Bill Gold - classic movie posters

Who's Bill Gold? you ask. 

Only one of the greatest movie poster designers of all time. He worked for Warner Bros. for 70 years. He's 92 now, and retired, except for doing the occasional Clint Eastwood movie poster. 

The first poster he ever worked on was for Casablanca (1942).

Bill Gold: “We had finished the poster. Warner Bros. looked at it for a while, and after few days they said, ‘Is there anything we can do to make this more exciting? More dramatic? It just kind of sits there.’
And I said, ‘Well, maybe. Let me take it back to the office.’
I brought it back the next day; I had put a gun in his hand.”

He'd left the gun out because Humphrey Bogart didn’t use a gun in the movie until the end, in the airport, when he shoots the Nazi. Gold didn’t want to reveal that until people came to see the film.

In the years that followed, Gold would put a lot of guns in the hands of a lot of leading men, especially Clint Eastwood, for whom he designed some 40 posters.

Learn more about Bill Gold:

IMP Awards    Independent    New York Times    Roundtable    Wikipedia   

Richard Griffiths - 1947-2013

Richard Griffiths was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1947. His parents were both deaf, and he learned sign language at an early age in order to communicate with them. Griffiths worked in small theatres, sometimes acting and sometimes managing. He built up an early reputation as a Shakespearean clown with portrayals of the Constable in The Comedy of Errors and Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and went on to play the King in Henry VIII.

He got his big break in film in It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet (1975). He played supporting roles in a number of major films, including The French Lieutenant's Woman, Chariots of Fire, and Gandhi. 

Gandhi (1982)

Griffiths' film roles were in both contemporary and period pieces such as Gorky Park (1983), Withnail and I (1987), King Ralph (1991), The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991), Guarding Tess (1994) and Sleepy Hollow (1999). 

Gorky Park (1983)

Later, he was seen as Harry Potter's cruel uncle Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter series.

Naked Gun 2½ (1991)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)

He appeared as Inspector Henry Crabbe, disillusioned policeman and pie chef extraordinaire, in the British detective drama Pie in the Sky, a role which was created specifically for him. 

He also made an extended appearance in the 2005 version of Charles Dickens' Bleak House. 

Griffiths died aged 65 after complications following heart surgery.
 

"Path of Beauty"

In this short film, Path of Beauty, a women walks in the Musée du Louvre, alone.

The museum is completely empty. We follow this young woman in her dreamlike journey through the different rooms of the museum, between amazement and beauty, art and poetry.

The woman is Eve Claudel. The film was directed by Florent Igla. The music, by Sigur Rós, is "Suð Í Eyrum."

Tricks of the Pickpocket Trade

Writing is a uncertain way of making a living. Most people need backup skills and an alternative method for generating an income. Here's something that might appeal to you... picking pockets. Your teacher tonight will be Apollo Robbins.

Robbins, who is thirty-eight and lives in Las Vegas, is a peculiar variety-arts hybrid, known in the trade as a theatrical pickpocket. Among his peers, he is widely considered the best in the world at what he does, which is taking things from people’s jackets, pants, purses, wrists, fingers, and necks, then returning them in amusing and mind-boggling ways.

In more than a decade as a full-time entertainer, Robbins has taken (and returned) a lot of stuff. He is probably best known for an encounter with Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail in 2001. While Carter was at dinner, Robbins struck up a conversation with several of his Secret Service men. Within a few minutes, he had emptied the agents’ pockets of pretty much everything but their guns.

In magic circles, Robbins is regarded as a kind of legend. Recently, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and the military have studied his methods for what they reveal about the nature of human attention.

Here's a short video in which he shows some of the how of his trade.

IMDb    Website    Wikipedia ________________________________________________________________________

In 1953, Sam Fuller made a film called Pickup on South Street. (The film was remade in South Africa in 1967 as The Cape Town Affair.) At the time, "pickup" was New York slang for picking a pocket. Sam Fuller knew a few professional pickpockets; he also knew Dan Campion, the Chief Detective of the Pickpocket Squad of the City of New York, who became an advisor on the film.

Apollo Robbins poses for a photo while picking a pocket from under the cover of a newspaper.
The paper is held well out of the way here for the benefit of the intended audience.

In Pickup on South Street,  Richard Widmark steals a purse from a lady's handbag
under the cover of a newspaper.

In The Cape Town Affair,  James Brolin steals a purse from a lady's handbag
under the cover of a newspaper.

I grew up on a housing estate where a disproportionate number of people were burdened with larcenous inclinations. One of my brothers was in and out of prison from the age of 15. The first time he went in, he was an angry country boy who scored high on initiative and low on knowledge. When he came out, he was a walking encyclopaedia of criminal ways and means. I spent a lot of time as a teenager listening to stories about criminal techniques. Although I eventually chose the straight path in life, I never entirely lost my interest in the alternatives.

If you'd like to know more about Mr Robbins and his unusual skills, here's a (long) article in The New Yorker you might like to read.

Interview with Daniel Zlobin

Daniel Zlobin is a writer, director and cinematographer who lives in St Petersburg, Russia. He studied screenwriting and photography at the Moscow International Film School, worked in a tent circus, made several short films, then studied lighting at the Saint Petersburg University of Cinematography and Television.
    Daniel is currently director of photography with a small production team, who are busily creating a short fantasy noir film called Tomorrow Tonight.
    I met Daniel online about the time he released the Indiegogo fund-raising project for Tomorrow Tonight and took the opportunity to ask him a few questions.
________________________________________________________________________

• Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

I was born in Moscow, and, generally, I grew up there. When I was 17, I entered the University of Film and Television in Saint-Petersburg and moved to live there.  

•  What kind of a family did you grow up with?

I grew up in lesbian family, and this is an extremely rare thing in Russia, which was very homophobic just after Soviet Union and staying homophobic now, also making some homophobic bills. So, my mother is an artist and my second mother is a psychologist working in charity organization.
    My mother made a great thing, raised me in the way I am, talking about art and showing me great movies.
    When I was a kid, and didn’t know which profession I’ll choose, my mother was always joking, "You can choose any profession, Danny, but not an artist." Because that’s a great labor and test, being an artist. But I decided to be a director of photography and, in some way, I decided to be an artist of film screen. So we always have a lot of things to discuss together.

•  Do you have any contact with your father?

No I don't, he didn't want to have children at the moment he had relationships with my mother. So, he abandoned us. It is rather long and complicated story, I don't think that's a big deal.

•  Where did you go to school?

In Russia there are eleven years of school before the university. So, I was studying in one usual Moscow school during seven years, after that I removed to a small town in the South of Russia (not so far from Sochi) to live with grandparents for a year and studied there, and then returned to Moscow.
   I studied two years in Moscow International Film School, but I exited there one year before graduation and finished the 11th grade at night school.

•  When did you first take an interest in films/stories?

So, my mother showed me a lot of good movies—modern and classic—since I was seven. Those were Russian classics (like Stalker and Andrei Rublev), Japanese films (Seven Samurai and Rashomon), Italian (Nights of Cabiria and Amarcord), some American classics (like The Godfather), and also some Japanese movies by Takeshi Kitano. There were very different films, old Polish crime comedy (Vabank) and at the same time some of James Cameron’s films like True Lies or The Terminator.
   So, by the age of ten I knew I want to make movies and began to learn some things about moviemaking. At thirteen I went to Moscow International Film School and there I realised I wanted to be a director of photography.

•  What was your first paying job? 

I was an operator of light controller in tent-circus in Moscow. Their permanent lightman asked me to cover him, during his vacation. So, when I was sixteen years old, I worked there on light controller every weekend for about one month, became friends with actors, several times changed lamps in spots about ten meters above the ground, without safety belt. I made a photo-reportage about this circus after the permanent lighter came back from his vacation.

A parrot-trainer at the circus

•  What was your first job in the movie business?

It’s hard for me to answer this question, because it’s hard to understand what is movie business in Russia. If we use this word to describe TV-series and Russian movies we can watch in cinemas, I still don’t work at movie business.
   Independent film projects I shoot are not connected with business now, because I’m not paid for them. And I never earned money with making movies. The other things are commercials, presentation videos, music videos, reportages and some kinds of videography. In this case, my first job was editing. And the next was camera assisting. And then I moved to Saint-Petersburg and make my living mostly with shooting commercials and music videos.
   And if we are not talking about paying job, my first work was the shooting of short film The Man Who Was There. That’s a kind of expressionist story about a lonely undertaker from some Russian village in 1980s.

•  Your current project is Tomorrow Tonight, a fantasy film noir. Who else is involved, and what is your role within the team?

We have a big team, much bigger than teams I’ve been working with on short films before. And the whole film is much more difficult than other shorts I shot, because here we have a really serious project. In some ways, it looks like a full-length movie, concentrated to thirty minutes. And there are a lot of difficult things to do— explosions, shootings, killings, action scenes, automobile chases, and everything is taking place in night-time. 

Concept art for Tomorrow Tonight

Our director is Vladislav Dikarev. He wrote this beautiful script himself and he will direct. Also he is the head of our administrating and producing headquarters. Now we are on preproduction, looking for locations and solving a lot of cases we need to solve before the shootings in April.
   Our production designer is Anna Martynenko. She graduated from university about three years ago. She’s a wonderful artist, very creative, resourceful and ingenious. When I was told that the world of the film is some kind of the world of jazz epoch of 1930s, evolved to nowadays with gas computers and modified revolvers and machine guns, I thought, "Wow, that’s gonna be tough." I had some idea of the way everything was going to be look, but then came Anna and showed us concepts, which were connected with my and director’s ideas, but that was much better and clearer.
 

Concept art for the car chase from Tomorrow Tonight

Also on Tomorrow Tonight, we have a post-production manager, Samvel Gevorgyan, who works with visual effects, colors, composing, and everything we need.
   And, as I told before, there are about five men and women, who care about our film process, looking for locations, making permissions for shootings, doing important paperwork, and whatever we could need.
   There are some actors, I haven’t met them yet, and a sound producer, and a lot of other people in the crew—gaffers, dolly workers, steadicam operators, super technicians, and such like.
   And among all this I am the director of photography on this movie.

•  Who has had the most influence on you as a filmmaker?

I think, when I was a child, Tarkovsky with his Stalker and Ivan's Childhood, Takeshi Kitano with Fireworks, Wenders’ Wings of Desire and Fellini’s Amarcord all impressed me more than anything. I remember that when I watched Amarcord, I thought, "That’s the way the movie should be." And later there were Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier. I think these directors and their films had the most influence on me.
   And if we talk about directors of photography, I think my teachers are Sven Nykvist and Georgi Rerberg.

•  Do you have any dreams of working in Hollywood?

I don’t know so much about Hollywood. That is not my dream, but I guess I’d like to work there a bit.

•  What one filmmaking advice book would you recommend to a young wannabe screenwriter in Adelaide?

For me, books are not the real way to learn something about making films and scripts. I think most things could be learned and understood in the right way just on practice. The only thing needed during such kind of education—some cultural background.
   And the only book, which really excited me in this way, is not about scriptwriting or film process, it’s about cinema in general, cinema as it is, cinema as a great art, which could be very different, and about the language of cinema. This is Dialogue with the Screen, by Yuri Lotman and Yuri Tsivian.

•  What are your ten favourite movies of all time?

It is always hard to say, because favorite movies have a habit to change.

8½ (1963), or Amarcord (1973)
The Silence (1963), or Persona (1966)
L.A Confidential (1997)
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
Wings of Desire (1987)
Stalker (1979)
The Element of Crime
Dead Man (1995)
Bullets Over Broadway (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)

•  I like your choice of Woody Allen film. Do you get to see many of his films in Russia?

We got to see a lot of different films of lots of directors here. I like the chosen film by Woody Allen more than others, I think, but I also enjoy Zelig and Match Point. The last one very impressed me.
________________________________________________________________________

To give you an idea of the project, Tomorrow Tonight, that Daniel is working on, here is the Indiegogo promo.

AWG Event in Adelaide

As development assistance for emerging writers becomes increasingly scarce, and with a growing pool of talented writers competing to climb through small windows of opportunity, what is a South Australian screenwriter to do? The Australian Writers' Guild has invited a range of SA writers at different points in their careers to share their biggest challenges and frustrations, before then opening the floor to an audience Q&A.

Panel: Ruth Estelle, Simon Butters, Andrew Bovell (host) & Sean Riley.

When: Wednesday 3 April, 7pm for a 7:30pm start

Where: King’s Head Hotel, 357 King William St, Adelaide

Cost: AWG Members $5 Guests $10

AWG members can register for the event here. 
(Make sure you log into the AWG site, first. Have a printer connected, so you can print out your receipt.)

The Film Before The Film

If you like movies, you'll love this. It was a research project at the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule (usually referred to as the BTK) about the history of Opening Titles on films. The bulk of the research and animation were undertaken by Nora Thoes and Damian Pérez.

Book review: "Hitchcock"

In 1962, François Truffaut commenced a series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, via an interpreter. These interviews occurred intermittently over the next five years. The end result was published in 1967, as a book called Hitchcock, though you will sometimes see it referred to as Hitchcock/Truffaut.

Prior to reading this, I didn't know much about François Truffaut, other than Julia Phillips' comments about him in You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (which is one of the great reads about Hollywood in the 1970s.)

Steven Spielberg had cast François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a film Julia Phillips produced. Truffaut and Phillips did not hit it off.

He was an arrogant, famous French film director and I couldn't help but feel that he was fucking with us all the time.
   I was convinced that the well-known-deaf-in-the-left-ear legend (with a hearing aid as a prop, if you please) was a ploy, like not speaking English, to keep the world at bay and for his own private amusement.
   Still I addressed myself to making him feel comfortable, revered, safe. That was my specialty. Also my job. But deep down I knew he was a prick and it was making me defiant. Fuck him. I wanted my own private amusement.

That private amusement took the form of a bet with Spielberg that Truffaut wasn't deaf. She would find out over dinner, where she would be sitting next to him, on his 'deaf' side.

"At some point during dinner I'll whisper his name and we'll see if he turns toward me. If he does he ain't deaf and I win. If he doesn't he is deaf and you win."

Spielberg accepted the bet.

Halfway through dinner I whispered "François" and he turned minutely in my direction. Of course, Steven argued that it was an inconclusive gesture, and he welched on the bet. I know I won because it earned me François's eternal enmity.

Enmity indeed. Truffaut sniped at Phillips throughout the lengthy filming exercise, including telling the Sunday New York Times that she was "incompetent" and "unprofessional."

It has long amused me that François became Julia's true foe. But I'm like that.

The Truffaut who comes through in this book is a serious cinephile, and so well researched that he knew things about Hitchcock's films that Hitchcock didn't know or had forgotten. I came away from the book with a deep respect for his film knowledge and insights.

I was interested to notice that many of the famous Hitchcock quotes that I've read over the years can be found in this book. Whether they are the original source, I cannot say. Here are some quotes from the book.
________________________________________________________________________

From François Truffaut:

• The only two British film-makers whose works have survived the test of time—and space, for that matter—are Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock.
• The man who excels at filming fear is himself a very fearful person.
• The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience.
• Clarity is the most important quality in the making of a film.
• Cardinal rule of cinema: Whatever is said instead of being shown is lost upon the viewer.
• In real life the things people say to each other do not necessarily reflect what they actually think and feel. This is especially true of such mundane occasions as dinner and cocktail parties, or of any meeting between casual acquaintances.
• If we observe any such gathering, it is clear that the words exchanged between the guests are superficial formalities and quite meaningless, whereas the essential is elsewhere; it is by studying their eyes that we can find out what is truly on their minds.
• Each of (Hitchcock's) pictures features several scenes in which the rule of counterpoint between dialogue and image achieves a dramatic effect by purely visual means.
• Hitchcock is almost unique in being able to film directly, that is, without resorting to explanatory dialogue, such intimate emotions as suspicion, jealousy, desire, and envy.
• Anything connected with fear takes us back to childhood. All of children's literature is linked to sensations and particularly to fear.

From Alfred Hitchcock:

• A film cannot be compared to a play or a novel. It is closer to a short story, which, as a rule, sustains one idea that culminates when the action has reached the highest point of the dramatic curve.
• In the usual form of suspense it is indispensable that the public be made perfectly aware of all the facts involved. Otherwise there is no suspense.
• To my way of thinking, mystery is seldom suspenseful. In a whodunit, for instance, there is no suspense, but a sort of intellectual puzzle.
• I don't really approve of whodunits because they're rather like a jigsaw or crossword puzzle. No emotion. You simply wait to find out who committed the murder.
• I hate to introduce a useless character in a story.
• Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.
• To insist that the storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately.
• A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow.
• In North by Northwest, where the villainous James Mason is competing with Cary Grant for the affection of Eva Marie Saint, I wanted him to be smooth and distinguished. The difficulty was how we could make him seem threatening at the same time. So what we did was to split this evil character into three people: James Mason, who is attractive and suave; his sinister-looking secretary; and the third spy, who is crude and brutal.
• In my opinion, the chief requisite for an actor is the ability to do nothing well, which is by no means as easy as it sounds.
• A mass of ideas, however good they are, is not sufficient to create a successful picture.
• The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.
• One of the cardinal sins for a script-writer, when he runs into some difficulty, is to say, "We can cover that by a line of dialogue." Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual form.
• Sex on the screen should be suspenseful, I feel. If sex is too blatant or too obvious, there's no suspense.
• You know why I favour sophisticated blondes in my films? We're after the drawing room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they're in the bedroom.
• Without the element of surprise the scenes become meaningless. There's no possibility to discover sex.
• When you're involved in a project and you see it isn't going to work out, the wisest thing is to simply throw the whole thing away.

When asked about his habit of making personal appearances in his movies:

• It was strictly utilitarian; we had to fill the screen. Later on it became a superstition and a gag. But by now it's a rather troublesome gag, and I'm very careful to show up in the first five minutes so as to let the people look at the rest of the movie with no further distraction.

________________________________________________________________________

Hitchcock is a big book (367 pages). It consists of the recorded dialogue between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, as they discussed every film Hitchcock made, from The Lodger (1926) to Frenzy (1972). After their meetings ended, Hitchcock made one last picture, Family Plot (1976). The book is of most value to directors, though screenwriters will find some elements of interest.

Seven tips for surviving the film industry

This month MovieMaker magazine has an article called Hitchhike a Thousand Miles: Oscar nominee John Hawkes gives seven tips for surviving the film industry.

John Hawkes is an actor who has appeared in well over a hundred movies and TV shows. I don't know how it came about, but he shared the following thoughts about longevity in the film business. What caught my eye was his admonition about "hitchhiking thousands of miles."

As someone who hitchhiked tens of thousands of miles as a skinny long-haired teenager, I instantly understood. Hitchhiking saved me. It showed me there were people, and lives, unlike those of the Housing Commission estate where I grew up. Thoughtful people. Considerate people. Generous people. When you sit with someone, in their car, for hundreds of miles, there is an expectation of conversation. I knew nothing and had nothing to say. So I asked questions. The first interviews I conducted were with mobile strangers and those strangers introduced me to worlds I'd never heard of before.

I don't want to distort the picture: I met some weirdos, too. Paranoids, drunks, and friendly men who wanted to show me a good time, wanted to take me home to bed. There were some women, too, with that same idea.

Like John Hawkes, I no longer recommend it, the times being what they are, but I'm glad hitchhiking was a part of my life.

Now see what else he had to say.
________________________________________________________________________

I’m an untrained actor with no formal education in moviemaking. I learned my trade by observing the work of others, reading books about acting and film, and through trial and error on sets and stages.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Trust your gut. Don’t guess what the audience wants. Tell the story you want to tell, the way you want to tell it.

2. All arts connect and inform each other. See theater, dance, music, and visual art; read great books. Be thrilled and inspired beyond your niche.

3. Loaf occasionally.

4. Make a vital life outside of the business. Travel, struggle, get a hobby, study, volunteer—gain perspective. This may indirectly benefit your work, as well. Hitchhiking thousand of miles, though I no longer recommend it, greatly enriched my understanding of people and story.

5. This business will knock you down. When it does, try to get up, dust yourself off, and take another step forward. And try to rejoice in the idea that you’ve found work that you love to do. Most don’t.

6. Be kind. Be brave. Be prepared. Work hard. Have a great sense of humor.

7. William Goldman famously said of the film industry that: “Nobody knows anything.” This may be true. I don’t know for sure.

________________________________________________________________________

Helping people get to see your short film online

This week Ryan Koo has a post on his blog, No Film School, called How to Get People to See Your Short Film Online with Vimeo Curator & SotW Co-Founder Jason Sondhi. The post contains a link to a video interview with Jason Sondhi, and some comments by both Sondhi and Koo.

That's what caught my attention. The comments. They list ways you can make your video more accessible online. Here is a conflation of their suggestions—Ten practical ways to help us help you:

Upload a trailer.
Set a clear release date.
Don’t set that date over the weekend.
Actually think about it as a launch; get everyone you can behind it in those initial stages.
Reach out to sites/individuals with an established audience.
Make sure the film’s description and thumbnail are enticing.
Have a website.
Update your contact info.
Provide stills.
Write production notes and director’s statements.

There are hundreds of short films and web series embedded on Adelaide Screenwriter. I strive to include all the contact information I can with those films: Facebook, Twitter, IMDb, LinkedIn, Website, Blog, Vimio/YouTube, Kickstarter/Indiegogo/Pozible, etc.

I want to help. Don't make it difficult. Sometimes I'll include a film with no other information, but usually I just skip it.

As Ryan Koo says:

Make yourself easy to find and painless to cover. You may have made the world’s greatest short, but if people can’t get hold of you or find everything they need to write up an article, your film will become nothing more than a pleasantly fading memory.

In search of a bigger (online) audience

This year I've been pondering the subject of finding an audience. I've been watching my friend Carlo Petraccaro search for an online audience for Total Football: The Movie, just as I've watched another friend, Anne Flournoy, search for an audience for her web series, The Louise Log (TLL).

Yesterday I was startled to discover that Dutch Gordon had published his assessment of the problems confronting Anne and TLL on his blog, Comedy TV is Dead. His post is called How a Web-Series Like The Louise Log Can Return To A Bigger Audience.

There are many web-series creators out there looking at the results of their first (or second) season and wondering why they didn’t do better—by that I mean get more views. Anne Flournoy, creator of the excellent but flawed The Louise Log, has made her position clear on the matter; cream doesn’t always rise to the top on the Internet. Quite simply, most of her potential audience has no idea The Louise Log even exists, so she’s decided it’s time for her to more actively promote her show, and if need be, reel in one viewer at a time.

Louise is not alone in searching for an audience.

Anne had posted this—How Can I Get My Stuff To Go Viral?—on her blog. As part of the wider conversation that was taking place at the time, I had asked Anne in an e-mail: Do you want to be a filmmaker, or someone trapped in a cycle of trying to get people to like an old webseries? I suggested she move on to something new. And Anne, to her credit, completely ignored my advice. (But nicely. Anne does everything nicely.)

In Australia we have a saying about "flogging a dead horse." Anne subscribes more to the idea of "flogging the willing horse." More Hard Work has always been her mantra. Or, as Nathan Buckley put it after last year's season-ending defeat: "Harder. Smarter. Longer." And, no, that's not a sexual reference. He was talking about preparing for the new football season.

Meanwhile, Dutch Gordon got to the point—you need to discover those really basic factors that determine success or failure.

There are currently a lot of unsolved problems out there, but more often than not creators are overlooking the really basic factors that are determining success or failure. Too much emphasis has been put on virality, especially as to how it applies to web-series. This post is about the basic things all independent web-series creators should think about before they actively promote their show but most do not.

"But most do not." That's an observation I've made over the last year or so, as well. If you're looking for a larger audience online, read this post by Dutch Gordon in full. It contains a lot of sensible advice.

"Total Football: the Movie"

Here's the story of two brothers, a suburban soccer team in Adelaide, the 2006 World Cup, traditional Australian mateship, a crew of Aussie battlers, and a writer/director who wouldn't give up.

In 2008, Gian Carlo Petraccaro (Carlo) wrote a screenplay about an amateur football team led by two brothers; one the captain, the other the coach. 

They're brothers, but they're very different people.

Charlie, the captain, is preoccupied with winning, and with women.

Lots of women like Charlie...

Not only is Charlie good with women, he's good at soccer football.
 

Up there, Cazaly!

The team members have all the usual problems.

"But I like beer and pizza!"

"Is this work? ... Or football?"

"What about you... Are you a virgin?"

"You said that you weren't going to take this seriously.."

It's not easy to sprint up Montefiore Hill in 40°C [104°F] heat.
 

"I think this might be my last season."

Frank, the coach and team virgin, loves South American football. He is obsessed with sporting purity—the Joga Bonito, the Beautiful Game, Total Football. 

"God has given us mud."

But once it becomes clear that their goal of winning the Cup Final is in jeopardy, Frank crosses to the Dark Side. 

"So, what is it that you do now... You're a... barista?"

 Charlie's nemesis is a big, bad professional footballer, played by Lehmo.

"Do you know what I do?"

Meanwhile, Charlie falls in love, but what's gonna happen when he finds out she's a professional stripper?

"Okay, fifty thousand dollars."

Then the big-money guys start paying attention, betting on the Cup Final, and the likely outcome becomes murkier than ever.

And that's the basic setup to the story. ________________________________________________________________________

Carlo scraped together all the money he had, talked local businesses into supporting him, and gathered a cheap cast and crew. Filming took place in January 2009, during a heat wave. There were problems during post-production, especially money problems, but also some ego problems.

A version of the film, hastily cobbled together, was screened a couple of times at a local art house cinema. Reviews were mixed, and the project descended into some kind of post-development hell.

Three years passed, slowly. Then the producer released the original footage into Carlo's hands, so he could re-cut it the way he planned it.

Now the re-cut film is available. It is one of the few all self-funded films made in South Australia in recent years. No help at all from the SAFC or MRC. 

You can view the film online for $4. Meanwhile, here's a trailer...

    Facebook     Twitter    Vimio    Website