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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 Delta sponsored the Best UK Short award, won by Tom Tagholm, director of The Truffle Hunter, a story about a Holdridge and crew 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 destina- tions 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

‘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 restlessly paces about the room, brooding and sensual, instantly conveying in 1967, Faye Dunaway has appeared in over 60 feature the oppressive boredom of small-town life. When she sees Clyde trying to films, worked with renowned directors such as Roman steal her mother’s car, she upbraids him from her bedroom window, clearly Polanski, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet and starred naked through the frosted glass, in a brilliantly daring scene. She clumsily opposite some of Hollywood’s most illustrious leading rushes down the stairs while hastily fastening her dress, but when she men, including Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen and comes out of the door to meet Clyde she’s all sass and tease. In that one SRobert Redford. And yet, in spite of everything she has achieved since scene, Dunaway has already vividly conveyed the complexity of the char- then, her first lead role in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) remains acter, her beguiling mixture of sexual confidence and country girl naïvety. her magnum opus, not only one of her most affecting and memorable per- Bonnie Parker was a new breed of female character, and it was one the formances but the one that made her a star. most exciting roles Hollywood could offer an actress at the time. Bonnie An unknown stage-trained actress with only two films under her belt, is not simply Clyde’s sidekick, but a fearless, gun-toting outlaw in her Dunaway got the part after Penn saw her in The Happening (1967), even own right. Not only that, but she is a sexually forward woman unafraid though Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda and Tuesday Weld had all been consid- to show her desires, a novelty in Hollywood at the time, whereas Clyde ered for the role. It was an inspired decision on Penn’s part, and not only is clearly uncomfortable with intimacy. The suggestion that the fearsome did Dunaway hold her own opposite Warren Beatty as Clyde, but her pas- bank robber Clyde Barrow may be impotent was one of the film’s boldest sionate performance gave the film its emotional core. touches, and it adds poignancy to Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship, which Penn clearly realised the importance of Dunaway’s Bonnie to the film they only seem able to consummate through crime. Both actors bring a and he chose to open the story with her: first a close-up of Dunaway’s lips, subtle tenderness to those scenes and Dunaway’s sensuous beauty turns then her face in a mirror before she gets up to reveal her nude back. She 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, Film House media encoding, digital film, DI grading, restoration, DVD and 142 Wardour Street distribution services for film and television. London, W1F 8DD All at 142 T: +44 (0) 20 7878 0000 www.ascent142.co.uk 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 tel- evision, 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 insti- tution 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 Previous spread The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); above Flick (2008) character whose all-consuming love for her work leads her to make some Bonnie and Clyde is the story of two characters with a tremendous truly disturbing decisions. hunger for something bigger, who shape each other into mythical figures. Dunaway’s career took a downturn in the 1980s, and this has been Clyde takes Bonnie out of Smallville and makes her a famous outlaw but commonly blamed on the Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest (1981), their exploits only become the stuff of legend when Bonnie writes their based on the memoir written by Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina. story in a poem, ‘The Story of Bonnie and Clyde’. Says Clyde when Bonnie Overly melodramatic and one-sided, it was slated by most critics although reads it out to him: ‘One time I told you I was gonna make you somebody, Dunaway was praised for her uncannily accurate portrayal of the Hollywood that’s what you’ve done for me. You made me somebody they’re gonna star. Beyond the camp following that it has acquired, it remains an interest- remember’. Dunaway had the same hunger, and Bonnie made her some- ing film, if only as a startling example of Dunaway’s capacity for excess, her body too, propelling her to instant stardom. ability to throw herself so completely into a character, which allowed her to Now Hollywood royalty, Dunaway would be offered some of her best give such remarkable performances as Bonnie Parker or Evelyn Mulwray, roles in the decade that followed, as directors were drawn to her pecu- but which, if not properly channelled, can easily turn to caricature. liar combination of aloofness and volatility, sophistication and emotional Dunaway found grace with the critics again in 1987 for her affecting intensity. She followed up Bonnie and Clyde with Norman Jewison’s classy portrayal of the still beautiful but alcohol-ravaged wreck Wanda in the caper The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), oozing glamour and seductiveness Charles Bukowski-scripted Barfly. Since then, she has appeared in Emir as Vicki Anderson, a supremely confident insurance investigator out to get Kusturica’s Dream (1993) with , Don Juan de Marco Steve McQueen’s suave millionaire thief. In 1970, she was reunited with (1995) with Depp and , Luc Besson’s The Messenger: The Arthur Penn for the revisionist western Little Big Man, playing the sex- Story of Joan of Arc (1999), The Rules of Attraction (2002), based on a obsessed preacher’s wife who has designs on Dustin Hoffman’s conflicted novel by Brett Easton Ellis, and most recently as Lieutenant McKenzie in hero Jack Crabb. Three years later, she was appearing in big-budget, all- Welsh rockabilly movie Flick. star productions such as The Three Musketeers and The Towering Inferno Just like Diana Christensen in Network, Dunaway is clearly in love with while the following year saw her playing opposite Robert Redford in her work. This may have led her to make some injudicious career decisions, Sydney Pollack’s conspiracy thriller but it is impossible not to be awed Three Days of the Condor. ‘In that one scene she has already by her tremendous appetite for act- In 1974, Roman Polanski cast her vividly conveyed the complexity of ing. Given the right role, Dunaway is as Evelyn Mulwray opposite Jack an actress of devastating emotional Nicholson’s private detective Jake the character, a beguiling mixture power and she is at her best when Gittes in Chinatown, and her searing of sexual confidence and naïvety’ portraying exceptional, excessive, performance is rightfully remem- ardent women. There is a scene in bered as one of her most impressive. She makes quite an entrance, first Chinatown that beautifully sums her up as an actress: just before they appearing in Gittes’s office threatening him with a lawsuit, all arched pen- kiss for the first time, Gittes notices a black speck in her green eyes. The cilled eyebrows and haughty demeanour. Beautiful and not to be trusted, expression on her face is at once enigmatic and vulnerable, and she replies, she first seems to be a classic femme fatale. But as Gittes digs out more ‘oh yes, it’s a flaw’. This perfectly encapsulates not only Evelyn Mulwray, but dirty secrets involving the water company co-owned by her husband and also the other great characters in her career, women of incredible beauty her father (played by a formidable John Huston), Evelyn Mulwray reveals and strength but with a flaw in them that inevitably leads to tragedy. r 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 Faye Dunaway will be at the screening of Flick on Friday 3 October at 7.15pm at Cineworld investigates, sensual and in control when they end up in bed together, Shaftesbury Avenue. Virginie Sélavy is the editor of Electric Sheep, the film magazine for lovers of needy and hurt when Gittes finds out the truth, Evelyn Mulwray remains offbeat, left-field and cult cinema, published by Wallflower Press. www.electricsheepmagazine.com

SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 15

AS VISITS RAINDANCE FOR THE FIRST TIME, FESTIVAL JUROR KIM NEWMAN LOOKS AT WHAT HE’S BEEN UP TO LATELY

‘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 Unlike ’s novella The Body, in which the writer is the sole shot, played one of those friends – Teddy Duchamp, adult survivor of the quartet who trekked through the woods to see the the kid with the mutilated ear and the scrappy atti- dead boy, Stand by Me doesn’t say much about what happened to Teddy in tude. Teddy bristles at ethnic jokes (‘Hey, I’m French, later life. Corey Feldman has had to live Teddy’s life for him, with as many all right?’), hysterically sticks up for his abusive father ups – he would score pop culture immortality as a member of another (‘Nobody ranks on my old man. My father stormed the foursome of young, seemingly bonded-for-life friends by voicing Donatello Cbeach at Normandy! He stormed the beach, you faggot!’), ponders sagely in the first and third Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, skipping the the question of whether Mighty Mouse could outfight Superman (‘Mighty second to allow Adam Carl to become the David Watson (look him up Mouse is a cartoon. Superman’s a real guy. There’s no way a cartoon could – he’s David Watson [1] on the IMDb) of turtledom – as downs. He was an beat up a real guy!’), continually rags on and batters (‘two for flinching’) ’80s kid, obviously, and has had to carry several weights because of that the fat kid he barely outranks in the underage hierarchy of Castle Rock – as one of the first child actors to divorce his parents, a well-publicised and doesn’t realise why his friends laugh when after a barbeque dinner bout with drug dependence and, probably most lastingly, as a featured and a smoke he sighs ‘I cherish these moments’. Directed by , player in big and small films you’ve might have seen several times apiece Stand by Me is one of the best films of the 1980s, and gains additional (especially if you grew up with video rentals). poignancy as its young stars (the top-billed kids were and Born in 1971, Feldman worked steadily from the age of three (‘I was ) near the age of the grown-up writer or (in Phoenix’s case) famous before I knew my own name’). His first gig was in a McDonalds will never make it. commercial at the age of three (he is now a vegetarian) and before

SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 17 HMV Paul M MI Raindance:HMV Paul M MI Raindance 4/9/08 17:08 Page 1

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 (1985); above left Bikini Bandits (played Raindance 2002); right The Birthday (2008) he was ten, he had done TV guest shots (, Mork & Mindy), Where is Corey now? been in a series regular (on a TV version of The Bad News Bears), made You might have fond memories of him in the eighties, but he’s still working his big screen debut (as ‘Boy at Museum’ in Time After Time) and voiced hard. In no particular order, this is how Corey has been spending his time the young Copper (former kid star Kurt Russell was the grown-up) in the recently: Disney cartoon . In the mid-’80s, he joined major American franchises by playing the son of 1950s sit-com icon Beaver The Birthday Cleaver in the TV movie Still the Beaver and the kid who takes down Jason A teaser poster for this Feldman film from Spanish director Eugenio Mira Voorhees in the mendaciously-titled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter asks a tantalising question, ‘Do you want to see Corey Feldman vs. The (Feldman cameos in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and his character, Demon Cthulhu?’. Corey plays a young man whose first encounter with his Tommy Jarvis, is the focus of a bunch of the series’ entries). girlfriend’s parents and future in-laws turns awkward when he learns that In Stand by Me, Wil Wheaton’s character grows up to be Stephen King the staff of the hotel they’re staying at is part of a strange cult trying to (or nearest offer), but Feldman’s screen image in the mid-’80s was more resurrect the Lovecraftian demon. in tune with what King was like as a kid. In , Feldman is the The Two Coreys archetypal monster-obsessed boy, reading Fangoria magazine and build- A&E’s ‘reality’ show sees Haim move in with Feldman and his wife Susie ing creature models. This carries over into his biggest hits, The Goonies and documents the escalating trouble their houseguest seems to attract. and , as well as his most underrated picture, ’s Producers claim it’s only partially scripted, and a third series seems unlikely The ‘Burbs. A coincidence of names hooked him up with Lost Boys co- after things came to a head with the two Coreys at the end of the second star in and Dream a Little Dream, the sort season. 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 Truth Movement to mention a joke about ‘non-threatening boys’ on The Simpsons), per- Feldman’s other passion is music, and with his band, Truth Movement, he’s sists in sequels (Dream a Little Dream 2, Lost Boys: The Tribe), Feldman’s readying to release his third album. A ‘Pink Floyd-inspired homage to clas- directorial debut (Busted) and a reality TV show The Two Coreys. Twenty sic rock’, Truth Movement whips audiences into a frenzy of excitement with years on, The Goonies and The Lost Boys seem as shrill and irritating as spectacle-driven live performances. The curious among you can sample grown-ups said they were when they came out, but have grown a nostalgic some of the band’s spectaculars during episodes of The Two Coreys. sheen for their hideous fashions, music tastes and snapshots of careers about to zoom () or evaporate (Jamie Gertz), but – and Both Feldman and his wife Susie are passionate supporters of animal I really mean this – License to Drive and Dream a Little Dream are great rights, and regular spokespeople for organisations like PETA and The teen pictures from a decade when the teen movie was as rich and strange Humane Society. They’re both vegetarian and extremely active in spread- a reflection of America as film noir in the ’40s and the Western or science ing the word about animal cruelty. ‘We must evolve as a race and as a fiction in the ’50s. Another Feldman credit from the period worth tracking planet, and evolution includes learning and changing from our mistakes,’ down is the woodland thriller Edge of Honor (1991), about boy scouts and he said in a PETA campaign. arms dealers. So, what’s he done lately – aside from sequels, cameos, cartoon voice- Lost Boys 2: The Tribe overs (Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!) and appearing under Slipping back into the role of Edgar Frog, by way of ’s the name Kinky Finkelstein in one of the Toxic Avenger sequels? He’s Batman voice coach, Feldman helped revive the classic vampire tale with directing again, with The Bloke Goes to Hollywood, and has starred in (and a straight-to-DVD sequel. As vampires re-emerge in the picturesque Luna produced) The Birthday, a Spanish-shot shaggy dog nightmare comedy Bay, Edgar Frog marches into battle once more. r 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 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 parties on the same night in the same building in 1987 and winds up par- 9:45pm at the Cineworld Trocadero. Kim Newman is a freelance film journalist and historian who ticipating in a ritual designed to resurrect an evil God. contributes a column on obscure and classic cinema to Rotten Tomatoes

SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 19 raindance2008_FP_dogwoof2 21/8/08 20:12 Page 1

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