Pages 11

DELTA SPONSORS THE RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL FOR THE THIRD YEAR RUNNING
This is the third year running of the partnership between Delta Air Lines and Raindance, continuing to support
emerging filmmakers and independent film.
Last year, Delta sponsored the attendance of selected filmmakers, who travelled from the USA to London in order
to support their screenings at the Raindance Film Festival.
One such filmmaker was Alex Holdridge, director of the stylish romance In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Together
with producer Seth Caplan and cast members Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds, Alex attended the screening
of the film, which was such a success at the festival that its screening led to the film being picked up by Vertigo
Films (Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Shrooms) for UK distribution. The film has since reached a larger
audience with screenings at mainstream cinemas.
Other guests sponsored by Delta included Hollywood movie star and icon Michael Madsen, who came to promote
the new mockumentary Being Michael Madsen, along with director Michael Mongillo. The Reservoir Dogs star
attended the screening, and participated in a special masterclass focusing on his acting career. Also supported
was Azazel Jacobs, whose independent hit The GoodTimesKid went down a storm with Raindance audiences.
For the second year running Delta supported the Raindance Director in Residence, which last year saw cult
Japanese director Ryuichi Hiroki attend the festival to host screenings of three of his films.
In Search of a Midnight Kiss director Alex
Holdridge and crew
Delta sponsored the Best UK Short award, won by Tom Tagholm, director of The Truffle Hunter, a story about a
struggling truffle hunter making the discovery of a lifetime, with devastating results on his relationship with his pig.
DELTA AT A GLANCE
Delta is the world’s leading transatlantic carrier, linking more European cities to the US than any other carrier.
Delta also serves the most cities in the US with flights to 48 states. From the UK, Delta offers non-stop flights
with convenient connections to over 200 cities in the US and beyond:
Delta flies to more worldwide destinations than any airline with Delta and Delta Connection flights to 312 destinations in 61 countries. To Latin America and the Caribbean, Delta offers 393 weekly flights to 47 destinations.
LGW – ATL LGW – CVG LHR – ATL LHR – JFK MAN – ATL MAN – JFK EDI – JFK
delta.com
SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
11
AS FAYE DUNAWAY VISITS RAINDANCE FOR THE FIRST TIME,
ELECTRIC SHEEP’S VIRGINIE SÉLAVY RETRACES HER CAREER IN FILM
S
‘Bonnie Parker was the first role, the one that was closest to me
in many ways. She was just this small-town southern girl, coming
out of nowhere, hungry and wanting to get ahead, wanting
to do something meaningful, wanting to succeed. She had a
kind of poetry in her soul. She’s a part of me to this day’
Interview by Mike Sager, Esquire, August 1999
INCE MAKING HER cinema debut with Hurry Sundown
in 1967, Faye Dunaway has appeared in over 60 feature
films, worked with renowned directors such as Roman
Polanski, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet and starred
opposite some of Hollywood’s most illustrious leading
men, including Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen and
Robert Redford. And yet, in spite of everything she has achieved since
then, her first lead role in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) remains
her magnum opus, not only one of her most affecting and memorable performances but the one that made her a star.
An unknown stage-trained actress with only two films under her belt,
Dunaway got the part after Penn saw her in The Happening (1967), even
though Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda and Tuesday Weld had all been considered for the role. It was an inspired decision on Penn’s part, and not only
did Dunaway hold her own opposite Warren Beatty as Clyde, but her passionate performance gave the film its emotional core.
Penn clearly realised the importance of Dunaway’s Bonnie to the film
and he chose to open the story with her: first a close-up of Dunaway’s lips,
then her face in a mirror before she gets up to reveal her nude back. She
restlessly paces about the room, brooding and sensual, instantly conveying
the oppressive boredom of small-town life. When she sees Clyde trying to
steal her mother’s car, she upbraids him from her bedroom window, clearly
naked through the frosted glass, in a brilliantly daring scene. She clumsily
rushes down the stairs while hastily fastening her dress, but when she
comes out of the door to meet Clyde she’s all sass and tease. In that one
scene, Dunaway has already vividly conveyed the complexity of the character, her beguiling mixture of sexual confidence and country girl naïvety.
Bonnie Parker was a new breed of female character, and it was one the
most exciting roles Hollywood could offer an actress at the time. Bonnie
is not simply Clyde’s sidekick, but a fearless, gun-toting outlaw in her
own right. Not only that, but she is a sexually forward woman unafraid
to show her desires, a novelty in Hollywood at the time, whereas Clyde
is clearly uncomfortable with intimacy. The suggestion that the fearsome
bank robber Clyde Barrow may be impotent was one of the film’s boldest
touches, and it adds poignancy to Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship, which
they only seem able to consummate through crime. Both actors bring a
subtle tenderness to those scenes and Dunaway’s sensuous beauty turns
to touching vulnerability when Clyde rejects her advances.
SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
13
Proud to be supporting the Raindance Film Festival...
... and proud to be working on some of the best independent films.
Post production: audio, editing, telecine, voice-over, graphics,
media encoding, digital film, DI grading, restoration, DVD and
distribution services for film and television.
All at 142
Film House
142 Wardour Street
London, W1F 8DD
T: +44 (0) 20 7878 0000
www.ascent142.co.uk
Previous spread The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); above Flick (2008)
Bonnie and Clyde is the story of two characters with a tremendous
hunger for something bigger, who shape each other into mythical figures.
Clyde takes Bonnie out of Smallville and makes her a famous outlaw but
their exploits only become the stuff of legend when Bonnie writes their
story in a poem, ‘The Story of Bonnie and Clyde’. Says Clyde when Bonnie
reads it out to him: ‘One time I told you I was gonna make you somebody,
that’s what you’ve done for me. You made me somebody they’re gonna
remember’. Dunaway had the same hunger, and Bonnie made her somebody too, propelling her to instant stardom.
Now Hollywood royalty, Dunaway would be offered some of her best
roles in the decade that followed, as directors were drawn to her peculiar combination of aloofness and volatility, sophistication and emotional
intensity. She followed up Bonnie and Clyde with Norman Jewison’s classy
caper The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), oozing glamour and seductiveness
as Vicki Anderson, a supremely confident insurance investigator out to get
Steve McQueen’s suave millionaire thief. In 1970, she was reunited with
Arthur Penn for the revisionist western Little Big Man, playing the sexobsessed preacher’s wife who has designs on Dustin Hoffman’s conflicted
hero Jack Crabb. Three years later, she was appearing in big-budget, allstar productions such as The Three Musketeers and The Towering Inferno
while the following year saw her playing opposite Robert Redford in
Sydney Pollack’s conspiracy thriller
Three Days of the Condor.
In 1974, Roman Polanski cast her
as Evelyn Mulwray opposite Jack
Nicholson’s private detective Jake
Gittes in Chinatown, and her searing
performance is rightfully remembered as one of her most impressive. She makes quite an entrance, first
appearing in Gittes’s office threatening him with a lawsuit, all arched pencilled eyebrows and haughty demeanour. Beautiful and not to be trusted,
she first seems to be a classic femme fatale. But as Gittes digs out more
dirty secrets involving the water company co-owned by her husband and
her father (played by a formidable John Huston), Evelyn Mulwray reveals
herself to be a moving, tragic woman with a terrible secret in her past.
Coolly elegant when the film starts, troubled and frightened as Gittes
investigates, sensual and in control when they end up in bed together,
needy and hurt when Gittes finds out the truth, Evelyn Mulwray remains
one of Dunaway’s most complex creations, a femme fatale who is fatal
only to herself, who lies not to manipulate men but to protect herself and
those she loves, and who ultimately cannot escape her past.
Dunaway had been nominated for an Academy Award for her role in
Chinatown (and previously for Bonnie and Clyde), but she finally won one
in 1976 for her portrayal of tough-as-nails TV executive Diana Christensen
in Sidney Lumet’s biting media satire Network. The film denounces the
increasing drift of television towards exploitative sensationalism, and
Dunaway’s bright, ambitious Christensen is seen as part of the new,
unscrupulous generation responsible for this shift. Driven and passionate
about her job, she doesn’t have much time for romantic relationships. When
she does have an affair with the middle-aged former Head of News Max
Schumacher, whose job she took, it unsurprisingly doesn’t last. Watching
the film now, it is striking how much of the bile is directed at Dunaway’s
character, and this even though as a young woman trying to make it in a
world ruled by middle-aged men she is clearly not the one in charge. In
spite of the obvious villainy of Robert Duvall’s or Ned Beatty’s characters,
it is Christensen that is most closely identified with the evils of modern television, as ex-lover Schumacher makes clear when they separate: he can’t
stay, he says, or he will be destroyed, ‘like everything you and the institution of television have destroyed’. While the animosity directed against
the only young female character in the film is rather dubious, Dunaway’s
intense portrayal of Christensen makes her a fascinating, multi-faceted
character whose all-consuming love for her work leads her to make some
truly disturbing decisions.
Dunaway’s career took a downturn in the 1980s, and this has been
commonly blamed on the Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest (1981),
based on the memoir written by Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina.
Overly melodramatic and one-sided, it was slated by most critics although
Dunaway was praised for her uncannily accurate portrayal of the Hollywood
star. Beyond the camp following that it has acquired, it remains an interesting film, if only as a startling example of Dunaway’s capacity for excess, her
ability to throw herself so completely into a character, which allowed her to
give such remarkable performances as Bonnie Parker or Evelyn Mulwray,
but which, if not properly channelled, can easily turn to caricature.
Dunaway found grace with the critics again in 1987 for her affecting
portrayal of the still beautiful but alcohol-ravaged wreck Wanda in the
Charles Bukowski-scripted Barfly. Since then, she has appeared in Emir
Kusturica’s Arizona Dream (1993) with Johnny Depp, Don Juan de Marco
(1995) with Depp and Marlon Brando, Luc Besson’s The Messenger: The
Story of Joan of Arc (1999), The Rules of Attraction (2002), based on a
novel by Brett Easton Ellis, and most recently as Lieutenant McKenzie in
Welsh rockabilly zombie movie Flick.
Just like Diana Christensen in Network, Dunaway is clearly in love with
her work. This may have led her to make some injudicious career decisions,
but it is impossible not to be awed
by her tremendous appetite for acting. Given the right role, Dunaway is
an actress of devastating emotional
power and she is at her best when
portraying exceptional, excessive,
ardent women. There is a scene in
Chinatown that beautifully sums her up as an actress: just before they
kiss for the first time, Gittes notices a black speck in her green eyes. The
expression on her face is at once enigmatic and vulnerable, and she replies,
‘oh yes, it’s a flaw’. This perfectly encapsulates not only Evelyn Mulwray, but
also the other great characters in her career, women of incredible beauty
and strength but with a flaw in them that inevitably leads to tragedy. r
‘In that one scene she has already
vividly conveyed the complexity of
the character, a beguiling mixture
of sexual confidence and naïvety’
Faye Dunaway will be at the screening of Flick on Friday 3 October at 7.15pm at Cineworld
Shaftesbury Avenue. Virginie Sélavy is the editor of Electric Sheep, the film magazine for lovers of
offbeat, left-field and cult cinema, published by Wallflower Press. www.electricsheepmagazine.com
SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
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AS COREY FELDMAN VISITS RAINDANCE FOR THE FIRST TIME,
FESTIVAL JUROR KIM NEWMAN LOOKS AT WHAT HE’S BEEN UP TO LATELY
C
‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve,’
muses the grown-up Writer (Richard Dreyfuss), in the last line of Stand by Me (1986).
‘Jesus, does anyone?’
OREY FELDMAN, FOURTEEN when Stand by Me was
shot, played one of those friends – Teddy Duchamp,
the kid with the mutilated ear and the scrappy attitude. Teddy bristles at ethnic jokes (‘Hey, I’m French,
all right?’), hysterically sticks up for his abusive father
(‘Nobody ranks on my old man. My father stormed the
beach at Normandy! He stormed the beach, you faggot!’), ponders sagely
the question of whether Mighty Mouse could outfight Superman (‘Mighty
Mouse is a cartoon. Superman’s a real guy. There’s no way a cartoon could
beat up a real guy!’), continually rags on and batters (‘two for flinching’)
the fat kid he barely outranks in the underage hierarchy of Castle Rock
and doesn’t realise why his friends laugh when after a barbeque dinner
and a smoke he sighs ‘I cherish these moments’. Directed by Rob Reiner,
Stand by Me is one of the best films of the 1980s, and gains additional
poignancy as its young stars (the top-billed kids were Wil Wheaton and
River Phoenix) near the age of the grown-up writer or (in Phoenix’s case)
will never make it.
Unlike Stephen King’s novella The Body, in which the writer is the sole
adult survivor of the quartet who trekked through the woods to see the
dead boy, Stand by Me doesn’t say much about what happened to Teddy in
later life. Corey Feldman has had to live Teddy’s life for him, with as many
ups – he would score pop culture immortality as a member of another
foursome of young, seemingly bonded-for-life friends by voicing Donatello
in the first and third Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, skipping the
second to allow Adam Carl to become the David Watson (look him up
– he’s David Watson [1] on the IMDb) of turtledom – as downs. He was an
’80s kid, obviously, and has had to carry several weights because of that
– as one of the first child actors to divorce his parents, a well-publicised
bout with drug dependence and, probably most lastingly, as a featured
player in big and small films you’ve might have seen several times apiece
(especially if you grew up with video rentals).
Born in 1971, Feldman worked steadily from the age of three (‘I was
famous before I knew my own name’). His first gig was in a McDonalds
commercial at the age of three (he is now a vegetarian) and before
SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
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my inspiration
Paul McCartney
She’s an artist,
she don’t look back
She Belongs to Me
Bob Dylan
Photography by Max Vadukul
© 2007 MPL Communications Ltd
Lyrics by Bob Dylan
© 1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music.
Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing.
All rights reserved. Use by permission.
Previous spread The Goonies (1985); above left Bikini Bandits (played Raindance 2002); right The Birthday (2008)
he was ten, he had done TV guest shots (The Love Boat, Mork & Mindy),
been in a series regular (on a TV version of The Bad News Bears), made
his big screen debut (as ‘Boy at Museum’ in Time After Time) and voiced
the young Copper (former kid star Kurt Russell was the grown-up) in the
Disney cartoon The Fox and the Hound. In the mid-’80s, he joined major
American franchises by playing the son of 1950s sit-com icon Beaver
Cleaver in the TV movie Still the Beaver and the kid who takes down Jason
Voorhees in the mendaciously-titled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
(Feldman cameos in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and his character,
Tommy Jarvis, is the focus of a bunch of the series’ entries).
In Stand by Me, Wil Wheaton’s character grows up to be Stephen King
(or nearest offer), but Feldman’s screen image in the mid-’80s was more
in tune with what King was like as a kid. In Gremlins, Feldman is the
archetypal monster-obsessed boy, reading Fangoria magazine and building creature models. This carries over into his biggest hits, The Goonies
and The Lost Boys, as well as his most underrated picture, Joe Dante’s
The ‘Burbs. A coincidence of names hooked him up with Lost Boys costar Corey Haim in License to Drive and Dream a Little Dream, the sort
of classics you had to be exactly the same age as the lead characters
to appreciate. This teaming, after career reversals and tabloid tattle (not
to mention a joke about ‘non-threatening boys’ on The Simpsons), persists in sequels (Dream a Little Dream 2, Lost Boys: The Tribe), Feldman’s
directorial debut (Busted) and a reality TV show The Two Coreys. Twenty
years on, The Goonies and The Lost Boys seem as shrill and irritating as
grown-ups said they were when they came out, but have grown a nostalgic
sheen for their hideous fashions, music tastes and snapshots of careers
about to zoom (Kiefer Sutherland) or evaporate (Jamie Gertz), but – and
I really mean this – License to Drive and Dream a Little Dream are great
teen pictures from a decade when the teen movie was as rich and strange
a reflection of America as film noir in the ’40s and the Western or science
fiction in the ’50s. Another Feldman credit from the period worth tracking
down is the woodland thriller Edge of Honor (1991), about boy scouts and
arms dealers.
So, what’s he done lately – aside from sequels, cameos, cartoon voiceovers (Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!) and appearing under
the name Kinky Finkelstein in one of the Toxic Avenger sequels? He’s
directing again, with The Bloke Goes to Hollywood, and has starred in (and
produced) The Birthday, a Spanish-shot shaggy dog nightmare comedy
that might be Meet the Parents rewritten by HP Lovecraft and features
Feldman in jerrylewisian mode as a schleb in a tuxedo who goes to two
parties on the same night in the same building in 1987 and winds up participating in a ritual designed to resurrect an evil God.
Where is Corey now?
You might have fond memories of him in the eighties, but he’s still working
hard. In no particular order, this is how Corey has been spending his time
recently:
The Birthday
A teaser poster for this Feldman film from Spanish director Eugenio Mira
asks a tantalising question, ‘Do you want to see Corey Feldman vs. The
Demon Cthulhu?’. Corey plays a young man whose first encounter with his
girlfriend’s parents and future in-laws turns awkward when he learns that
the staff of the hotel they’re staying at is part of a strange cult trying to
resurrect the Lovecraftian demon.
The Two Coreys
A&E’s ‘reality’ show sees Haim move in with Feldman and his wife Susie
and documents the escalating trouble their houseguest seems to attract.
Producers claim it’s only partially scripted, and a third series seems unlikely
after things came to a head with the two Coreys at the end of the second
season.
Truth Movement
Feldman’s other passion is music, and with his band, Truth Movement, he’s
readying to release his third album. A ‘Pink Floyd-inspired homage to classic rock’, Truth Movement whips audiences into a frenzy of excitement with
spectacle-driven live performances. The curious among you can sample
some of the band’s spectaculars during episodes of The Two Coreys.
Animal Rights
Both Feldman and his wife Susie are passionate supporters of animal
rights, and regular spokespeople for organisations like PETA and The
Humane Society. They’re both vegetarian and extremely active in spreading the word about animal cruelty. ‘We must evolve as a race and as a
planet, and evolution includes learning and changing from our mistakes,’
he said in a PETA campaign.
Lost Boys 2: The Tribe
Slipping back into the role of Edgar Frog, by way of Christian Bale’s
Batman voice coach, Feldman helped revive the classic vampire tale with
a straight-to-DVD sequel. As vampires re-emerge in the picturesque Luna
Bay, Edgar Frog marches into battle once more. r
Rotten Tomatoes will host a discussion with Corey Feldman on Saturday 11 October at 5pm at the
Cineworld Trocadero. Corey will also be present for the screening of The Birthday on 11 October at
9:45pm at the Cineworld Trocadero. Kim Newman is a freelance film journalist and historian who
contributes a column on obscure and classic cinema to Rotten Tomatoes
SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
19
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