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| Aspiring filmmakers make the cut for Reel Beginnings |
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| By Jim Aquino |
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Recently Los Gatos has become known to South
Bay cineastes as the hometown
of both acclaimed screenwriter Scott
Frank - who adapted Get Shorty, Out
of Sight and Minority Report for
the silver screen - and Oscar-winning
American Beauty producer Dan Jinks.
Now 14 aspiring Los Gatos filmmakers are
attempting to follow in the footsteps of
Frank and Jinks. Their short films will be
presented during the Los Gatos Film
Festival's Reel Beginnings program at the Los
Gatos Cinema on Aug. 22.
Filmmakers like cinematographer Matthew
Talesfore view their festival entries as
their calling cards to the film industry. The
entry that Talesfore submitted, Jim's
Place: Open All Night, is a 24-minute
short Talesfore shot for his friend, director
Shane Edleman. Talesfore, Edleman and another
friend, producer Pamela Abdy, made Jim's
Place in Southern California in 1996 to
get their feet in the door, a year after
Talesfore finished his film studies at
Emerson College in Boston.
"It was a five-day night shoot. We shot at a
diner in Beverly Hills. I had a great time
doing it," recalls Talesfore, who, in
addition to being the cinematographer for the
recent independent comedy feature Rutland,
USA, also works as a freelance video and
website producer in the Bay Area and is
serving as a festival volunteer.
The makers of Jim's Place adapted
their short from a comedic one-act play in
which a diner owner and his customers
ruminate on relationships. Talesfore admits
his first cinematographical effort has its
rough spots, but he always wanted to show
Jim's Place on the festival circuit.
Some of the Reel Beginnings filmmakers are
complete unknowns, while others are a little
more established, like documentarian Chris
Martin, who co-owns the San Francisco
production company 400 Blows Pictures.
Martin's Reel Beginnings entry is his first
film, titled An Innocent View of Old
China. For the production Martin
unearthed 16mm footage that his great-uncle,
Lloyd Free, shot of pre-Communist China while
participating in an exchange-student program
in Peking in 1931.
"The film sat in my grandma's garage for many
years. It's in amazing shape. It survived a
fire," says Martin, who studied world history
at UC-Santa Cruz and has always been
interested in making historical
documentaries.
Other entries in Reel Beginnings include:
- Blanco Afro and Foxe, a documentary
short about Afro-Brazilian music and culture,
directed by Carolina Moraes-Liu.
- Permanent, a tale of an academically
troubled high school kid who seeks the help
of a hypnotist, directed by 17-year-old Craig
Blaine and Patrick Griffin.
- Dean: Reel to Reel, a piece that
speculates on the last few years of James
Dean's life, made by Lance Stell, "one of the
nation's most popular James Dean
look-alikes," according to Talesfore.
Reel Beginnings committee chairperson Joanne
Talesfore - who also happens to be Talesfore's
mother - says that the 14 entries selected by
festival judges feature a wide range of
subject matter. The festival committee
received 28 submissions, an amount that
surprised Talesfore, who only expected about
10 entries. She hopes that in the future,
Reel Beginnings will expand to include
filmmaking workshops.
"Visual art, especially video, is already
having such an impact on our daily lives that
we need to learn more of the language of it.
The schools here in Los Gatos are doing
amazing work with that medium," Talesfore
says. "This is Reel Beginnings' first year.
Hopefully it'll grow."
The Reel Beginnings portion of the Los
Gatos Film Festival will take place Aug. 22,
3-6 p.m., at the Los Gatos Cinema, 41 N.
Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos. 'Jim's Place:
Open All Night' and 'Permanent' will be
screened again at the cinema at 5:15 p.m. on
Aug. 24. For more information, call
408.354.9300
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