PTFF News
Newsletter Archives
July 29, 2008
Contents- New Special Guest Secured; Contest to Resume
- All the things you’ve ever wanted to know about Robert Osborne
- West Coast Live will make its fifth annual broadcast from the Port Townsend Film Festival
- Elliott Gould Feted in Brooklyn
- Local Girl Does Herself and Her Town Proud
New Special Guest Secured; Contest to Resume
Negotiations are complete for the new special guest for the 9th annual Port Townsend Film Festival, September 26-28. An earlier choice for the guest spot had cancelled. The Guess-the-Guest contest will resume on Wednesday, August 6. Clues will appear in The Leader and the Peninsula Daily News. They’ll also appear in this eNewsletter.
All the things you’ve ever wanted to know about Robert Osborne
Just as the 1897 "report of (Mark's Twain's) death was an exaggeration" (he died some 13 years later), the recent report identifying Robert Osborne as the "former host of Turner Classic Movies” was an inexplicable error made by a careless or inattentive journalist. Robert, as he is affectionately known in these parts, is indeed in contract negotiations with TCM, but is still very much its host. In anticipation of his attendance at the 9th annual Port Townsend Film Festival, Sept. 26-28, he has agreed to answer questions for publicity purposes.
So now’s your chance to find out all the things you’ve ever wanted to know about Robert Osborne.
Please send your questions to info@ptfilmfest.com, write “Robert” in the subject column. We’ll compile and collate them and send them to him for response. We’re not sure yet where his answers will be published, but we’ll let you know as soon as that’s determined. Please give your name, phone number, and city/community where you live. We’ll publish only your first name and the city.
Timing is of the utmost. Please send us your questions by Monday, August 4. Thanks.
West Coast Live will make its fifth annual broadcast from the Port Townsend Film Festival
Also contrary to rumor, West Coast Live will indeed make its fifth annual broadcast from the Port Townsend Film Festival on Saturday, Sept. 27. Stay tuned for details.
Elliott Gould Feted in Brooklyn
Elliott Gould, center, at the 2007 Port
Townsend Film Festival with volunteers,
from left: Mara Lathrop, Monica
Mick’Hager, Mark Saran, Sue Gillard,
and Darlene Quayle.
In last Sunday’s New York Times, Mike Hale reported on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s celebration of “Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age,” a three-week 10-film tribute beginning Friday. The films will include M*A*S*H, “The Long Goodbye,” “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, “California Split,” and Ingmar Bergman’s first English-language film, “The Touch.” The latter two films were screened in the Port Townsend Film Festival 2006 tribute to Gould.
“Elliott Gould was the anti-movie star and therefore the perfect movie star for the anti-decade of the 1970s,” Hale wrote in the Times. Hardly uptight, he was also the perfect guest for the festival as he jumped right into the community, participating in discussions with school kids, giving interviews, making appearances, answering questions, attending the quilt show.
Local Girl Does Herself and Her Town Proud
Theater review that appeared in The Seattle Times, Friday, July 25, 2008:
"The K of D": a haunting, intriguing one-woman show
By Tom Keogh
Laura Schellhardt's "The K of D" has a gothic insularity that feels like collective and escalating madness. One feels as if the audience is being dragged down a rabbit hole of psychological horror, with fewer and fewer ordinary bearings as shadows grow so deep we glimpse the juncture where darkness and magic meet.
Spooky, indeed, and all the more so because "The K of D" ("the kiss of death") is told in a way that intentionally raises doubts as to its partial or whole veracity. Through its tormented, central figure's simultaneously painful and playful monologue about the difference between facts and truth, Schellhardt provocatively explores the role of creativity in emotional survival.
The remarkable Renata Friedman plays a girl-woman we assume to be Charlotte McGraw, who possesses an ostracizing if useful ability to bestow death with a loving gesture.
The character weaves stories around Charlotte in the third person, though, either literally or literarily, she is clearly her own subject.
Clambering about a rustic dock where Charlotte's abusive father has been known to go fishing, the haunted heroine tells a long story she suggests could be real or an ever-evolving urban legend of oblique validity. In any case, it involves the death of Charlotte's twin brother, Jamie, and his possible reincarnation as a heron.
Also in the mix is Faulknerian decay in the McGraw family, and an unholy war that breaks out when the psychopath responsible for Jamie's killing moves next door to the McGraws.
It is Friedman alone playing all these people, and more. Friedman plays a meta-Charlotte who, as storyteller, invokes the voices, mannerisms, emotions and unique mania of each individual in her tale. Director Braden Abraham proves a superb traffic cop helping Friedman keep each role clearly delineated.
Describing Friedman's cracked-mirror performance as virtuoso is hardly adequate, especially since she isn't simply stepping out of one character into another but rapidly yanking feverish impressions from Charlotte — an identity she won't even embrace.
In its chilling ending, "The K of D" suggests this cursed narrator is doomed to tell and retell these (truly or figuratively) autobiographical events in an endless loop, making storytelling not so much catharsis as living hell.
Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com
Ongoing performances:
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday through Aug. 9 at Balagan Theatre, 1117 E. Pike St., Seattle; $12-$15 (information, 917-297-9545 or www.thekofd.com/show.html; tickets, www.brownpapertickets.com).
Port Townsend friends of Renata have been streaming to Seattle to see the production, some several times. At last Sunday’s sold-out matinee, probably 49 of the 50-member audience were home-town folk. Several performances have sold out, so make reservations before you go.