Limelight out on DVD today
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 9:15AM 
"Billy Corben’s 2011 documentary Limelight has just arrived on DVD and it proves to be as gripping as any fictional film. Limelight isn’t just Gatien’s story. The movie is about the changing pop culture scene of the last 30 years — particularly, the shift in club music from disco to electronica to hip hop — and the drug culture that went along with the transitions." --Joe Meyers, Connecticut News-Times
The New York Post ran an oral history of the Limelight:
[Today], the documentary “Limelight” arrives on DVD, offering an insider’s look into the heyday of New York’s most notorious ’90s nightclub, run by impresario Peter Gatien. Here, key players look back at the club’s glittering rise and shocking fall, before its glorious Gothicchurch home turned into a mall:
JEN Gatien: “I remember when I was 20, Bruce Springsteen walked up and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to come in here. Do you think I could get a tour?’ So I gave him a tour of the club, and it had this inflatable [Moon Bounce] — you know, one of those things that kids jump inside of. So we both took off our boots and jumped around. I’d regularly see celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Juliette Lewis, Adrien Brody, Vin Diesel, Chloé Sevigny.”
Frank Owen, former Village Voice night-life reporter, author of “Clubland”: “Limelight had some of the best music I’d ever heard. I saw practically every major techno act at Lord Michael’s Future Shock night — Ultramarine to Prodigy to the Orb. Also, Funkmaster Flex’s hip-hop events were amazing. I first met Michael Alig in the late ’80s. He seemed as harmless as a powder puff.”
Michael Alig, “King of the Club Kids” and Limelight party promoter: “My favorite memory of Limelight was this magical time between 4 and 6 a.m. All the “normals” had gone home, and all that was left was a really fabulous group of club kids, drag queens and transsexuals, and everyone was really drunk and high on the dance floor, and you could see sunlight coming in through the stained glass windows.”Steve Lewis, director of Limelight: One night in March 2006, “Michael asked to borrow my car, and I asked why. He said, ‘Well, I killed Angel [Melendez, his drug dealer], and I’m going to chop up the body, put it in a box, put it in your trunk and dump it.’ I said, ‘Michael, get the f - - k away from me.’ I knew he had gone down a very bad road with drugs, but this was the most absurd thing I’d heard.”
Owen: “Never in a million years could a scene like Limelight’s happen again. These days, club owners [say], You want to make money in the club business? It’s simple: Just throw in a few banquettes, pay a designer, buy a bunch of vodka, and you’ll make money hand over fist selling bottles for $400.’ Think of the culture that came out of nightclubs in the ’80s and ’90s: hip-hop, house music, garage music. But nightclubs today are no longer cultural institutions.”
rakontur
Limelight is also available for streaming on-demand via Amazon
Frank Owen, Jen Gatien, Michael Alig, Peter Gatien in Limelight "The Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke" premieres tonight at Sundance
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 11:02AM Uncle Luke arrived in Park City last night and will be attending the premiere tonight at the Redstone Cinema 8 at 9:30 pm. rakontur's Evans and Jenna Moshell, the Borscht crew and director Jillian Meyer also made the trip.
All four screenings are sold out but wait list tickets are available.
If you go, make sure to get your Lukey Cushion:
Peter Berg says "The U was my favorite" 30 for 30
Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 6:32PM Peter Berg had nice things to say about The U in a Sports Illustrated interview:
SI.com: Besides Kings Ransom, your documentary about Wayne Gretzky's trade to the L.A. Kings, what were your favorite movies in ESPN's 30 for 30 series?
Berg: The U was my favorite. It was daunting because I went first, and so I felt like we had to move very quickly. And Wayne is a friend of mine and that was a story I found interesting having lived in L.A. -- I had just moved to L.A. maybe two years prior to the Gretzky trade. That was a huge deal for me. Having Wayne in L.A. was an incredible, very exciting time. But what ESPN did with 30 for 30 was remarkable. I credit those guys. Bill Simmons is a good friend. He's the one that basically said, "You're doing this and you're going first." Looking back I wish I had a little more time maybe. But The U was my favorite.
A Helping Hand: a short documentary about funeral home voodoo
Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 10:00AM Dave told me about a short documentary his friend Nathan Alexander worked on while attending the FSU Film School in 1998, that chronicled the bizarre shenanigans of a feud between rival funeral home owners in Bradenton, Florida, involving voodoo and severed body parts:
BRADENTON, Fla. — A Florida funeral home owner stuffed voodoo dolls into a corpse in a death curse against her burial-business competitors and other enemies, police said recently.
A report for police by a Miami voodoo expert said Paula Green-Albritton, owner of Green's Funeral Home in Bradenton, invoked the voodoo deity Damballah in the hope that people whose names she had written on notes pinned to the dolls would die.
One of the names attached to a doll was that of competitor Richard Woodie of the Westside Funeral Home.
Here is A Helping Hand:
Booty Call at Sundance
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 12:51PM The Biscayne Times has a feature on The Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke, a short film we executive produced that premieres at Sundance on January 20th:
The film was directed by Jillian Mayer, a rising star on the local arts scene, scripted by Lucas Leyva, the founder of Borscht, and produced by Rakontur, the group behind the hit documentaries Cocaine Cowboys, The U, and Square Grouper.
But, [Mayer] says, they didn’t think they could actually snag the celebrity for their little indie production. That’s when Evan Rosenfeld of Rakontur got involved, pulling Campbell into the project.
Rakontur, founded by Miami filmmaking duo Alfred Spellman and Billy Corben, has thrown support behind the [Borscht Film] festival as well. “Leyva and I…collaborate on almost all our creative projects in one way or another,” says Mayer. “But this was my first time working with Rakontur. They were really positive and encouraged the whole project, and the indie film scene in general.” Hence this project involving contributions from across Miami’s contemporary cultural spectrum -- music, writing, film, and visual arts.
rakontur in 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 10:00AM 2011 was a big year for us. We released two feature docs, Square Grouper in April and Limelight in September (on DVD January 24th), and started work on a handful of new projects.
In 2012 we plan to release at least three titles:
Dawg Fight will premiere in the Spring. Details to follow shortly.
Our new ESPN doc, examining the explosion of money in sports over the past twenty years and the epidemic of pro athletes who have lost it all, is slated to premiere in late summer/early fall.
We'll also release a entirely new, recut version of Cocaine Cowboys this year, probably early summer, that we're calling "Remix." As we told BlackBook:
The first cut of Cocaine Cowboys was four hours, so it came down to flipping coins to see what we would cut and what we would keep…until we had an epiphany: These are two completely different movies. One is about Jon Roberts and Mickey Munday and the smuggling, the other is about the murder and Griselda and the hit men. So with that premise we decided to make one sort of seminal one, Cocaine Cowboys, and if it caught on, we had the material for the sequel, which is what happened. And this remix is the stuff that ended up on the editing room floor because it didn’t quite fit. Not because it wasn’t good, but because we ran out of time. We get emails all the time from die-hard fans of the first two asking for more, so this is for those people. It’s not a director's cut, it’s a remix. There’s hours of new material. We changed picture, audio, packaging. It’s Cocaine Cowboys, the untold stories.
We're still working on a third installment of the Cocaine Cowboys doc series. We took some time off from it in 2011 to finish Square Grouper and Limelight, but we're trying to get it done this year.
Michelle Ashford is making progress on the Cocaine Cowboys HBO TV series we're producing with Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer; we expect to have some news on that in the first couple months of the year.
rakontur's Evan Rosenfeld executive produced The Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke, a short film directed by Jillian Mayer and written and produced by Borscht's Lucas Leyva. It premieres at Sundance on January 20th:
Jon Roberts, smuggler featured in Cocaine Cowboys, passed away yesterday
Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 11:50AM ;)
Jon had been battling cancer for several years. He was 63.
His autobiography, American Desperado, was published in November. He did an interview in October with NPR to promote the book:
"I've talked to my son and I don't know if I'm going to live a month, a week, I don't know what I'm going to live," he says. "But I wanted him to take away from this that he's got to go a different path than I went in life."
The Miami New Times ran an obituary today.
;)
R.I.P. Hitch: Wish I Made it to Dinner
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 11:28AM ;)
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
I found out on Twitter, just before midnight.
I usually check Twitter right before I go to bed, and this is the third time this year that a death (the passing of Jobs, the killing of bin Laden) has caused me to stay up well into the night to read the reactions of others.
Several people tweeted that Hitch was at the top of their wish list of dinner party guests. Sad to say that I missed my one opportunity to dine with Christopher and share, as he described his partiality to long boozy dinners, “a feast of reason and a flow of soul."
Billy, Dave and I were headed to Toronto in May 2009 to shoot Peter Gatien's interview for Limelight when I got a call from my friend Tom Quinn, who was our man at Magnolia at the time. He was going to be in Toronto at the same time for HotDocs and was meeting with a producer about a proposed documentary based on Hitchens's book God is Not Great. Hitch was in Toronto, too, and they were all going to dinner. Did I want to come along?
OF COURSE!
But immediately after I RSVP'ed, I started to get nervous. What could I possibly add to a dinner table conversation with this man? I couldn't make a fool of myself, so I pulled back-to-back all nighters reading up on every conceivable issue of international importance: Kurds in Iraq, free speech rights of Danish cartoonists, the Tamil Tigers, the Swat Valley, Robert Mugabe, the Armenian Genocide. I just wanted to be able to keep up with the discussion because I knew keeping up with Hitch's legendary imbibing was out of the question.
A passport snafu made it impossible for me to fly into Toronto, so I had to book a flight to Buffalo later in the day, rent a car and cross the border at Niagra Falls. By the time I got to the hotel, I missed the dinner. Dejected, I went down to the bar at the Drake Hotel. Around 1am Tom emailed "Christopher and I are headed to the Brass Rail," Toronto's most notorious strip club. Already halfway in the bag and discovering that the Brass Rail closed at 2am, I bailed out and went to sleep, missing my opportunity to hang with Hitch. Tom reported the next day that a good time was had by all.
To my knowledge the documentary never got made, although Tom and I talked about revisiting it off and on for the next year. In June 2010, Hitch announced he had cancer.
I read several obits last night and this morning, but the standout is Christopher Buckley's in the New Yorker:
Lunch—dinner, drinks, any occasion—with Christopher always was. One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.
In the end, cigarettes did him in, as he often said he knew they would. His last column, posted at the Vanity Fair site last week, seemed to indicate that he knew the end was coming sooner than later.
It's tough to name someone who packed more living and memorable work into 62 years. Christopher Hitchens was the consummate raconteur of our times. In honor of his passing, at half past midday I'll have "a decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice."
I'll miss him.
@AlfredSpellman