rakontur Blog

Limelight available via video-on-demand today

2012-01-27T22:23:11Z

Check your cable or satellite listings.

Also streaming via Amazon and iTunes.

Limelight out on DVD today

2012-01-24T14:15:12Z

"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.”

"The Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke" premieres tonight at Sundance

2012-01-20T16:02:48Z

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

2012-01-12T23:32:48Z

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

2012-01-05T15:00:21Z

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:

August 23, 1998

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:

@AlfredSpellman

Booty Call at Sundance

2012-01-04T17:51:07Z

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

2012-01-03T15:00:17Z

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:

@AlfredSpellman

Jon Roberts, smuggler featured in Cocaine Cowboys, passed away yesterday

2011-12-29T16:50:07Z

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.

Happy holidays from the rakontur crew

2011-12-21T15:00:19Z

R.I.P. Hitch: Wish I Made it to Dinner

2011-12-16T16:28:31Z

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

Hitchens's most memorable books

The Dawg Fight rough cut

2011-11-15T23:34:57Z

I watched the rough cut of Dawg Fight yesterday.

It's a totally different style for us, but works on so many levels.

When Sam Rega finished editing Limelight in the spring, he got right to work on the edit. Over the past six months I've stayed away from watching too much of the early cuts, as Billy and Dave worked through it with Sam. Towards the end of an edit a pair of fresh eyes is desperately needed. It makes it easier to slash and burn scenes when you don't have an emotional attachment to how they've evolved.

It's long, running about 135 minutes. The plan over the next couple weeks is to cut 35 minutes.

We set a 90-100 minute running time as our goal; sometimes we get there. Raw Deal was 100 minutes, Cocaine Cowboys ran 118 and could've been 10 minutes longer, Square Grouper and Limelight came in right around 105. ESPN said The U had to be exactly 102 minutes and 40 seconds, to fit into a two hour time block and allow for commercial breaks. That was the first time we worked with a preset running time and it certainly made it easier to cut; there was no choice, no scenes we could be precious about. We had to hit the mark.

We're still working out a release plan, but I can tell you that we'll premiere it some time in the first half of 2012.

If you've been anxiously awaiting this docu since we posted the first reel in March 2009, a couple months after we started production, you won't be disappointed.

@AlfredSpellman