Month: April 2010

Here They Go Again

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date April 15, 2010

The issue of federal health-care legislation — which, as we documented in last week’s Flyer cover story, has preoccupied members of the Tennessee legislature — is even now encountering further would-be obstacles in the General Assembly. On Monday, the state House voted 66-29 to express its opposition to the health-care act recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama.

Styled as a “non-binding resolution,” the measure, brought by state representative Susan Lynn (R-Mt. Juliet), will have no effect whatsoever on the fact or inevitability of the act’s implementation. Meanwhile, several other anti-health-care bills sponsored by Lynn or her opponent in this year’s election for a state Senate seat, incumbent Republican senator Mae Beavers, also of Mt. Juliet, are wending their way through committee and will doubtless find their way to the floor.

All this despite a clear, unambiguous statement last week from state attorney general Robert Cooper Jr. that these legislative measures, insofar as they aspire to reverse federal action, are manifestly unconstitutional. We imagine that the sponsors of the Tennessee bills, as well as those members of the House and Senate who vote for them, are fully aware of the fact. What’s happening in the legislature is political posturing — nothing less, nothing more — and much of it, particularly with regard to Lynn’s and Beavers’ competitive bills, is simply attributable to the ad hoc improvisations of ongoing political races.

We sympathize with a remark uttered during debate on the House floor by state representative Joe McCord (R-Maryville): “We sound like we’re in a coffeehouse discussing national politics. We ought to be discussing our own problems.”

And we especially like the response by a Shelby County Republican House member, Curry Todd of Collierville, who called the proceedings “totally asinine.”

Indeed, they were — and are. What troubles us is that the state House bill passed by a margin of 66-29 in a body that is only barely under Republican control. In other words, the scofflaw attitude in Tennessee runs well across partisan lines.

Under the circumstances, we take comfort where we can, as in the recantation offered in Memphis Monday by Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp, currently a candidate for governor in the state Republican primary.

Asked about his well-publicized statement that, in opposition to the implementation of the health-care bill, he would meet federal officials “at the state line,” Wamp walked that statement back, right over the border. His statement had been only “proverbial” or “theoretical,” he said. Metaphorical? “Yes, thank you,” he said. Not literal, in any case. “Fighting may be in a court of law, fighting may be at the ballot box … but I think these things are worth fighting for.”

Fair enough, and, even though Wamp said what he said in defense of the highly questionable “state sovereignty” movement, he drew a clear rhetorical line this side of the old segregationist “states’ rights” formula. He is entitled, if he wants to, to complain about “a billion-dollar mandate that [the state] can’t afford” whether that’s an accurate appraisal or not. And so are fellow GOP gubernatorial candidates Bill Haslam and Ron Ramsey, who also oppose the bill. So, too, are those 66 errant House members, so long as they, too, stop this side of interposition.

Opinion Viewpoint

Blogging the News

Post author By A.C. Kleinheider
Post date April 15, 2010

“So, what are the bloggers talking about today?” That was invariably the lead-in to almost every conversation I had with co-workers during my first blogging job at television station WKRN, where for two years I was tasked with giving the web audience of Nashville’s ABC affiliate a window into the world of political blogging.

While tempted many times to retort with something like “anarcho-syndicalism and applesauce,” I usually just gave them an answer I thought would be easily digestible and suitable for small talk.

Blogs had been around for at least seven years or so at that point, but most in the newsroom didn’t know quite what to make of me and my fellow paid blogger Brittney Gilbert.

We might have drawn a paycheck but reading and writing blog posts all day did not merit entry into “the club” — at least not initially.

In my four years as a pro blogger, both at WKRN and nashvillepost.com, I often encountered journalists who did not view me or what I did as “legitimate.” I never really protested too much. I still don’t. As Eminem so eloquently put it, “I am whatever you say I am.”

From the time I was first hired as a professional blogger by WKRN to the time I was sacked at nashvillepost.com, I was at one time or another a pure blogger with a strong voice, an aggregator passing along news of interest to readers, and even, with varying frequency, a provider of breaking news previously unpublished by other media outlets. Very rarely during any of that time did I wonder whether what I was doing was “Big J” journalism. I was more concerned about keeping the readers engaged and coming back for more.

In 1998, when I was fresh out of school, I applied for many journalism jobs and was turned away from every one. By the time I eventually became an employee of a media company in 2006, after a string of dead-end jobs, I had more or less given up on the dream of being a journalist, so it never much concerned me whether my colleagues in the two newsrooms in which I worked viewed me as such. I was getting paid by a media company to read and write blog posts. I intended to keep doing that as long as I could.

Of course, I was aware of the treatises being written on the effect of bloggers and “new media” on the craft of journalism, but the debate over whether bloggers were journalists was one I mostly shied away from. I was less interested in waxing philosophical about blogging than I was in trying to actually keep readers abreast of news and generating page views for my employers.

Blogs are merely a delivery system for — well, whatever. It’s a platform, not an art form. Like the printed page, television, radio, or Twitter, a blog is just a medium. Time-stamped posts displayed in reverse chronological order — that’s what a blog is. It can be a diary or a list of recipes. It can be a log of libel or an archive of real-time reporting.

Aggregation, analysis, commentary, and reporting all have come under my byline on a blog at one time or another. You can call that journalism or you can call it pancakes, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is serving the reader.

Online gurus who say that blogging, citizen media, or whatever the latest buzzword is will eventually replace the “mainstream media” have always been smoking that proverbial “good stuff.”

The news still has to be gathered. After that, it can then be analyzed, commented on, and, yes, aggregated. So when I am asked about the future of news aggregation, all I can say is that the future is only as bright as the news being aggregated. Technology has made it very easy to receive and send information. It has lowered the barrier to entry to the publishing business significantly. To hold open the possibility that the challenges confronting the news business are ultimately insurmountable is not pessimism, it is realism.

This is not to say that the craft is going away. The news is not going to die. Readers and viewers are going to get information. Whether that information is going to be trustworthy and whether people will continue to make their living distributing it, however, is still an open question. A question, unfortunately, that my four years of professional blogging still leaves me unable to answer.

A.C. Kleinheider is a Nashville-based blogger-aggregator — and, at the moment, unemployed.

Music Music Features

Grammy Event Helps Navigate Music Biz

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date April 15, 2010

When the local chapter of the Recording Academy hosts Grammy GPS: A Roadmap for Today’s Music Biz this week, the daylong “mini-conference,” as Memphis chapter executive director Jon Hornyak calls it, won’t exactly be a new event.

Grammy GPS is instead a reconfigured version of the Recording Academy’s previous “Indie Impact” seminar.

“We wanted to rebrand this so it sounded a little broader-based,” Hornyak says. “We felt like ‘indie’ had been a little overused as a word. So we came up with what we think is our clever ‘Grammy GPS’ name, navigating the new music business. It’s not SXSW, but there are performance opportunities. There are panels and workshops. Networking opportunities.”

The event, which is bringing a variety of significant music-industry insiders to town, kicks off Thursday, April 15th, with a registrant-only party at The Warehouse downtown that will feature live music from Ryan Peel, Yung Kee, Star and Micey, and The Summers. The conference itself will be held from noon to 7 p.m. Friday at the new Playhouse on the Square in Midtown and will be followed by an open-to-the-public showcase at the Hi-Tone Café.

“We thought it would be interesting to make this a Midtown event,” Hornyak says. “In recent years, we’ve focused on downtown. With Playhouse putting this swell new building together and with the Hi-Tone so close by, it would be easy for out-of-towners to navigate. Maybe people can grab some dinner at a Midtown restaurant [after the conference] and then head to the Hi-Tone.”

The event, which is free for Recording Academy members and $40 for non-members, is envisioned as a professional development conference that allows attendees to hear from and mingle with established songwriters, producers, label reps, and other music-industry insiders. (Hornyak says he expects anywhere from one third to one half of the attendees to be regional college students involved in the organization’s GRAMMY U program.) Among the seminar topics are demo critiques for both rock and “urban” artists, “Direct-to-Fan and Internet Marketing,” and “Supply and Demand: The Basics of Distribution.”

“Things are changing so much now,” Hornyak says of the event’s emphasis on artist control. “CDs don’t sell the way they used to. It’s harder to get a major record deal, and even if you get one, it might not really be a good deal. So artists are getting more control of their careers, because they have to. It’s about where the industry is today.”

Along those lines, the keynote speaker will be Mark Montgomery, an “entrepreneur in residence” at Nashville’s Claritas Capital who is said to be a pioneer in e-commerce and direct-to-fan marketing.

“I think Mark is someone who looks to the future in this business,” Hornyak says. “He’s one of the people who was involved early on in the ‘direct-to-fan’ idea. He’s worked for labels, and he’s worked for artists. His clients have included Kanye West, Keith Urban, Bon Jovi, and Pearl Jam.”

Hornyak says he expects most of the out-of-town attendees to stick around for the showcase concert at the Hi-Tone, which will present a diverse mix of local and regional artists.

On the rock side, the showcase artists are emerging classic-style rockers The Dirty Streets, who recently toured with Lucero, longtime local punk fixtures Pezz, heavy modern-rockers Sore Eyes, indie/metal band Tanks, and singer/songwriter Jeremy Stanfill. On the urban side is Louisiana rapper DEE-1 and the highly promising young local hip-hop artist Skewby, who recently was featured in the “Unsigned Hype” column of venerable hip-hop magazine The Source.

Registration for Grammy GPS is open through the day of the event. You can register on-site or in advance via Grammy365.com/events/Memphis-grammy-gps-roadmap-todays-music-biz. The showcase concert at the Hi-Tone is free for conference attendees and $10 for the general public. Showtime is 8 p.m.

Art Art Feature

Being There

Post author By Carol Knowles
Post date April 15, 2010

The paintings in “Altiplano,” Keiko Gonzalez’ exhibition at Lisa Kurts, are both abstract and achingly real. Gonzalez, a widely traveled, internationally respected artist, lives and paints in Altiplano, the vast Bolivian plateau flanked on all sides by peaks of the Andes.

Many of Gonzalez’ paintings — such as Laja, Patacamaya, and Tren a Oruro — are named for small towns scattered across the Altiplano. One-story buildings at the very bottom of these works look minuscule compared to the imposing Andean peaks that rise above them. In his particularly powerful deep-red monochromes, we feel the passion of the artist as well as Altiplano’s rugged terrain as Gonzalez scrapes, scumbles, and gouges palette knives into layer after saturate layer of carmines, burgundies, corals, and brick-reds.

Thick passages of carmine slashed through with burgundy in the 72-by-72-inch pink-ochre painting Calamarca suggest a scarred rock face and the torn flesh of farmers who eke out a living in a beautiful, inhospitable terrain. Dark purples and midnight blues limned in white in Las Animas evoke the sub-zero temperatures and frozen mists of this 14,000-foot-high Andean plateau, where fierce winds make piercing sounds the locals describe as “voices of the ancestors.”

At Lisa Kurts through April 30th

Like Keiko Gonzalez’ “Altiplano” paintings, some of the most powerful pastels in Kathleen Holder’s David Lusk exhibition “Okeanos” are large red monochromes. Rather than conjuring up primal emotion, raw earth, and bruised flesh, Holder’s pastels draw us deep into barely discernible syntheses of water, shadow, and light.

The velvety sheen of Holder’s mixes of powdered pigments and opalescent minerals create the impression that light is about to break through even her darkest passages — like the lavender-gray twilight in Okeanos II and the iridescent Okeanos V, in which a river rounds a bend beneath a pinpoint of light in a night sky. Four pinpoints of light, aligned horizontally across the center of this midnight-blue painting, conjure up otherworldly or quantum physical systems of communication (something akin, perhaps, to Bell’s Theorem) that crosses vast expanses of physical and psychic space.

Holder’s dark-red pastels evoke “Okeanos,” the Greek term for the cosmic river flowing between our universe and a sulfurous underworld. The pyramidal shape near the top of Okeanos I, the darkest and most iconic work in the show, could be Mount Olympus, the prow of a boat emerging from the mist — Holder’s symbol for accessing alternate states of consciousness — or the softly-glowing conical hat of a bishop (or wizard or fool), each radiating its owner’s special prowess.

Burgundy shadows at the center of the painting read as dark passages of the underworld or the psyche. Light breaks again at the bottom of Okeanos I — not as reflected light but as inner radiance — as Holder’s metaphorically complex mixture of mystery and myth draws us, increment by subtle increment, into the deepest pool of all: the human soul.

At David Lusk through April 24th

What to make of Peter Bowman’s exhibition, “Time and Space,” also at David Lusk? Bowman’s color schemes are unorthodox, his compositions are off-center, his lines of perspective are seriously askew. The centerpiece of his show is a studio table covered with empty paint tubes, mixing pans, palette knives, and what looks like a decade’s worth of slathered-on oils.

Is Bowman untrained or primitive or, perhaps, a faux folk artist? None of the above. In one of the most exuberant, inventive shows of his career, Bowman envisions God as a graceful frond that arcs up and into the painting on the wall in Untitled (Orchid). The frond’s spring-green tip is about to touch the stem of a brown pear (as rough-hewn as a lump of clay) in an ingenious update of Genesis and the Sistine Ceiling that suggests every act of creation is as powerful as the first.

Why stop there? Like a child, like the Buddha — Bowman sees the world with fresh eyes as he experiments with alternate universes and messes with time and space. In Untitled (Rising Sun), a free-floating pear (Bowman’s illusion is unsettlingly convincing) is backdropped by a red sun. Instead of rising above or dropping below the line of horizon, the bright-red disc embeds itself in a bank of snow.

Tags David Lusk Gallery, Lisa Kurts Gallery

Music Music Features

Back to the Blues

Post author By J.D. Reager
Post date April 15, 2010

Todd Rundgren has achieved just about all that anyone could imagine in more than 40 years in the music industry. As a musician and songwriter, he’s regarded as a pioneer of the power-pop and progressive rock genres and has achieved chart success with numerous singles, including “Hello It’s Me,” “I Saw the Light,” and “Bang the Drum All Day.” As a producer/engineer, he’s helmed classic albums by the Band, Meat Loaf, XTC, and the New York Dolls, just to name a few. And he’s also lauded as a technological innovator in the fields of digital audio recording, videography, and computer-based animation.

Yet, in 2008, when Rundgren was set to unveil his newest collection of songs, the riff-heavy and (eventually) critically acclaimed Arena, the musician found it difficult to secure distribution. And in what became a strange twist of music-business fate, it was this unfortunate, if somewhat unfathomable, situation that ultimately became the impetus behind Rundgren’s newest project, an album and live show based around the work of blues singer Robert Johnson cheekily titled Todd Rundgren’s Johnson.

“I’m not sure inspiration is quite the word,” Rundgren says. “I had some knowledge of Robert Johnson, of course, but he was never a big influence for me directly. Basically, I needed distribution for Arena, and the company I found to do it also administers the publishing for Robert Johnson’s catalog but didn’t own any of the actual recordings. So they made it a condition of the deal for Arena that I record a collection of Robert Johnson’s songs, and that’s how it started.”

After the success of Arena (Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke called it “a bright, bullish return to Rundgren’s specialties — paisley-mod punch, Who-ish guitar fireworks, and white-soul-boy woe”), Rundgren double-checked with the label to make sure a Robert Johnson covers album was still what it wanted. It was. But Rundgren still wasn’t quite convinced:

“I was a bit apprehensive of any comparisons to Eric Clapton, who’s made a second career of reworking blues songs and is known for Johnson’s material in particular.”

Even so, Rundgren eventually set about the task of researching Johnson’s career and catalog, in an attempt to find a suitable approach for the project. This search eventually led him back to English blues revivalists, such as Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and Jeff Beck, contemporaries of Rundgren’s in the late ’60s who had served as personal inspiration for him at the time, and more modern blues artists, such as Buddy Guy, Albert King, and Paul Butterfield.

“I just felt that instead of emulating Robert Johnson directly, it would be better for me to focus on more second-hand, indirect influences that were more meaningful to me,” Rundgren says. “Which essentially means more recently living, latter-day artists.”

The album version of Todd Rundgren’s Johnson is slated for release next month, but a three-song preview, Short Johnson, is already available for download on iTunes, Amazon.com, etc.

For the live show, Rundgren also combed through his own vast catalog, selecting old and new songs with a strong blues influence to go with the Johnson material.

“It actually turned out to not be so bizarre,” Rundgren says. “If I’d been a strict stylist in my career, it might have been more difficult, but there’s a strange plausibility to me doing a blues-themed show. My first real working gig in music was in a blues band [Woody’s Truck Stop], so it makes sense.”

After the touring and promotion for Todd Rundgren’s Johnson is completed, Rundgren will turn his attention back to performing classic material of his own, a project he began late last year with a series of ambitious live re-creations of the influential 1973 psychedelic album A Wizard, A True Star in Europe and the U.S. As decided by a fan vote, Rundgren will stage full live versions of the albums Todd (1974) and Healing (1981) this fall.

“These shows are proposed and promoted by the fans,” Rundgren says. “I’m lucky to have a very loyal audience. It seems like some of them will come out for just about anything. But because the album re-creation shows are a much bigger production with a bigger band and more expenses, I can’t afford to do them all the time.”

That said, don’t expect a dull or drab set from Rundgren, a consummate performer who, at age 61, shows no signs of slowing down. He returns to Memphis this week.

“If I didn’t feel like the show or my playing was up to a certain level, I wouldn’t do it,” Rundgren says. “I don’t really focus on my level of popularity or success anymore. I’m more focused on maintaining a level of quality, for myself and the fans.”

Todd Rundgren plays the New Daisy Wednesday, April 21st.

Food & Wine Food & Drink

It’s Personal

Post author By Ari LeVaux
Post date April 15, 2010

Local food. Organic food. Natural food. Fair-trade food. To me, these loosely competing paradigms are useful guideposts when I’m shopping to fill the holes in a meal I’m preparing, but they don’t describe my preferred diet. If I had to describe my food in a single word, I would say “personal.”

What distinguishes food as personal is the role I play in the creation or acquisition of its ingredients. It’s food with which I have a measure of involvement, beyond just having bought it. A meal won’t be disqualified for containing store-bought ingredients, but it’s the hard-won ingredients that determine how personal it really is. If a home-cooked meal doesn’t have at least one ingredient that I grew, swapped for, preserved, hunted, gathered, bought directly from a farmer, brought home from a faraway land, or otherwise made some special effort to acquire, then it isn’t personal.

The biggest sex organ in your body, according to sex therapist Dr. Ruth, is the mind. And for similar reasons I believe the mind is one of the body’s biggest taste buds as well. The more a meal’s story is known, the more meaning it has, and being able to mentally picture where something came from adds to the experience of eating it. But personal food isn’t all head games. I’m positive that even in a blind taste test, personal food will win.

Many a dinner guest has suggested to me, “You should open a restaurant.” While I appreciate the compliment, it’s rather like a satisfied lover suggesting, “You should be a hooker.” My food is good because I obsess about my ingredients. Good broccoli, lightly blanched and quickly frozen at the peak of freshness last summer, will be more alive and flavorful than fresh broccoli shipped in from somewhere and purchased at the store. I treasure such ingredients for their quality and the work I put into them, and I make sure they are prepared to look and taste their best.

This isn’t to say that purchased food can’t be personal, but it must have a story that you are privy to, that you can play a role in. There’s nothing compelling about purchasing grass-fed organic beef at the store. But if you buy the same thing at the farmers market, directly from the producer, that’s beginning to get personal. You have a relationship, however fleeting, with the rancher who had a relationship with the animal. If you and the farmer become friendly, things can become much more personal. Maybe you buy a quarter of beef for the freezer.

Having a stash of food put up, like some cut and wrapped chunks of personal beef in the freezer, changes things. Your meal planning begins to shift from “what do we need to pick up at the store” to “what do we need to thaw out.” If your steak is cooked with homegrown garlic, that further personalizes the meal. If that package of ground beef is used for burgers you serve with homemade catsup made from homegrown tomatoes and mustard ground from the mustard seeds at the bottom of a jar of pickled peppers you made, the story gets even better. If you want a cheeseburger but don’t have your own cheese-making operation, buy some cheese from the lady at the farmers market and don’t forget to ask how her goats are doing.

Personal foodies tend to stick together, trading their canned goods, going mushroom hunting, sharing gardening tips and seedlings, and having each other over for dinner. In this way, the pursuit of personal food can bring you closer to a likeminded community.

Because long-distance relationships with ingredients are usually tricky, personal foods tend to be local, but there are exceptions. Returning from a recent trip to France, I brought home some Turkish figs and dates, five pounds of Breton sea salt, some French filet bean seeds (seized at the border, dammit), a few pounds of amazing cheese, a salami (also confiscated), some chocolate, chestnut paste, a few cartons of crème anglaise (kind of like eggnog), and two baguettes, which were crushed in my luggage. If I shave some of my stinky French cheese onto a fried egg from my backyard hens, that’s deeply personal, even though the cheese came from far away. My bags of sea salt, meanwhile, will allow me to sprinkle that personal touch onto hundreds of meals.

Eating my brutalized baguettes became a race against the clock as they quickly hardened. I ate them with cheese, with breakfast, with salad, wishing I still had that salami. And then I had an inspiration that will change my personal meal plan forever.

It started with a flashback of the North African grocers in Paris who sold a rainbow of olives, stuffed peppers, feta cheese, pickles, and many other goodies, including marinated sun-dried tomatoes.

Last summer we preserved our tomatoes as catsup, salsa, ratatouille, and pasta sauce — the usual suspects. We also experimented with sun-dried tomatoes, which turned out to be the easiest and most efficient way to process them. But we hadn’t really mastered the art of eating sun-dried tomatoes. They made great snacks but hadn’t evolved into ingredients.

I put a handful of sun-dried tomatoes in a bowl and poured balsamic and wine vinegar on them. I added a sprinkle of Breton sea salt, let them soak in the vinegar for a few minutes, poured olive oil into the bowl, mixed it up, and voilà: a very nice condiment to eat with my baguette.

Since then I’ve tried adding slivers of homegrown garlic to this marinade, as well as chunks of local feta and dried homegrown basil.

When the baguette became dangerously hard, I froze the remains. Maybe it will end up in stuffing. Maybe bread pudding. Maybe as seasoned crumbs on a piece of fried fish. Whatever ends up becoming of that half-stale baguette I bought on the way to the airport, it will be personal.

Film Features Film/TV

No Babysitter Required

Post author By Addison Engelking
Post date April 15, 2010

Unless you sit through the closing credits of Date Night for the single, out-of-nowhere chortle that comes from a Tina Fey outtake, the latest product from director Shawn Levy (both Night at the Museums) leaves not a trace of pleasure. Date Night looks like a comedy all right, with its goofy high-concept premise and its swell lineup of supporting players, but it sure doesn’t play like one. When set alongside this film, the sloppy but exuberant Hot Tub Time Machine feels like a work of a profound comic philosopher.

Date Night stars Steve Carell and Fey as the Fosters, a normal, middle-class New Jersey couple with normal, middle-class responsibilities — feeding the kids, working at their jobs, and planning for sex that doesn’t happen as much as it used to — that ground the film in a recognizable reality which is quickly whisked away. One night they treat themselves to dinner in New York City, and after committing the unfathomable crime of taking someone else’s restaurant reservation, they are plunged into a neon-lit Nighttown where they rub elbows with corrupt cops, shirtless super-spies, a pasta-gobbling mobster, and a district attorney with an appetite for kink capacious enough to include a normal, middle-class New Jersey couple pretending to be a stripper and her pimp.

To their credit — I guess — Fey and Carell throw themselves into their roles and disappear. But they’re so good at being a beige Everycouple that they make you forget their respective pedigrees. It’s probably unfair to compare different media, but it’s unavoidably true that any random episode of either star’s TV shows (The Office for Carell, 30 Rock for Fey) offers better writing and more complex storytelling than their big-screen joint venture. Carell’s sudden, petulant explosions of insecurity and Fey’s sharp, bitchy put-downs are severely curtailed. I’m indifferent to Carell, but I cherish Fey as both a late-blooming star and a late-blooming beauty. However, her role here is nearly identical to her role as a good-looking sexophobe in 2008’s Baby Mama. Can she play any other role? Moreover, is she allowed to?

The underuse of the other actors in this film (Mark Ruffalo, Kristen Wiig, Nick Kroll, Ray Liotta, James Franco, Mila Kunis, and especially William Fichtner) shrivels the heart. Watching them drift into the frame for a scene or two and then vanish is as depressing as watching an old boot drift down a stream. Only Mark Wahlberg is used for more than a scene or two, as more of a physical prop than a flesh-and-blood spray of human graffiti. And to top it all off, the squares onscreen can’t really make each other laugh. One of the things the Fosters like to do when they’re out is look at other couples and imagine what they’re talking about. Unfortunately, this improv setup falls flat three straight times. Not even the nostalgia of seeing a good, old-fashioned police-car pileup will keep this surprise box-office earner from the dustbin of history, where it can rub elbows with 1989’s Three Fugitives.

Film Features Film/TV

Craig Brewer slated to direct Footloose remake.

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date April 15, 2010

One of the worst-kept secrets in Hollywood is out: Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer has signed on to direct a remake of the 1984 teen-cinema fave Footloose for Paramount. Brewer has been rumored in connection with the remake since late last year and had recently been working on a new script for the project, but the final deal for Brewer to helm the rebooted Footloose was reported Monday night by industry trade publication Variety and confirmed by Brewer shortly thereafter.

“I’m now directing Footloose,” Brewer told the Flyer Tuesday. The next step in the process is casting the film and choosing a location, but Brewer says he expects the film to begin shooting sometime this summer.

The project initially had been set up for High School Musical director Kenny Ortega and envisioned as a lighter, musical-theater-style piece. Brewer had turned down the project after being approached by Paramount last year but took another look when Paramount executive Adam Goodman gave Brewer the go-ahead to scrap the initial rewrite and take the project in his own direction.

Brewer, who has long expressed a love for the “working-class cinema” of the ’80s such as Footloose, Purple Rain, and Flashdance, had plenty of ideas.

In his new version, Brewer sought to return the film to its original drama, wrapped up in teen angst, parental control, religious repression, and small-town malaise. And he appears to have made the project personal by drawing on his own experiences with the Baptist church and as a teen outsider who grew up in California but would spend summers visiting relatives in Memphis. Brewer says he’s also drawn on his parenthood in developing a new appreciation for the material.

“I’m beginning to understand how parents, worried about the dangers and potential deaths of their children, can make rash decisions,” Brewer says.

Brewer says he did his rewrite in six weeks, completely rebuilding the project from the ground up.

“I’ve been shakin’ the Etch A Sketch,” he says.

Brewer has set the film in Tennessee, but given the more generous film-production incentives in surrounding states, particularly Georgia, shooting the film in Tennessee may be a long shot, though Brewer says he hasn’t given up.

“This is a battle, unfortunately. There’s nothing the studio can do. There’s just a lot of financial incentives to go to Georgia,” Brewer says. “It would be a shame to shoot in Georgia and have to put up Tennessee flags. I guarantee you I’m the only person in Hollywood fighting to make a movie in Tennessee.”

It’s been nearly five years since Brewer shot his last feature, Black Snake Moan. Now it looks like he’ll be helming two major feature-film productions over the next year or so.

“The one reason I’m focused on shooting [Footloose] this summer is because I want to make Mother Trucker next summer,” Brewer says of his adaptation of a Details magazine story about a man who breaks out of jail and hijacks a semi-trailer truck to visit an ailing mother.

Mother Trucker, according to Brewer, is lined up and ready to go. The script has been approved, and “there’s a budget, there’s a schedule, and there’s a plan.”