Download and View The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour on Fandor!

As of September, my film The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour is now available to download on the video-on-demand site Fandor.  You can access and download the film here.  It is featured on that site with many much-talked-about recent films such as Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, Damien Chazelle's Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues and many others.  For the cost of a Fandor subscription, you can see my film and all these others for just $10/month (and you also have the option of a two-week free trial).  Please note that proceeds go directly back into the filmmakers' pockets.

Filmmaker Rob Nilsson, winner of the 1978 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or and the 1987 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, says of the film, "The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour is a no-budget, do-it-yourself excursion to India, from a very talented filmmaker of considerable enterprise and admirable aplomb. Actor William Cully Allen is heartbreaking in the role and has a very dynamic face -- there is a piquant, tragic quality there that makes one understand and gravitate towards him and his mission. The beautiful cinematography and the compelling story guarantee a 'gravity tour' to the East that you won’t regret taking."

In other news, I am editing to finally complete a feature-length project that I shot as far back as 2006 and 2007.  It is a stylized portrait of the short life and long death of writer Klaus Mann, son of Nobel author Thomas Mann, set in modern-day Philadelphia.  In 2007, I left behind an aborted, unfinished 62-minute cut with no ending and only half a second act cobbled together.  I returned only recently to investigate if there was enough material to finish the project.  The project is titled Sophisticated Acquaintance, which intimates that the main character is a loner, an intellectual and willfully a friend of no one.  It is also a reference to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past when the narrator refers to Swann as a "sophisticated acquaintance" and is later deprived of his mother's goodnight kiss because of Swann's presence in the family house (as the film is, among other things, about a strained familial relationship).  There were certainly some embarrassing and pretentious moments in the original cut to prove that I have grown (I hope at least) as a filmmaker in the last five or six years, and I am putting the pieces together with a new awareness of what works and what does not.  The leading pretension was the original title, Umlaut: The Klaus Mann Project.  Thus far, it's been a very fascinating process, and one that has certainly made me look back and reflect on where I was then in terms of strengths and weaknesses...and where I am now.

I am still working on Teschlock's Whale, the Rivette-inspired "reinvented recut" of The Idiotmaker's Gravity Tour in whatever spare time I have.  We will soon resume the shooting of the Sag Harbor yacht-set thriller One Corner Surfacing by first taking care of interiors in winter (although the project takes place in summer).  I will also be shooting the tentatively titled The Close Facsimile with co-director Deniz Demirer in San Francisco in January.  I am also working on a book detailing the fascinating life and career of marginalized director Sidney J. Furie (The Ipcress File, The Boys in Company C, The Entity), expanding the earlier profile piece published on this blog with the help of the man himself.  One Corner Surfacing is an homage to the work of Furie, as well as the thrillers of Alan J. Pakula and Arthur Penn.