Tag: Indie Memphis

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Team Picture:

Two years ago, a relatively unknown local filmmaker named Andrew Nenninger, who works under the pseudonym Kentucker Audley, won an award at Indie Memphis for his short film Bright Sunny South, a little black-and-white drama less notable for its somewhat contrived story and at times over-heated acting than for its moments of deadpan comedy and the timing and framing of a natural filmmaker.

Bright Sunny South went on to screen at the Slamdance Film Festival, which gave Audley entry to the filmmaking world outside of Memphis. Two years later, Audley’s Team Picture becomes perhaps the first debut feature from a local filmmaker to screen at Indie Memphis with more of a reputation outside Memphis than within it.

That the 25-year-old Audley already has become a filmmaker of note within certain indie-film circles might be surprising to some Team Picture viewers, who will see an ostensibly awkward no-budget film shot on a home-video-quality camcorder in which not much really happens.

Yet Audley was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” this summer by Filmmaker Magazine, and Team Picture has already screened at two series devoted to emerging filmmakers in New York and Boston, screening at the IFC Center in New York as part of a program called “The New Talkies” and at the Harvard Film Archive’s Independents Week in a series curated in part by film scholar Raymond Carney, a noted expert on the father of the American indie scene, John Cassavetes.

In his notes on Team Picture for the Harvard series, Carney offers an extremely perceptive and persuasive case on what makes Team Picture more than the lazy, listless first film some might mistake it as: “Audley’s Team Picture presents a view of experience close to the flatness and banality of off-screen life,” Carney writes. “Rather than being organized around dramatic conflicts, confrontations, and resolutions, Audley’s narrative consists of evasions, delays, and deferrals of dramatic significance. … These may sound like merely negative virtues, but Audley’s studious avoidance of rhetorical heightening reveals a complex world on the other side of the programmatic conflicts and patterned intensification of mainstream filmmaking.”

Team Picture focuses on a few days (or perhaps weeks) in the life of a young man named Dave (played by Audley under his given name), who is caught between his ostensibly normal work and family life and his more bohemian home life. At the outset, Dave shows up for work at a Germantown sporting goods store, looking uncomfortable in khaki pants and a tucked-in baby-blue polo shirt and exchanging awkward conversation with his boss, a jocky and jocular man (played by local sportscaster Greg Gaston) who also happens to be his mother’s boyfriend. Audley cuts from this scene to a shot of Dave at home and at ease — wearing cutoff shorts, a straw hat, and sunglasses, strumming an acoustic guitar and filling up a kiddie pool in the overgrown front yard of the Midtown house he shares with roommate Eric.

“I really like the idea of colliding identities,” Audley says, “pitting the character’s past [like Audley, Dave played a lot of organized sports as a child, which yields the film’s title] against his present and the fish out of water thing for him to be back in his parents’ house.”

There’s great, understated comedy in Team Picture. At one point, Dave attends an open mic at his neighborhood coffee shop, introducing himself to a handful of disinterested patrons like this: “I want to play a song I wrote today. It’s based on a decision I made, a life decision. It’s called ‘I’m Going to Quit My Job Tomorrow.’ It’s a true-life kind of thing.” And there’s also tenderness, as in his hapless courtship of a girl that inspires a side trip to shoot on location in Chicago.

Audley’s emerging reputation outside of Memphis — and his inclusion in the recent New York and Boston series — are a result, in large degree, of his being cited as part of a loose cohort of twentysomething filmmakers whose work has been dubbed “mumblecore.” Audley has befriended many of the leading filmmakers of this movement, including Andrew Bujalski, whose Mutual Appreciation has become the genre’s signature film.

“I hadn’t seen any of those films before I made Bright Sunny South, but I would say that Mutual Appreciation was an influence on Team Picture,” Audley says. “I had the script written by the time I saw that, but it influenced me in terms of keeping it small and relying on natural situations — trusting that that would be enough, not heightening anything or making it more dramatic than it would be in real life.”

A Kentucky native (thus his moniker), Audley moved to the Mid-South to finish school at the University of Memphis after a couple of years of film school at the Savannah College of Art & Design.

“I had a pang of guilt about spending my parents’ money on a very expensive education,” Audley says. “So I went home, saved up money, and came to college [at U of M].” In Memphis, Audley fell into the nascent filmmaking scene surrounding Midtown’s Memphis Digital Arts Cooperative, which also gave birth to local filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox and his debut Blue Citrus Hearts, another local feature that was shown widely on the festival circuit.

Team Picture, Audley says, is somewhat biographical.

“I feel like it’s me a few years ago. I’m 25 — I think the character is about 21. It definitely is my personality in the movie, focusing on one aspect of my personality.”

That personality may separate it from Audley’s mumblecore contemporaries, whose films tend to be more talkative than Audley’s comparatively non-verbal work.

“I think that a lot of the mumblecore movies are very chatty and that’s one of the things that makes Team Picture a little different,” Audley says. “It’s setting up a mood more than it is talking about anything.”

In trying to make movies that bypass filmmaking conventions to capture something real, Audley might be helped by something that definitely separates him from most other aspiring filmmakers: He’s not very influenced by other peoples’ films.

“I don’t watch a lot of movies, in general,” Audley says. “The idea is to be influenced primarily by real life. Most films do seem to be influenced by other films rather than by real life, and that’s a shame to me.”

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Indie Memphis

The Indie Memphis Film Festival began in 1998 with a handful of modest local films screening on a sheet against the wall of a Midtown coffee shop. Ten years later, it returns to Midtown with more than 120 local, regional, and global films showing over seven days on three screens at the city’s preeminent art theater and with one of the most important filmmakers the American independent scene has produced kicking things off.

After several years downtown, the last few at Muvico’s Peabody Place theater, Indie Memphis moves to Malco’s Studio on the Square this month for the 10th Indie Memphis Film Festival, which runs Friday, October 19th, through Thursday, October 25th. The opening night film is The Honeydripper, a blues-themed film from acclaimed indie filmmaker John Sayles, a two-time Oscar nominee for his films Passion Fish and Lone Star.

“We feel like we’re coming home in a way,” says festival director Les Edwards of the move back to Midtown. “Muvico has been great to us, but downtown can be challenging to negotiate. Midtown has its own dynamic.”

Edwards says Midtown businesses have embraced the festival, which should lead to a different vibe as the festival spills out of the theater and into surrounding restaurants and clubs. The festival is employing a shuttle van to help filmmakers and other festival attendees get around the Overton Square and Cooper-Young neighborhoods during the festival.

“Studio is perfect for us,” Edwards says. “The theaters are equipped with new digital projectors and built-in microphones for the panel [discussions].” Malco is setting aside three of the theater’s five screens for a full week for the festival, which will allow Indie Memphis to host weekday matinee screenings for the first time and to offer multiple screenings of every local feature film.

The presence of Sayles — one of the most important of the generation of American independent filmmakers who emerged in the 1980s — makes The Honeydripper the most high-profile opening-night screening in the festival’s history.

Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan director Craig Brewer made the screening happen, Edwards says of the fest’s big get: “We ran into Craig at the office supplies store on New Year’s Eve — this is the exciting life we all lead. We were wishing each other happy holidays, and he said he’s been dealing with John Sayles and he has this great new movie that would really work for Indie Memphis. He said, we just need to talk to John and see if we can get it here. So Craig and I talked over the summer, and I guess about [three weeks] ago it finally happened.”

The festival has secured two prints of The Honeydripper, a story about a rural Alabama juke joint circa 1950 that has screened at the Toronto and New York film festivals and will do staggered screenings on opening night, with Sayles and his producer Maggie Renzi on hand to hopefully introduce each screening and take questions afterward.

But, despite the presence of an established indie-film heavyweight in Sayles, the festival is likely to be more notable for the emerging filmmakers on display, including feature debuts from two of the artists Filmmaker Magazine tapped for its “25 New Faces of Independent Film” issue this summer. One of these is North Carolina’s Craig Zobel, whose Great World of Sound is about a couple of men traveling to towns to record undiscovered musicians for a fee. Great World of Sound premiered at Sundance early this year and will screen at Indie Memphis only once, on Saturday night.

The other rising star featured in Filmmaker Magazine is Memphis filmmaker Andrew Nenninger, aka Kentucker Audley, whose short film Bright Sunny South was an Indie Memphis winner in 2005. Audley’s feature debut, Team Picture, already has screened as part of two emerging directors series in New York and Boston. It’ll make its local premiere at Indie Memphis.

But these three films are only the most obvious highlights. A typically strong documentary slate includes For the Bible Tells Me So, a survey of religious families dealing with the coming out of homosexual sons or daughters which has received strong reviews recently in the Village Voice and Salon.com; Run Granny Run, a political documentary from the maker of former Indie Memphis fave Mai’s America that is screening on HBO this month; and Manufacturing Dissent, an unintentional exposé on Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko director Michael Moore.

Aside from Team Picture, this year’s festival includes five more local narrative features, as well as a cornucopia of locally produced documentaries, short films, and music videos, the later sponsored by Live From Memphis.

The festival’s “Soul of Southern Film” mission is expanded this year by a “Global Lens” program that will screen otherwise undistributed films from Third World countries in one of the three theaters. This program is a partnership with the San Francisco-based nonprofit Global Film Initiative, which is dedicated to promoting foreign-language film in the United States. High school students will get free admission to Global Lens screenings.

As part of its celebration of its 10-year anniversary, this year’s Indie Memphis Festival will also look back at the filmmaking scene in Memphis that preceded the festival, with a “Back in the Day” program that will screen, among other things, Memphis-bred filmmaker Ira Sachs’ debut The Delta, with Sachs in town to attend the screening.

Over the next few pages, we look at some of the potential highlights of this year’s festival. For expanded coverage, as well as a guide to each day’s screenings, go to MemphisFlyer.com. — Chris Herrington

The Indie Memphis Film Festival

Studio on the Square

Friday, October 19th, through Thursday, October 25th

Tickets are available at the Studio on the Square box office.

For a complete schedule and more information on tickets or festival passes, see IndieMemphis.com.

Team Picture by Chris Herrington

For Better or For Worse? by Greg Akers

Zombified by Chris Davis

Team Picture by Chris Herrington

For Better or For Worse? by Greg Akers

Zombified by Chris Davis

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Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis Award Winners

Local filmmakers Alan Spearman and Lance Murphy were the big winners over the weekend as award recipients were announced at the Indie Memphis Film Festival. The duo took home the award for Best Documentary (and its $400 cash prize) in the festival’s Hometowner Competition for their film Nobody, and followed that up by winning the Kodak Tennessee Filmmaker’s Award, which comes with $1,000 in film stock. Nobody screens Thursday, October 19th, at 8:45 p.m., with Ron Franklin performing at an after-party at the Gibson Showcase.

The other Hometowner winners this weekend were Just the Two of Us for Best Narrative Feature ($600), Ad Man for Best Narrative Short ($400), The Importance of Being Russell for the festival’s Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award ($500), and What Goes Around … director Rod Pitts for the Promising Filmmaker Award.

In the Soul of Southern Film competition, Joey Lauren Adams‘ opening night film Come Early Morning won Best Narrative Feature ($750); Kubuku Rides (This Is It) won Best Narrative Short ($500); Playing With RAGE won Best Documentary ($750), and Found won Best Animated or Experimental Film ($500).

For more information on the festival, see IndieMemphis.com.

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Cover Feature News

Festival Highlights

Phil Chambliss: Auteur from Arkansas

Special program

Saturday, October 14th, 5:15 p.m.

After making movies in obscurity for decades, using cheap equipment and a cast of friends and co-workers, Camden, Arkansas, native Phil Chambliss has become a minor cause celebre on the film festival circuit. Chambliss, who has written, directed, shot, edited, and scored 27 films over the past three decades, received his first public screening at the 2004 Nashville Film Festival and will be celebrated at the British Film Institute’s 50th London Film Festival later this month.

Dubbed a “folk art filmmaker,” Chambliss’ ostensibly amateurish, rural-based, borderline surreal short films are so odd, there’s a temptation to file them under “so bad they’re good,” if not just plain bad. But there’s something real happening in Chambliss’ work, at least in the three examples being screened at Indie Memphis.

The 1982 “thriller” Shadow of the Hatchet Man is the most memorable of the bunch. It’s shot in gloriously grimy 8mm black and white, which lends an effectively nasty tone to an already disreputable tale of a hatchet-wielding killer and the cheating husband who sees in the furor an opportunity to off his wife. From the pungent, intentionally loony, and well-observed dialogue (“I can see she was a cute l’il ole girl,” a newscaster — played by Chambliss — drawls during a report on the latest hatchet killer victim) to such memorably odd images as a bare-chested sheriff reporting from in front of an Arkansas flag, Shadow of the Hatchet Man is hard to forget.

The other two shorts being shown as part of this program aren’t quite as absorbing, but are still memorable. Mr. Visit Show (2002) depicts a reporter investigating rumors that the “Bird-Mart Day Care Center for Birds” is using sleeping pellets instead of seed, and ends with probably the most hilariously unstrenuous fist-fight in movie history.

Even better is 1986’s The Devil’s Helper, in which two good ole boys out in the deer woods run into one of Satan’s minions and cut a deal for expanded hunting privileges. The Devil’s Helper opens with a still shot of a giant buck, presenting the deer as a creature of awe, like a god. If you grew up around the culture of rural deer hunting (I was born in December — the lore goes that I was the only thing able to pull my older male relatives out of “camp”), you’re liable to react to the image with a laugh of recognition.

Chambliss will attend the screening. — Chris Herrington

A Reel Man

Special program

Wednesday, October 18, 8:30 p.m.

Skip Eisheimer was a film geek who chanced into 500 educational filmstrips from the 1930s to 1970s. A collector was born and, thousands of strips later, cineastes everywhere can rejoice. Eisheimer formed A/V Geeks, a group based in Raleigh, North Carolina, that takes these almost-forgotten artifacts and publicly screens them. The reaction to these strips ranges from recognition to horror to delight. A Reel Man tells Eisheimer’s story and, better yet, shows clips of some his filmstrips. Eisheimer is a kind of archaeologist, digging through the dusty discards of libraries, schools, and government agencies and resurrecting the celluloid bones he discovers there. Some of the best of these strips — More Dates for Kay, Why Vandalism? — are educational to current-day audiences, illuminating some of the ideals and mores that kids in the mid-20th century were exposed to. It raises the question: How did those generations escape deep emotional scarring? One can only hope they laughed at these films like audiences do today. And laugh you will: There’s a clearly zonked Sonny Bono lecturing on teenage pot use. In Alcohol is Dynamite, there are lines such as, “Like dope addicts, one drinker can’t stand the sight of somebody not drinking.” There’s the titular, faux-Johnny Cash country song for Shake Hands with Danger. And there are Bizarro World home truths like “It’s not sissy to be clean.” In addition to the screening of the documentary, Eisheimer will appear at the festival and will show some of his films, making this a don’t-miss event on the program. — Greg Akers

American Cannibal: The Road to Reality

Beyond the South Documentary

Sunday, October 15th, 5 p.m.

American Cannibal: The Road To Reality is such a devastating — and devastatingly funny — film about Hollywood’s sleazy underbelly, it’s difficult to imagine that it wasn’t co-scripted by David Mamet and Christopher Guest. But, no. It’s a real documentary about Gil Riply and Dave Roberts, two idealistic kids determined to make it in the entertainment industry if it kills them. After a pilot for Comedy Central fails, the duo turns to Kevin Blatt, the pornographer who distributed the Paris Hilton sex tape, to produce a reality show called American Cannibal, where starving contestants engage in grueling challenges for food in an exotic, if not particularly scenic, locale where cannibalism is legal. Things quickly go from bad to as bad as it can get, and Riply and Roberts are in way over their heads. — Chris Davis

The Bridge

Hometowner Feature

Monday, October 16th, 8:45 p.m.

This locally produced feature directed by Brett Hanover uses materials created by the Church of Scientology and stories told by former members of L. Ron Hubbard’s controversial sci-fi religion to build a tragic narrative about misplaced faith and insidious fraud. Scientologists will hate it. People who hate Scientologists won’t like it nearly as much as the Tom Cruise episode of South Park. — CD

Cocaine Cowboys

Soul of Southern Film Documentary

Monday, October 16th, 6:30 p.m.

Audacious research and fierce editing are the standouts in Cocaine Cowboys, a documentary that chronicles the roots, heyday, and consequences — bad and good — of the cocaine trade in Miami. The city was relatively quiet in the early 1950s, but, in succession, gunrunning, rum running, marijuana trafficking, and Cuban immigration led to the cocaine-trade explosion in the ’70s. Among the significant notes is that Pittsburgh Steelers players were doing coke in the days leading to their Super Bowl game against the Dallas Cowboys in Miami in 1976. The Steelers, of course, won the game. Cocaine Cowboys doesn’t just give an overview, but focuses on individuals and their fates. Its conclusion seems inarguable: The skyline of Miami today owes more than a little to cocaine. — GA

Delusions

Hometowner Feature

Monday, October 16th, 8:30 p.m.

Delusions kicks off with drugs, rape, and prostitution, and the title credits that follow are reminiscent of the opening of The Sopranos. It doesn’t get any less bleak from there. In the movie, Memphis is a town populated by evil men, losers, and worse, and the innocent don’t remain so for long. A drug dealer (Chris Ross) and a sweet-natured virgin (Tiffany Pemberton, in a brave, gutsy performance) cross paths and have a romance that sours in devastating ways. A debt enforcer (Bevan Bell) completes the triangle, and soon enough no one remains innocent. Written and directed by Robert Saba, Delusions is a kind of would-be Bluff City Requiem for a Dream. — GA

Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island

Hometowner Feature

Monday, October 16th, 6:45 p.m.

Local filmmaker Mark Jones established himself on the local scene five years ago with his polished screwball comedy debut, Eli Parker Is Getting Married? This follow-up feature is a gay-themed horror-comedy spoof. Jones, who wrote and directed the film, reunites with his Eli Parker collaborator Ryan Parker, who serves as the editor and director of photography on Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island. The plot concerns a fraternity “hell night” staged at Hell Island (Mud Island), which had witnessed a multiple murder on the 4th of July 20 years earlier. Protagonist Jack (Tyler Farrell) is a gay pledge whose sexuality is known only to his also-closeted frat-brother boyfriend (Michael Gravois). On hell night, Jack has to worry about more than ghosts and fraternity hazing; there’s also a murderous clown on the loose, which has nothing on the perils of being in the closet while in the frat. Because of the gay theme, Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island is able to spoof both the sexualized atmosphere of slasher movies and real-life fraternities. Jones’ movie tackles these issues with a light comic touch that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Eli Parker Is Getting Married? At the end, Jack’s frat has been turned upside down and features a “token straight brother.” — CH

Grim Sweeper

Hometowner Feature

Tuesday, October 17th, 8:30 p.m.

I like to think that a lot of people first get into independent filmmaking so that they can play with fake blood. I don’t know if this true in the case of Edward Valibus Phillips, director of the locally produced Grim Sweeper. But his movie features gobs of perfect fake blood, brains, and bone — enough to inspire a whole gaggle of new filmmakers. Grim Sweeper follows Hal (Phillips) and his pal Rod (Benjamin Rednour) as they punch the clock on a job that is both familiar (the bland humdrum of hourly wage employment with coworkers who are annoying) and alien (the duo clean human gristle from crime and death scenes). Gallows humor reigns as Rednour steals the show with his acting and Phillips reinforces the wit of the endeavor with with confident visual observations. — GA

The Importance of Being Russell

Hometowner Feature

Thursday, October 19th, 6:45 p.m.

This local feature unites two known forces on the Memphis film scene, the Paradox Productions crew responsible for the ambitious feature Strange Cargo a few years ago and actor/writer John Pickle, creator and star of the cable access skit show Pickle TV. The pair previously collaborated on the short film The Last Man on Earth, but this comedic fantasy-farce is their first feature. Pickle plays “redneck” inventor Russell Hawker (among his many great ideas is fashioning a “shotgun silencer” by duct-taping a pillow over the barrel), unhappily married, professionally frustrated, and coming up on his 10th wedding anniversary.

Pickle’s Jim Varney-esque hick character is a confident creation who holds the screen and provokes some actual laughs. The film also boasts some good ideas, such as the neat symmetry and casual critique when Russell and his wife sit down to breakfast opposite one another and separately watch the same program on adjacent televisions. The Importance of Being Russell works well early on, finding humor in its backwoods setting without being condescending, but despite a well-staged combat scene (that’s right — a combat scene!), it loses its footing a little as the plot becomes more fantastical. But it’s handsomely shot (by Paradox’s Jeff Hassen) and well made (Sean Plemmons directs, Jeff Bryant produces) throughout. — CH

Old Joy

Beyond the South Feature

Sunday, October 15th, 7 p.m.

This well-reviewed indie feature from writer-director Kelly Reichardt follows two friends (Will Oldham and Daniel London) who reunite for a weekend camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade mountain range and confront where they are in their divergent lives. Old Joy is set for an official release next month, but since a local theatrical run seems like a longshot, this might be your only chance to see it on the big screen. — CH

Playing With Rage

Soul of Southern Film Documentary

Thursday, October 19th, 6:30 p.m.

Female stereotypes are smashed to bits in Playing With Rage, a feature length documentary about a disillusioned sportswriter who rediscovers his love for competitive athletics after following the ups and downs of a professional female football team from Texas. What begins as shades of Sherman’s March quickly evolves from a self-pitying account of the filmmaker’s burnout into a seriously engaging meditation on gender roles and sports in the American heartland. — CD

Stomp! Shout! Scream!

Soul of Southern Film Feature

Saturday, October 14th, 1 p.m.

The tagline of Stomp! Shout! Scream! describes the movie as “A Beach Party Rock & Roll Monster Movie.” The beach is in 1960’s Georgia. The rock-and-roll is mainly provided by the fuzzed-out garage rock of Catfight! The monster is the Skunk Ape, an allegedly real-life Everglades Bigfoot, described by a plant-biologist character in the movie as an “antediluvian simian creature.” The tone of the film is like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, another recent homage to Atomic Age creature features, but in this case it’s more camp than overt comedy. In the movie, a guy in a suit — I mean, the mysterious Skunk Ape — menaces a small town and, like that other famous cinematic monkey, falls for a girl. — GA

What Goes Around …

Hometowner Feature

Tuesday, October 17th, 8:45 p.m.

The end of the credits for What Goes Around … states, “No animals, crackheads, or film geeks were harmed in the making of this film.” I can’t say I remember seeing any crackheads, and I’m pretty sure there weren’t any animals, but such are the quality and interests of the film that there’s no doubt it’s full of film geeks. The story is simple and universal: Talal (Patrick Henry) has been with girlfriend Marie (Chris Brown) for years, but realizes he’s philophobic — afraid of commitment. It isn’t so much Talal’s feet that are clay as his heart. When he meets Angela (Lisa Miller), he’s smitten and drops Marie for her, an action that has unforeseen and heartbreaking consequences. The film bursts with Chow Yun Fat and Rudy Ray Moore references and, in featuring the now-defunct Parallax Video as a location, provides a fitting coda to that downtown establishment. Best of all, Memphis has never looked so romantic as when Talal and Angela hit the town on a first date, their burgeoning relationship captured with black-and-white photography and Billie Holiday’s “Solitude” washing over it all. It doesn’t seem so hard to imagine the Bluff City as New York in a ’40s or ’50s film. — GA

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Cover Feature News

On the Job

Local filmmaker C. Scott McCoy and his partners in Oddly Buoyant Productions are the only previous winners of the Indie Memphis Film Festival’s Best Hometowner Feature award to have a film up for that same award this year. McCoy & Co. won two years ago for the rock-mockumentary Automusik Can Do No Wrong. Judging by their impressive follow-up, Eat, they should have a good shot again this year.

Directed by McCoy, who co-wrote and edited the film with his partner Laura Jean Hocking, Eat is an ambitious, structurally tight feature that boasts 54 speaking parts and 48 songs from 23 local or regional bands over its 83-minute run time.

The film takes place over a 24-hour period and follows the work and social lives of employees from three different restaurants — an upscale family restaurant, a corporate chain, and a cozy after-hours bar.

“We collected stories, sort of like an oral history,” says McCoy. “It’s lore,” Hocking adds.

“War stories,” McCoy says. “We stitched them together.”

The idea for the movie came from Hocking, a waitress and manager at McEwen’s who’s worked in restaurants for two decades.

“I wanted it to be a love letter to the restaurant industry,” Hocking says. “Tough love. I wanted to give back to waiters and restaurant workers.”

McCoy, a writer and editor by trade, also drew on restaurant experience. “I’m a horrible waiter,” he says. “I’ve been fired from more restaurants that you’ve eaten at in this town. Spaghetti Warehouse, Applebee’s, Alfred’s — walked out of Alfred’s. Got fired from the Belmont. Fired from Boscos. Didn’t get fired from the Pizza Café. Endless.”

McCoy and Hocking say they also drew on the restaurant experience of their cast in a movie that used plenty of improvisation.

“That was something that really helped, but it wasn’t a requirement,” Hocking says. “But it’s not hard to find an actor who’s a waiter.”

One of the standouts in the cast is local musician Amy LaVere, who plays a waitress for the corporate theme restaurant Canape’s (“a bad concept poorly executed,” McCoy says) and delivers a charmingly natural performance.

“She started working in restaurants when she was 13 or 14,” McCoy says of LaVere, “so she had a lot of restaurant anger built up. She’s a really good actress. I think next time we won’t be able to afford her.”

Eat weaves its large cast together with ease. The film’s de-centered narrative is quite a departure from Automusik Can Do No Wrong and will remind viewers of filmmakers such as Richard Linklater (Slacker, which Eat references) and Robert Altman. (McCoy cites Altman’s Short Cuts as a prime influence: “We were throwing an Altman party.”)

“It’s a movie about work,” McCoy says. “You could make it in a steel mill, but it wouldn’t be as interesting because you wouldn’t have the customer interaction. And people don’t make movies about work. But the drama you go through every day just to make a living is something everyone goes through, and those are some of the greatest dramas in people’s lives. It was important to us to do that, to make a movie about everyday experience. We wanted to make it funny, and we wanted to make it real.”

Eat(Hometowner Feature Competition)

Sunday, October 15th, 8:45 p.m.

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Cover Feature News

Out of Nowhere

It’s like a moment out of The Blair Witch Project. The day is racing to a close and the shadows are long and deep when Alan Spearman and Lance Murphy decide it might be best to split up. The Johnson grass is head-high on the forested northern tip of Mud Island. Old paths have been hidden by new growth since the last time the two filmmakers visited.

“Maybe we should try to get in and get out while there’s still light,” Spearman suggests, asking if anybody is particularly susceptible to poison ivy.

Spearman and Murphy are looking for a ruined rubber canoe that once belonged to their friend Jerry, a homeless man who kept his camp along the river on what would have been high-dollar real estate had he lived in a house rather than an improvised tent. It’s a spiritual touchstone for the professional journalists and neophyte filmmakers who’ve spent the past five years working on Nobody, a documentary following Jerry’s incredible river journey from Marion, Indiana, to Memphis.

“It’s over here,” Spearman eventually calls out, maneuvering through a thicket of vines and spider webs. Murphy, who had been exploring to the east, announces that he’s on his way and crunches through the leaves and branches. The two men fawn over the deflated yellow boat like a lost treasure.

“You know, Jerry used to write things on the canoe,” Murphy says. “It’s gone now, but there was writing all over it. There was a note from his son.”

Jerry came into Spearman’s and Murphy’s life unexpectedly when The Commercial Appeal photographers received a phone call from the Coast Guard, who thought somebody might be interested in talking to the good-natured homeless man who’d given up on society after the death of his mother and fell in love with America’s big river.

Jerry on the streets in Nobody

“He’s really like a modern-day Huck Finn,” Murphy says. “We wanted to show that these people that Mark Twain wrote about are still around. And still pretty much the same.”

He and Spearman work their way to the riverbank and look out over the dark waters swirling with the last pink and purple rays of the sun. They marvel at how the river can become an addiction and speak enviously of the vistas known only to those who live on the river.

Jerry is an alcoholic and a drifter but he’s not a panhandler. At one point in the film he declares, “I’m too proud to ever ask anybody for a dime.”

Nobody opens with a shot of Jerry shaving, watching his reflection in a small, jagged shard of mirror. It then moves from one breathtaking and provocative image to the next, calling into question all of our culture’s preconceived notions about homelessness and community.

From one homeless man’s recipe for cooking up pigeon and possum to Jerry’s own revealing commentaries on birth, death, and what lies between, Nobody alternately repulses and intrigues.

Spearman and Murphy have taken a formal approach to their film, and the contrived images may get under the skin of documentary purists.

“We’re prepared for that,” Spearman says confidently, brandishing a flashlight. “Now maybe we should try to get out of the woods while we can still see where we’re going.”

Nobody

(Hometowner Documentary Competition)

Thursday, October 19th

8:45 p.m.

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Cover Feature News

South from Sundance

In 1993, Ashley Judd starred in a disarmingly modest Southern indie movie called Ruby in Paradise. She played a young woman from the rural South (Kentucky, or maybe Tennessee) who packs her car in the opening credits, fleeing a bad relationship, and heads south to Florida to start a new life. She gets a job at a beachfront gift shop. She makes a few friends. She has a couple of relationships — one bad, one good but complicated. In typical movie narrative terms, nothing happens. But that nothing encompasses everything. Years ago a good friend and fellow Ruby in Paradise admirer labeled the film a koan, a mysterious touchstone for being young and single and discovering your life.

Earlier this year, after a long time in the Hollywood wilderness, Judd appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in Come Early Morning, another naturalistic Southern indie about a woman in search of her life. This character was a decade older, of course, and more damaged; her wounds more self-inflicted. But the character’s journey — and the movie’s uncommon patience and naturalism — mark Come Early Morning as a Ruby in Paradise companion piece, right down to its refusal to tidily wrap up its romantic plot thread and the way its character locates contentment through work.

This connection appears to be purely accidental, according to Come Early Morning‘s creator, Arkansas-bred, indie-identified actress Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy, Dazed and Confused), who makes her writing and directing debut with the film, which is the opening-night screening at this year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival.

Adams, who currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, says that Come Early Morning wasn’t written with Ruby — or even Judd — in mind. But it was born out of a frustration with Hollywood that Judd could probably identify with.

“I guess I was sort of frustrated with the roles that were available, not just for me but for women in general,” Adams says. “And I realized I wasn’t going to change anything by acting. As an actress, there are times when you’re doing a film and you’re really busy. And then other times I’d wake up and want to work, but there were no scripts to read, no auditions, nothing to do. And that drove me nuts. So I started writing. And rule number one is write what you know, or so I’m told.”

Adams set and filmed Come Early Morning around her hometown of North Little Rock and the smaller communities of Scott and Lonoke.

Adams had originally written the film as something to act in herself, but that changed when she decided to direct as well. “I wasn’t going to get a Michael Apted to direct it, or a Bruce Beresford,” Adams says, citing two of her favorite filmmakers. “The director we were talking with [didn’t have much experience] and then the music started to become really important to me, and the place, and I became so terrified about what someone else might turn it into.”

The more Adams learned about what goes into directing, the more she realized she didn’t know enough to direct and star.

Joey Lauren Adams (left)

“One of my producers gave [the script] to [Judd’s] agent at Sundance the year before,” Adams says, “and she loved it. Ashley read it right away. And decided she wanted to do it.”

Adams says she saw Ruby in Paradise when it came out but never really had it in mind. Her template, she says, was Tender Mercies, a Beresford drama from the ’80s staring Robert Duvall.

“I do see Lucy [Judd’s character] as more of a masculine character,” Adams says. “She’s doing what the guy usually does in the movies — sleeping with the guy and trying to sneak away in the morning.”

Come Early Morning confounds expectations in many ways — from its refusal to fashion a conventional happy ending to Lucy’s potentially redemptive romance to a novel but believable depiction of Southern church culture to the respect it gives to work, with Lucy finding a measure of job satisfaction as a contractor.

Come Early Morning was purchased by indie distributor Roadside Attractions after screening at Sundance and is set for a U.S. theatrical run starting next month.

As for the director’s future? “I definitely want to write and direct,” says Adams, most recently seen in a supporting role in the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston comedy The Break-Up. “I’m sort of over L.A., and as an actress I’d have to spend more time there. I love writing and I love that I can do it anywhere.”

Adams will be driving from Oxford to attend the screening.

Come Early Morning

Opening-night screening

Friday, October 13th, 8 p.m.

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Cover Feature News

Indie Memphis

The Indie Memphis Film Festival celebrates its ninth year this week, screening approximately 80 films — features, documentaries, shorts, music videos, and experimental movies — over the course of seven days at Muvico’s Peabody Place Theater.

A festival that’s long prided itself as being the definitive annual showcase of locally produced movies will boast its largest selection of local — dubbed “Hometowner” — features ever this year. Among the eight feature films by Memphis filmmakers are three notable second features, including Eat from C. Scott McCoy (of 2004 Indie Memphis winner Automusik Can Do No Wrong), Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island from Mark Jones (of Eli Parker Is Getting Married?), and The Importance of Being Russell from director Sean Plemmons and his partners with Paradox Productions (of Strange Cargo).

The festival lives up to its “Soul of Southern Film” moniker with a couple of high-profile screenings: Arkansas-bred, Mississippi-based actress Joey Lauren Adams will be in town to show off her writing and directing debut, the regional drama Come Early Morning, which screened at Sundance earlier this year. And Arkansas “outsider cinema” auteur Phil Chambliss will be at the festival to screen a few of his homemade short films before they get the royal treatment at the London Film Festival later this month.

Indie Memphis also expands its mission to incorporate more selections from “Beyond the South.” Boston’s acclaimed Alloy Orchestra will be in town to give live accompaniment to a screening of the 1920s silent classic The Phantom of the Opera. And one of the year’s most critically acclaimed indies, Old Joy, will make its first and perhaps only Memphis appearance at the festival. — Chris Herrington

Indie Memphis Film Festival

Muvico Peabody Place Theater

Friday, October 13th-Thursday, October 19th

Individual screenings $6.50; full festival pass $60

See IndieMemphis.com for a full schedule

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Music Music Features

Indie Memphis Does Music

This weekend, Live from Memphis will present its second annual Music Video Showcase, part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival (see Cover Story, page 19). Twenty-five music videos will be screened during the Saturday night showcase, held at Peabody Place‘s Muvico theater, augmenting main-theater music-related screenings such as Return of the Blue Moon Boys, which documents musicians Scotty Moore, DJ Fontana, and the late Bill Black; Soul of the Delta, a 30-minute movie about the Mississippi gospel scene; and the fictional Stomp! Scream! Shout!, which follows the exploits of an all-girl garage-rock band, circa 1966.

John Michael McCarthy, who has cast local musicians such as Jack Yarber and Poli Sci Clone in movies such as Sore Losers and E*vis Meets the Beat*es, has a few videos in the showcase, including a scripted short built around California garage-rock group The Willowz‘ “Equation #2.“ Muck Sticky will screen his self-directed opus “Thingy Thing,“ while other offerings include videos for Lord T. & Eloise‘s “Million Dollar Boots” (produced by Old School Pictures), Mr. Sche‘s “Front Me Somethin'” (directed by Marc A. Dokes), Chess Club‘s “Devastortion” (directed by Amy Frazier), and Skillet‘s “Rebirthing” (directed by Darren Doane), as well as animated videos for “Linchpin” from Clanky’s Nub (directed by G.B. Shannon) and Arma Secreta‘s “Segue/Debris” (directed by Clayton Hurley).

Additionally, Live From Memphis will screen footage culled from performances by The Secret Service, captured at the Buccaneer; The Reigning Sound, filmed at the Hi-Tone Café during Goner Fest 2; and Lucero, shot at Young Avenue Deli.

Live From Memphis founder Christopher Reyes also directed two music videos on the schedule — Organ Thief‘s “Psychochauffeur” and a Ballet Memphis performance choreographed by Garrett Ammon, called “In Ways Ungrateful” — while Sarah Fleming, Reyes’ creative partner, will be showing “Can You Hear Me Now,“ a Spinal Tap-inspired video for John Pickle‘s mock rock group Mung.

“As a music lover, I would much rather see footage of a live band,” says Reyes. “With live videos, we try to recreate what it’s like to actually be at a show, to give a sense of what the band is about and document that moment. But as a filmmaker, I like the creativity of making a music video, which affords me a lot more visual leeway.”

Reyes says that he shot the Organ Thief video on a zero budget, working at night with his Panasonic VX 100 camera and using a hearse belonging to the Memphis Roller Derby Girls as a prop. “It was fun and loose,” he says. “I had a concept but no real time to create something with tons of thought-out shots.”

He sees the final product as a marketing tool that the band can use on Web sites like MySpace and YouTube or send to MTV2 and cable-access video shows.

“YouTube,” Reyes notes, “can be so beneficial for bands, but I’m seeing a lot of single-camera, shaky from-the-back-of-the-room footage. You can’t really see the band, and the audio is distorted. I usually turn that kind of stuff off. So, at times, having a video can do more harm than good.”

“Music videos are just another form of media that’s available for exploitation,” Fleming says. “If you have something that looks good, it can lend professionalism to the band’s overall image.”

Local musician and filmmaker Geoffrey Brent Shrewsbury also has an entry in the showcase: a video for Evil Army‘s “Friday the 13th.“ Shrewsbury is no stranger to the Indie Memphis festival: He won an award for Best Narrative Short in 2004 with 17-inch Cobras and snagged the Tennessee Filmmaker’s Award with San Quentin, a series of static shots cut to the Johnny Cash song, last year.

“I haven’t made anything in a while, and I wanted a new project to practice with, something more contained and quick to turn around,” says Shrewsbury, who made the minute-and-a-half video using a camcorder and some blank tapes he had lying around.

Jeff Pope stars in the black-and-white horror flick, which, says Shrewsbury, was shot without spending a dime. “The goal was to make something as creative as possible with no budget and the least amount of stress on the band,” he explains. “It sounds like I was cutting corners, but I intentionally designed it that way. It was really a creative exercise, a challenge to remain simple and tell a story in under two minutes.”

Look for more from Shrewsbury later this fall, when he hopes to release a DVD of his short films, including videos from local bands the Lost Sounds, The Oblivians, his own group Vegas Thunder, and more.

Live From Memphis Music Video Showcase

Saturday, October 14th, 9 p.m.

Muvico, Peabody Place