FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES and ATO PICTURES PRESENT A
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FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES and ATO PICTURES PRESENT A CONTRAFILM / ATO PICTURES Production In Association with ARAMID ENTERTAINMENT FUND SAM ROCKWELL ANJELICA HUSTON KELLY MACDONALD BRAD WILLIAM HENKE JONAH BOBO WRITTEN FOR THE SCREEN AND DIRECTED BY.......................................................CLARK GREGG BASED ON THE NOVEL BY...............................CHUCK PALAHNIUK PRODUCED BY.....................................................BEAU FLYNN ..................................................................................TRIPP VINSON ..................................................................................JOHNATHAN DORFMAN ..................................................................................TEMPLE FENNELL EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS .................................MIKE S. RYAN ..................................................................................DERRICK TSENG ..................................................................................GARY VENTIMIGLIA ..................................................................................MARY VERNIEU DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY .......................TIM ORR PRODUCTION DESIGNER..................................ROSHELLE BERLINER EDITOR...................................................................JOE KLOTZ COSTUME DESIGNER.........................................CATHERINE GEORGE ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS..................................LISA ZAMBRI ..................................................................................LAURIE MAY COMPOSER ...........................................................NATHAN LARSON MUSIC SUPERVISORS ........................................LYLE HYSEN ..................................................................................KEN WEINSTEIN CASTING BY.........................................................MARY VERNIEU ..................................................................................SUZANNE SMITH CROWLEY Rated R Running time 92 minutes “If you are going to read this, don’t bother. After a couple of pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece. Save yourself.” -- Chuck Palahniuk, Choke From maverick author Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) and breakout new writer-director Clark Gregg comes the subversively comedic tale of Victor Mancini, con artist, sex addict, Colonial village re-enactor, angst-filled son, serial restaurant choker . and unsuspecting romantic antihero for our unsettling times. Victor (Sam Rockwell), in an effort to pay for his once radical, now demented mother’s (Academy Award® winner Anjelica Huston) expensive care in a private hospital, engages in a brazen scam. While dining in upscale restaurants, he deliberately chokes on his food, allowing himself to be “saved” by good Samaritans who grow so close to him in the wake of their heroic Heimlich Maneuvers, they lavish him with checks. His day job is no more conventional: he portrays an indentured Irish servant in full 18th Century garb at a historical theme park. And when he isn’t busy being a put upon Pilgrim, gagging violently or visiting the mother who doesn’t recognize him, Victor is attending sexaholic recovery meetings (or having forbidden encounters in the meeting hall bathroom.) It’s no wonder Victor feels adrift. But when his declining mother hints that she might be ready to spill the secret identity of his long lost father, Victor hopes it can finally provide the answers he has been searching for. With the help of his fellow sex addict Denny (Brad William Henke), Victor befriends his mother’s alluring young physician (Golden Globe® nominee Kelly Macdonald), who leads him to believe his origins may be far more shockingly divine than he ever could have imagined. So is Victor Mancini still the no-good loser he has always thought he would be for the rest of his life or could he possibly be . some crazy kind of savior? CHOKE, which ran away with the Special July Prize for Best Work by an Ensemble Cast at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is not only a cathartic and romantic satire about uncontrolled lust, lost faith, childhood trauma, mad addictions, bizarre fantasies and blockages both emotionally and literally, but also about second chances, redemptive moments and true love – that is, it’s about modern life. Fox Searchlight Pictures and ATO Pictures present a Contrafilm/ATO Pictures Production in association with Aramid Entertainment Fund, CHOKE, written for the screen and directed by Clark 2 Gregg, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The producers are Beau Flynn, Tripp Vinson, Johnathan Dorfman and Temple Fennell. The executive producers are Mike S. Ryan, Derrick Tseng, Gary Ventimiglia and Mary Vernieu. Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad William Henke and Jonah Bobo headline an ensemble cast that includes Heather Burns, Paz De La Huerta, Clark Gregg, Joel Grey, Viola Harris, Gillian Jacobs, Matt Malloy, Bijou Phillips and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. The film’s behind-the-scenes team is made up of accomplished indie veterans including director of photography Tim Orr (SNOW ANGELS), production designer Roshelle Berliner (JOSHUA), editor Joe Klotz (JUNEBUG), costume designer Catherine George (RESERVATION ROAD), composer Nathan Larson (THE WOODSMAN, BOYS DON’T CRY) and music supervisors Lyle Hysen (LOVE, LUDLOW) and Ken Weinstein. The soundtrack features songs by indie darlings Radiohead, as well as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Fiery Furnaces, Ben Kweller and the Twilight Singers. CHOKING UP: ADAPTING CHUCK PALAHNIUK “Everything we do is an attempt to fool people into loving us or wanting us, and so my characters are really no different from ordinary people.” -- Chuck Palahniuk Chuck Palahniuk’s fourth novel Choke is an amped-up, relentlessly satirical look at sex, work, identity and bottomless yearning in contemporary America. Much like his earlier novel, Fight Club, which sparked a cult phenomenon and became a critically acclaimed hit movie starring Brad Pitt, Choke is a story that blasts through one taboo after the next. It tackles bad parenting and degenerate sex, consumerism and addiction, Colonial history and holy relics, medical horrors and blatant con games, an adult sense of failure and the freaky transcendent power of love. Like its self- asphyxiating main character, the book was all about people getting stuck . and suddenly dislodged from the patterns of their pasts. Most shied away from its tricky tone and uninhibited themes, but when executive producer Gary Ventimiglia showed filmmaking newcomer and actor Clark Gregg the manuscript for Choke, Gregg was driven to try to adapt the book. Not only that, he had his own daring and unlikely vision for the movie version of CHOKE: as a wicked, Palahniuk-style twist on that age-old heartwarming genre, the romantic comedy. “I had never read anything so painful and yet also so funny,” Gregg says of the novel. “I know Chuck is usually seen as this dark, nihilistic writer but I saw more than that in CHOKE. I felt the story was actually very hopeful and romantic, in its own perverse, post-modern way.” 3 He continues: “Palahniuk’s got so many clever, brilliant, satirical ideas and his finger on the pulse of what works and what doesn’t work in this country. For me, the book hit that chord where I thought ‘I have to make this; nobody’s going to let me do this but I’ve got to find a way.’” Best known for his work as an actor, theatre director and a founding member of New York’s Atlantic Theater Company, Gregg earlier made his screenwriting debut with the horror thriller WHAT LIES BENEATH, starring Harrison Ford. He has appeared in dozens of stage productions, films and, most recently, in the sitcom “The New Adventures of Old Christine” with Julia Louis- Dreyfus. But Gregg had never directed a feature film before and he knew he might be a little crazy to attempt his first outing with such provocative material. He began by getting Palahniuk’s blessing. “Chuck was very patient because it took me a year and a half, two years maybe, and a couple of drafts before I could really get a handle on taking this surreal, satirical world from the page to the more three-dimensional realm of a movie,” Gregg recalls. “Fortunately, Chuck, like a lot of the smartest novelists I know, is really aware that for a movie adaptation to work, at a certain point, you’ve got to just put the book away. From the first time I spoke to him he told me ‘Don’t be too faithful, don’t stick to the book.’ I really had to do that because there is just so much brilliant stuff in Victor’s voice, I could have just basically made my own book on tape and it would never have worked. Whatever I understood about the book, I had to let it no longer be a book and become a screenplay.” To accomplish that, Gregg followed the trail of his own emotional reaction to the novel. “My mother is not Ida and I never worked in a Colonial village, but there was something about the story that always felt painfully familiar,” he says. “Along with its themes of sexuality and obsession, I found it to be a really heartbreaking story about the way people recover from emotional trauma in their lives so that they can give and receive love.” He also hung on to Palahniuk’s mix-mastering of contrasting tones. “One of the things that constantly drew me to the material was how it managed to have scenes that I found hysterically funny in a black comedy vein and then, two minutes later, there would be a really heartbreaking exchange that felt like Chekhov. In retrospect, I didn’t