Coates Promotes “Juko’s Time Machine” at the SF Indie Film Festival Feb 18 and 23

Juko’s Time Machine
directed by my client Kai Barry premieres at The San Francisco Indie Festival with two screenings February 18 and February 23 at the Roxie Cinema.
Shot on the RED Camera, color finished in APPLE Color at my home office, Kai’s clever feature narrative is a well acted dance of love to the music of time warped.

Press review of “A Fierce Green Fire”

The Hollywood Reporter reviews my client Mark Kitchell’s film at Sundance.

OSCAR nominee list

Congratulations to my client Robin Fryday, whose film The Barber of Birmingham has made the finalist list for Best Documentary Short Film in the 2012 Oscar competition.
Color finishing and Post Production management by COLORFLOW, Berkeley, CA.

“A Fierce Green Fire” is heading for Sundance

My client Mark Kitchell’s film “A Fierce Green Fire” is two hours’ attempt to embrace the history of environmental activism and it still must drop from discussion at least two hours more. Connie Field’s history of the anti-apartheid struggle needed at least seven hours to tell some of the story in “Have You Heard From Johannesburg”. In “A Fierce Green Fire” I had hoped to see scenes from the oil spill at Santa Barbara and the anti-nuclear movement I participated in but the documentary form must encase itself in the attention span of theatrical entertainment. Oh well. The Fierce Green Fire will hold you for two hours easily. It should be a series and television may be the correct medium for it instead of the cinema hall.

Zaentz Media Center’s Clarity Films Gets a PBS Independent Lens run

Here is a good review of my client Connie Field’s documentary about the anti-apartheid movement “Have You Heard From Johannesburg?” beginning a multiple night run on Independent Lens on PBS.

Everyday Sunshine: local theatrical run at the Roxie

My clients documentary about the Los Angeles band Fishbone begins a theatrical run at the Roxie Cinema.

Here’s a review in the San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle.

Phoning it In As Kodak Irises Out

My most recent feature film client shot his movie on a NOKIA phone. Meanwhile, Kodak stock is under a buck per share and the company was told today it’s about to be de-listed. The film OLIVE played a week in Santa Monica and is trying to get nominated for the song Oscar. Gena Rowlands is still an amazing actress in her part in this sweet story.

Here’s the story in The Los Angeles Times .

And here for Academy consideration is the aspiring song “Imaginary Friends”.

John Korty Retrospective at the Smith Rafael Center, San Rafael, CA

John Korty turned 75 this year and the Smith Rafael Center is hosting a retrospective of his prolific career in filmmaking. It begins Thursday night November 10 at 7PM with a screening of two films I color finished, “Miracle in a Box: A Piano Reborn” and Korty’s latest work “John Allair Digs In!”

John is the original Bay Area maverick filmmaker who lured Coppola and Lucas up from Southern California to see his West Marin operation where he made his first feature film “Crazy Quilt”. The posse formed and shared offices at the early incarnation of American Zoetrope on Folsom Street in San Francisco. Korty returned to Marin and John Korty Films in Mill Valley was the incubator for the careers of the following filmmakers: David Fincher, Henry Sellick, Rick Goldsmith, Trip Gruver, Gary Guitterez, Drew Takahashi, Doug Haynes, and the animation director of the Hershey’s Kisses commercials who introduced himself to Korty with a business card that read “Carl Willat- Teenager”.

Korty at 75 is still embracing the new edge in the technology and always has. He took to color grading with a Hazeltine video analyzer while some of us film timers were still eyeballing negatives and guessing how to print them and he cut down the number of prints he needed for the final answer print to one.

Korty was in the front row of the demonstration in 1978 of One Pass Video’s Rank Cintel telecine, newly arrived and ready to transform color finishing in the Bay Area for the next generation.

And now Korty, fullly engaged in the era of digital filmmaking, gets it when I show him what you can do with the color tools in Final Cut Pro.

I hope to see you at the premiere of John Allair Digs In! Its a red hot boogie woogie piano show.

Jordan Belson (1926-2011)

On September 6, 2011, two master filmmakers of the San Francisco avant garde cinema died, George Kuchar age 69 and Jordan Belson age 85.
Both were personal mentors of mine back to the 1960s. I saw “Eclipse of the Sun Virgins” by George and his brother Mike at Doc Films, the art cinema showcase of the University of Chicago in 1969 and liked its weird transgressive excess, a style explained to me later in film school by P. Adam Sitney as a genre of “Ironic Spectacle”. The Kuchar Brothers and my teenage mentors The Gelander Brothers brought me into Super 8mm filmmaking in the late Sixties. We made a Freudian comic book ironic spectacle of our own called “Butterflyman vs. the Megazoid” with the 15 year old yours truly as the insect hero regressing in monochromatic return to the cocoon pupa state after a patricidal superhero combat six years ahead of George Lucas and two thousand behind Sophocles.

Around this time in say 1970 filmmaking friends and I founded a high school cinema club and brought to our Midwestern milieu The Kinetic Arts Film Festival out of California. In the reels of short film offerings that nearly got me expelled by pious school administrators were Jean Cocteau’s “Egypte, O Egypte”, Terry Riley’s “Music With Balls” and Jordan Belson’s new film “Samadhi”. (And A French New Wave spoof called “Sweet Wounded Bird” with a topless blonde required sober adult monitoring lest a bacchanal broke out in the High School Library where we screened it.)

Well, I was quite taken with Belson’s film, a cosmic mandala printed on celluloid triacetate 16 millimeters wide. Within a year Gene Youngblood wrote about Jordan Belson in his book “Expanded Cinema”, connecting Belson to the “2001: A Space Odyssey” intergalactic gateway as a birth canal to cinema of cosmic consciousness. I so enjoyed even the rump end of the Sixties as the acne healed.

You will understand then the magnetic pull of the San Francisco experimental cinema of the 1940s-1990s that lured this prairie dog out of his Flatland burrow.

With great delight I met Jordan Belson at my first job in the San Francisco post production industry at W.A. Palmer Films in the middle 1970s. I was a laboratory film timer apprentice and Belson was the singular filmmaker customer who “timed” his own films. Belson brought in multiple rolls (alphabetically ordered from A to D in his case) of 16mm film he had assembled, along with the index cards that marked the footage count and the intended printer light he had assigned himself after my lab colleagues had instructed him to do. It was my task to examine his A-D rolls in a gang synchronizer over a light table, inspect his application of the silver foil tab between the film sprocket holes that would trigger an advance of the computer punch tape I would make that governed the Bell and Howell Model C printing machine that spun color and light into a Kodak Ektachrome emulsion numbered 7390. I was entrusted with assuring the artist’s printing program would work and that the multiple rolls would fade in and out overlapping each other in mechanical rhythms of 16, 24, 32, 48, and 96 frame length dissolves, photochemical musical scoring to me.

When the film was printed and processed I then inspected the results, the first eyes on the artist’s work. In my twenties it was an incalculable thrill.

Belson continued to operate from his Montgomery Street hermitage on Telegraph Hill to generate optical wonders on film, most popularly demonstrated in the Phil Kaufman film “The Right Stuff” when Chuck Yeager escapes the earth’s atmosphere and briefly glimpses the Van Allen Belts on the modern wings of Daedulus, as imagined by Belson.

I moved on from W.A.Palmer Films, out of the lab and into the telecine world where I met Jordan Belson again twenty years laster as the trained painter turned cinema artist was warily looking at video as the repository of his life’s work. He was recalcitrant and suspicious of the video medium.
A patient sherpa had guided him into Western Images where I was flogging our new Sony High Definition Telecine. Jordan could not get past the experience of the film he made illuminated by television phosphor light instead of by projected film. I did not make the sale and I respected him for it.

When he died, I posted a You Tube link to his last film on my Facebook page. When I later read that he had expressly forbidden this form of exhibition I was ashamed of myself.

Therefore, I note and promote the memorial event at Pacific Film Archive October 19 at 730PM when Jordan’s films will be projected in the best light as he would have wanted.

For further reading about Jordan Belson, I refer you to the good scholarship of:

Gene Youngblood “The Expanded Cinema”
Scott MacDonald “Art in Cinema”
Scott MacDonald “Canyon Cinema”
Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid “Radical Light”
Pauline Kael “For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies”

And for the curated film transfers Jordan finally approved of or submitted to:

Center for Visual Music “Jordan Belson: 5 Essential Films”
NTSC standard definition

Also, an excellent article about Jordan’s graphic artwork:
The Unseen Art of Jordan Belson by Ying Tan

OSCAR news

Barber of Birmingham has made the short list for the Documentary Short category for the 2012 Academy Awards.