wire.”

Signing on as an executive producer for the film, Stan asked around about makeup artists in the New York area who could handle such a difficult job under that kind of time pressure. One answer consistently came back: “Literally everyone, hands down, was like, ‘You’ve got to get Marino,’ ” the actor recalls.

Though he was already busy with a job on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Marino, who has done his share of more fantastical creatures, leapt at the challenge of re-creating a real-life disfigurement like Pearson’s. “I’m fascinated with people that have something going on with their skin because it’s just the most interesting, artistic, natural thing,” Marino says. “For me, there’s an amazing beauty to how Adam looks. This was not about a scary face or a monstrous person. I don’t like to do things like that with no soul or purpose.”

Marino’s passion for makeup and prosthetics took root early in life, inspired by industry legends like Dick Smith (“The Exorcist”) and Rick Baker (“An American Werewolf in London”). Growing up in New York, Marino started honing his skills as a preteen by practicing on his friends with latex, foam and various chemicals, destroying his bedroom rug in the process, to the chagrin of his parents. While still in high school, he mailed his portfolio to Smith and received encouragement and advice by phone from the makeup legend, who won an Oscar in 1985 for “Amadeus” and earned an honorary Academy Award for his life’s work in 2012. “Once he acknowledged me, it was like, OK, this is serious. There was no stopping me.”

After cutting his teeth on “Saturday Night Live” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Marino broke into film with the 2007 psychological thriller “Anamorph” and quickly became known for his versatility, seamlessly switching between fantasy creatures and more subtle, realistic applications. His work on Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” amplified the film’s psychological horror, while on Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” he enhanced the film’s digital de-aging of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino with carefully crafted prosthetics.

Outside of film, Marino created the Weeknd’s plastic-surgery-gone-wrong look for the singer’s “Save Your Tears” video. “It’s all problems to solve,” Marino says. “There is no playbook.”

Diving into “A Different Man,” Marino used photographs and 3D scans of Pearson’s face, which has undergone some 40 surgeries over the years, as the basis for a multi-piece silicone prosthetic that would work with Stan’s features. “There was no way I could completely replicate Adam’s exact proportions,” he says. “I had to make some aesthetic choices.”

While the makeup work in “The Elephant Man” benefited from that film’s grainy black-and-white cinematography, the prosthetics in “A Different Man” had to withstand more unforgiving scrutiny. To put his Edward face to the test, Stan would walk from Marino’s makeup chair to the set through the streets of New York and crowds of strangers, giving him tremendous insight into how people treat those who look different.

“I went to my old coffee shop and the same barista who’d served me for years couldn’t identify me,” Stan recalls. “I got to really feel people’s reactions in real time. There were people who couldn’t even look at me, other people were staring and sometimes you’d get a bigger reaction, like, ‘Oh s—, it’s the Elephant Man!’ As Adam puts it, you feel like public property.”

Pearson, who shares his character’s sunny gregariousness, encouraged Stan to think about it like he does with his own experience as a movie star. “I was like, ‘You don’t know the level of invasion I get with people pointing, staring and taking photos, but you do understand a very similar thing from this angle, so lean into that heavily,’ ” he says. “ ‘And if it makes you uncomfortable, lean into it further.’ ”

While wearing the prosthetics, Stan could only see out of one eye and had limited hearing in one ear, challenges that helped further inform his performance as a man who has learned to shy away from potential threats and insults. “Edward is a character that has had to endure a lot of emotional abuse and probably some physical abuse, so he is probably always on his left foot a little bit in case something happens,” Stan says.

As Edward’s face changes following his radical treatment, Marino made additional prosthetics showing the transition, including an “extremely soft, mushy version” that, in a particularly Cronenbergian scene, Stan could pull off in chunks.

Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot in “The Batman,” work for which Marino was Oscar-nominated. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Marino’s talent for transforming stars is on full display in Farrell’s hulking, thuggish look as the Penguin in 2022’s “The Batman” and the new HBO spinoff series. “When Colin saw the sculpture I made, ideas started exploding,” Marino says. “Once we did a makeup test, it was magical — he knew how to speak, how to walk and he was already the guy.”

Marino, who is preparing to make his directorial debut based on a script he wrote set in the 1980s (“It’s deliberately not effects-heavy,” he hints), has lost none of his passion for the transformative power of latex and silicone since the days he was obsessively poring through issues of Cinefex magazine as a teenager. “If you think of Michelangelo showing beauty 500 years ago in painting and sculpture, I’m still showing that same beauty but in this new hyper-realistic way, in silicone,” says Marino, who named his makeup effects studio Prosthetic Renaissance. “It’s a very unique art. It’s like moving sculptures and paintings all at once.”

As for Pearson, if he were offered an experimental treatment to change his face, like in “A Different Man,” he says he wouldn’t take it. Despite the challenges it has brought him, Pearson believes his face has shaped the life he leads today.

“I joke with my friends that my disability does a lot of heavy lifting for my appalling personality,” he says with a laugh. “Everyone thinks it’s hard to go from non-disabled to disabled but I think the other way around would be even harder. The path we walk and the struggles we go through make us who we are and they’re inseparable from one another.”

[flanaganfilm]

Hey Mike! Can you talk about your experience going from Absentia to Oculus? That process after Absentia went on its festival run to pitching Oculus? Would love to learn about that time in your life & career!

I moved to Los Angeles in 2003, right after I graduated college. I went to Towson University in Maryland, was an EMF major (Electronic Media & Film) and had wanted nothing more than to make movies my whole life. We were a comfortable middle class military family (my dad was in the Coast Guard) and for most of my life, making movies for a living felt like an impossible dream.

When I moved to LA I took whatever work I could find. I shot and edited those local car commercials you see on TV at 2am, I was a logger and an AE for reality TV shows, and I eventually worked my way to editing.

I said I'd give myself 5 years to make it in Hollwood. By the time we shot Absentia, I'd been here for 7 years, and in that time I hadn't gotten any closer to my dream.

I've already written at length about how Absentia came along and what it was like to make that little movie, and I've recently blogged about how the Oculus premiere changed my life and birthed my career, so I won't rehash those - but I don't often talk about what went on in between.

I finished editing Absentia just before my oldest son was born in 2010, and went back to working full-time as a reality TV editor. In fact, in the months leading up to his birth, I was working double-time - I spent my days at a company called Film Garden working on a series for DIY Network, and my nights editing packages at Nash Entertainment for those true crime clip shows. Whatever it took to keep the lights on and provide as much support as I could for my son.

While this was happening, I'd submitted Absentia to a pile of film festivals. We didn't get into any of the majors - Sundance, SXSW, and Toronto all passed on the film. Our world premiere was at the Fargo Film Festival, where Tom Brandau, one of my former professors from Towson - and one of my mentors - was teaching.

(Our original festival poster, WAY better than the weird clip art that would come later)

The movie got into a fair amount of film festivals, and we traveled with it as much as we could. I have fond memories of the Phoenix Film Festival, San Luis Obispo (where I met Greg Kinnear at a party and very awkwardly asked for a picture - you can see how thrilled he is about it) and my personal favorite: the Fantastia Film Festival in Montreal.

(At one of the screenings, I believe the San Luis Obispo Film Festival)

While this was happening, the film was picked up for a tiny VOD and DVD release through Phase 4 Films.

They were a Canadian distribution company whose claim to fame was putting out Kevin Smith's Red State under a very unusual distribution model. They acquired the movie, which led to a company holiday part in Hollywood.

There, I briefly met Kevin Smith for the first time. We've met again since, and I've now had a chance to thank him for the kindness he showed me back then - I was just some starstruck kid at a party, but he was gracious and available and inspiring. I really admire the way Kevin deals with his fans, and I've tried to emulate it over the years.

So that was kind of it for Absentia. We went to a few festivals, went to a few parties, and posed for a few pictures with some people we admired. Phase 4 designed some truly godawful cover art, dropped the movie into video stores, and that was that.

($2.99 is a pretty good deal)

So Absentia had pretty much run its course. It had a passionate following of fans, but between the crappy art design and glut of low budget horror films on the market, its moment had already come and gone. I was back at work, editing a series for DIY Network called Extra Yardage, and yearning for another chance to make a movie.

Absentia might not have broken open the industry doors like I'd wanted it to, but one thing it did yield was a meeting with an entertainment attorney named Joel VanderKloot.

I had been represented a few times over the years by various managers (to be honest, they were actually Jeff Howard's managers, and they took me on because we had a co-written project together.) But those relationships hadn't gone anywhere, I'd never sold a script or booked a job, and when I suggested making Absentia they were not supportive ("You've already tried the indie thing, haven't you?") so by the time Absentia was made, I was completely unrepped.

Joel was a family friend of Jason Poh, who was one of our Absentia Kickstarter backers. He was a guy who'd just found the project online and donated a thousand bucks. He kept up with us, and loved the final movie. He told me he knew an entertainment lawyer and offered to arrange a lunch.

I left my editing job at Film Garden for a long lunch and met Joel in Santa Monica (this was a day-killing drive for me). Joel had seen the movie and really liked it. We had a good lunch, but wasn't immediately sure about taking me on - it's a lot of work to take on a new client, and there wasn't much heat on my movie. But there was something there that he liked, and he called later that day to say he would take me on as a client.

I was elated. I felt like I'd made my movie to the best of my ability, and that it had flashed in the pan and then died... no one had noticed outside of a few festival audiences and critics. But here was someone who worked in the industry and he saw something in the film that he believed in.

Joel started looking for managers while I clung to my day job. He passed the movie around and we had a few nibbles, which led to the first manager in my career who wanted to simply represent ME: Nicholas Bogner.

Bogner went about setting general meetings at production companies who specialized in horror films. There weren't a lot of takers, and not everyone was willing to watch an entire feature film in consideration of a general meeting. So it was hit or miss - I was a nobody, after all, and they get these kinds of incoming inquiries all the time.

But there were a few takers. And the very first meeting I had was with Anil Kurian at Intrepid Pictures.

Again, I took an extended lunch from my editing job and drove across town to Intrepid's offices in Santa Monica. I was beyond nervous when I sat in the waiting room. The young man working the front desk signed me in and offered me a water. And then, just before the meeting started, he leaned over and he said "I loved Absentia, by the way."

Anil was a really cool executive and we had a good general meeting. At the end of it, he introduced me to the heads of Intrepid: Marc Evans, and Trevor Macy.

We all ended up in the conference room, where posters for Intrepid's other movies - at that time, The Strangers and The Raven - were hanging. I vividly remember staring at them while I pitched all five of the ideas I had for movies.

One of them was a story about a little boy whose dreams manifested in real life, and another was a take on Stephen King's novel Gerald's Game. But at the time, none of these ideas worked. The meeting was over, and everyone was politely going about their day.

I felt a panic in me. It was my first real meeting, the door had been cracked open just an inch by Absentia, and I was about to walk away with nothing. Would my new manager want to keep me? Would my new lawyer think he was wasting his time?

I stopped in the doorway and turned back. "I've got one other thing," I said. "I made a short years ago about a haunted mirror, and I have a take for a feature."

They kind of laughed at the idea of a haunted mirror. "How do you make that scary?" Trevor asked. I said "Think of it like a portable Overlook Hotel," and the room got a little quieter.

"I'd like to see that short," Trevor said. I agreed to send it immediately.

I ran back to work, stayed a few hours late to make up the time I'd burned on my lunch hour, and went home to find a DVD copy of Oculus: The Man with the Plan.

I'd made that short in 2005. It was 20 mins long, and a lot of fun. Over the years whenever I'd get into meetings (all courtesy of Jeff Howard, who had sold scripts long before we started writing together), people would see it and ask about a feature. Every time, though, the conversation stalled because they wanted the film to be a found footage movie, or they'd balk at the idea of me directing a feature.

I sent the DVD to Intrepid and waited. About a week later, they called and asked me to come back in.

I took another long lunch (this would become quite a habit as the project advanced) and drove back down. We met again in the conference room, but this time the mood was a little different.

Trevor said "We're interested in this. How would you expand it? I know there are cameras in the room with the man and the mirror, which begs the question of found footage..."

My heart sank.

"... but we're thinking that's a mistake. It looks like all the fun is in playing with reality, and you can't do that with found footage. So how would you do it?"

And we were off.

I won't rehash the long journey between this meeting and the Oculus premiere at Toronto (scroll down to find another blog about that), but that was really the moment when things changed.

I drove back to work a little giddy. Intrepid optioned the short film, I called Jeff Howard to see if he'd still want to work on a feature with me, and we were commissioned to write the script.

It was my first Hollywood job. I was paid the bare minimum, but I was also able to join the WGA because of the deal. I still didn't quit my day job (and wouldn't for a long time, not until the movie was really shooting in Alabama the following year) but I was off to the races.

Once the script was done, Oculus would lead to my first agents (at APA, and they treated me very well) and my first "real" movie.

What's particularly neat about this time, looking back, is that I owe it all to Absentia. We'd made this tiny little movie to try to kick open the door of Hollywood and start a career. And despite the enormous pride I had in the finished film, it felt for a long time like it hadn't quite succeeded in that.

But quietly, subtly, the movie did exactly what I hoped it would. The festival screenings built up a small but confident word of mouth. The movie led directly to my attorney Joel (who still represents me to this day), which led directly to my first real representation, which led directly to Intrepid Pictures.

Trevor Macy is now my business partner and has produced every single thing I've ever made since. We run Intrepid Pictures together, and I see that same eagerness in the faces of young filmmakers who find their way to us for general meetings. I try to be as supportive and accessible to them as I possibly can, because I remember very well what it feels like to stand in their shoes.

And Trevor even ended up making those other pitches he'd rejected all those years ago - Before I Wake and Gerald's Game followed soon after Oculus was done.

Absentia did everything I could have wanted it to do, and much more. I'll always remember that period of time with great affection... but man, it was stressful. The uncertainty of those years still exists in me, I don't think it'll ever leave.

Someone told me, along the way, that there wouldn't be a moment when I realized I "made it." It would happen while I wasn't looking. That ended up being absolutely true.

[nerdygaymormon]

LDS LGBTQ Anniversaries for 2023

For 8 years I’ve been in charge of creating my stake’s calendar. In addition to stake meetings & activities, I include holidays and significant LDS anniversaries like when it was the 175th anniversary of the founding of Sunday School or 40 years ago priesthood and temple blessings were restored to members of African descent. 

This year there's only 1 significant anniversary I put on the calendar: Sept 21st will be 200 years since the angel Moroni first appeared to Joseph Smith.

For readers of this blog, here’s a few anniversaries this year that may be of interest:

75 years ago

April 1948 - Gay BYU students Kent Goodridge and Richard Snow met with church president George Albert Smith. They were in love and wanted to get a clarification of their ‘status.’ President Smith treated them with great kindness and told them to "live their lives as best they could" in their companionship. They had gambled making this appointment and worried they could be excommunicated on the spot, instead they left feeling loved and valued. 

Unfortunately, this live-and-let-live attitude didn’t last long as President Smith's successor, David O. McKay, felt homosexuals "should be excommunicated without any doubt, that the homosexual has no right to membership in the Church."

30 years ago

May 18, 1993 - Apostle Boyd K. Packer gave an address to the First Presidency, the Quorum of the Twelve, and the Presiding Bishopric, in which he stated there are three great threats to the LDS Church: the gay/lesbian challenge, the feminist movement, and scholars 

September - The September Six are excommunicated for publishing scholarly work against or criticizing church doctrine or leadership. This was widely reported in national press and resulted in a chilling effect on academics challenging approved church narratives

25 years ago

October - Mormon-raised Russell Henderson and his friend Aaron McKinney tortured Matthew Shepard and left him for dead in Wyoming. The shocking crime made international news. The outrage over this crime eventually lead to the Matthew Shepard Act in 2009 which expanded the federal law’s definition of “hate crime” to include sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2018, Matthew's ashes were moved to the Washington National Cathedral

15 years ago

Chieko Okazaki, the first person of color to serve in an LDS Church general organization presidency, was first counselor in the General Relief Society President when she published a book in which she wrote “A family with a gay child is not a failed family. It's a family with a member who needs special love and understanding and who has love and understanding to give back.”

California’s Prop 8 - Church leadership heavily encouraged members donate time and money to pass Prop 8 which would ban same-sex marriage in California. About 1/2 of the money raised for its passage came from Mormons. The proposition passed and immediately there were protests at temples in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, and the church received a lot of negative exposure. Since then the church has preferred behind-the-scenes roles in its efforts to combat queer rights

10 years ago

Dec 20, 2013 - Same-sex marriages became legally recognized in Utah. Seth Anderson & Michael Ferguson, both former Mormons, are the first gay couple to get married in Utah 

5 years ago 

January 2018 - The documentary "Believer" featuring Imagine Dragon's lead singer Dan Reynolds premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Reynolds discussed the intersection of LGBTQ people in the Mormon community. Later in the year he appeared on The Ellen Degeneres Show and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and spoke of LGBTQ Mormons and suicides

January 2018 - Josh Weed, the most famous LDS gay man in a mixed-orientation marriage, announces that he & his wife will get a divorce. They apologize to everyone who ever had their story held up as an example that gay people can get married and stay in the Church.

February 2018 - Church-run Family Services states it no longer provides reparative therapy or sexual orientation change efforts

February 2018 - Richard Ostler starts a podcast called “Listen, Learn, and Love,” which has LGBTQ members/former members share their stories

March 2018 -  BYU sponsors its first LGBT campus event, a panel of four students--Kaitlynn Wright, Ben Schilaty, Sarah Langford and Gabriel Cano–answer student-submitted questions

As president of the LGBTQAI+ and Allies Club, Jill Stevenson worked with administration at Southern Virginia University, a predominantly-LDS liberal arts college, to get the university to officially recognize the club, and to allow same-gender dancing on campus

June 2018 - The Church’s Family Search website starts allowing same-sex marriages to be recorded

July 2018 - The Provo Freedom Festival allows LGBTQ groups to participate in the parade due to a contract it had signed with the city of Provo which included a non-discrimination clause.

Dec 2018 - Stacey Harkey, a cast member on BYUTV’s popular show Studio C, comes out as gay