Gerald Baliles and the Virginia film industry

Former Virginia Governor Gerald Baliles was laid to rest yesterday after a funeral service at Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville.  After serving in the House of Delegates and as Attorney General, Baliles was elected governor in 1985 and served a four-year term ending in 1989.  He succeeded Governor Chuck Robb and was, in turn, succeeded by Governor Doug Wilder.

Gerald Baliles (c) Rick Sincere 2013

During his term as governor, Baliles became a co-founder (with Patricia Kluge and others) of the Virginia Festival of American Film, which eventually became the Virginia Film Festival.  The most recent film festival, the 32nd annual, took place across various venues in Charlottesville last month.

At the 26th annual Virginia Film Festival in 2013, I spoke to Governor Baliles -- who was then director of the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia -- and asked him about the beginnings of the film festival and his role in enhancing the footprint of the film industry in Virginia.

Baliles had just moderated a panel discussion following a screening of the CNN documentary film, Our Nixon, with the film's producer, Brian L. Frye, and Miller Center historian Ken Hughes (see below).

I began by asking whether the Virginia Film Festival, as it had developed over the years, had met or exceeded his expectations back in the 1980s.

"When one launches a new venture," he said, "one has a vision. One has hopes, expectations. I thought it was entirely conceivable that the first couple of years, if they went well, would provide the setting for a much larger public acceptance and interest in support of what has come to be known as the Virginia Film Festival."

He conceded that "it is impossible to predict the details but it is also possible to envision the possibilities and that's what we had 26 years ago."

I also asked about his desire to expand the activities of the film industry in Virginia. He explained how he used a legislative maneuver to authorize what became the Virginia Film Office.

Virginia Film Festival logo

Baliles explained that every state in the United States and foreign countries "are competing for production of films in their own localities."

He noted that, "when I was a young legislator, I was struck by a film that was made in Hampton Roads, and I read that the producers had left 40 percent of their budget in Hampton Roads and I thought, 'Why don't we do this sort of thing?'"

After he learned about that, he said, "I put a bill in to create a Virginia film office as a way of enticing producers to come to the state. We would provide advice and counsel and scouting locations and that sort of thing."

The bill failed, however, but then-Delegate Baliles "happened to serve on the Appropriations Committee and the budget always contains a lot of fine print in the back. So, when my bill was killed, I just inserted the same language in the back of the budget. The budget was approved, of course, and so was the film office. The film office then started, I think, to create the possibilities of attracting film producers to the state. The Virginia Film Festival was created 10 to 15 years later, when I was in office as governor."

His aim in seeing more movies in Virginia was not incidental, he continued.

"My interest in film has been one of long standing. I read a lot but I also recognize we are a visual society, and pictures speak louder than words."

The entire interview with former Governor Gerald Baliles is available for listening as part of the November 9 podcast episode of The Score from Bearing Drift, "The Score: Virginia Elections, Candidates Speak, Assessing Politics, Business Ethics, Gerald Baliles."

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Here is the video of Governor Baliles moderating the panel discussion on Our Nixon in 2013:

And here is Governor Baliles introducing a screening of All the President's Men at the Virginia Film Festival in 2012:

He also moderated a post-screening panel discussion about the movie with journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward:

Unrelated to the Virginia Film Festival, here is former Governor Baliles speaking at the ceremony marking the opening of the visitors' center at Monticello in 2009:

From the Archives: Filmmaker Stanley Nelson on ‘Freedom Riders,’ the news media, and civil rights

Filmmaker Stanley Nelson on ‘Freedom Riders,’ the news media, and civil rights
November 18, 2010 1:11 PM MST

"What the civil rights movement did,” reflected documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, was to force people “to make a choice. You couldn’t ignore it anymore. It was stuff that was on the front page, it was in your face, you had to choose: which way are you going?”

Nelson, whose new film, Freedom Riders, was screened at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville on November 5, made his comments in a panel discussion following the screening.

Other participants in the discussion were civil-rights activists Dion Diamond, Reginald Green, and Joan Mulholland, who were among the original “freedom riders” of 1961. The panel was moderated by Larry Sabato of the UVA Center for Politics.

Effective engagement of the news media

In response to a question from Sabato, Nelson pointed out how the civil rights movement’s strategy of engaging the news media was slow in emerging but eventually “incredibly effective.”

During the 1961 freedom rides, he said, “the media’s role really changed.”

When the freedom rides started in May of that year, “there was no media coverage except the black press,” such as the Washington/Baltimore Afro-American and Johnson Publications (Ebony and Jet), which each had a “representative on the ride.”

The rest of the news media, however, “totally ignored the rides and there was no media coverage at all,” Nelson said, which caused difficulty for him and his team of filmmakers, because there was a dearth of archival material from the early part of the freedom ride phenomenon.

What changed “by the end of the freedom rides,” he explained, was that there were “400 people coming in [and] that was a huge news story, so you had the nightly news and you have all the print journalists and camera people there.”

By mid-summer, the news media was reacting to the civil rights movement’s strategy “to hold the front page” for at least five days at a time, to keep people’s attention on the issue so that it became “impossible to ignore.”

Making a choice

In researching the freedom rides, Nelson explained, “one of the fascinating things that we found making the film was that” in the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi), “there was a very small percentage of people of white people who supported integration -- a tiny percentage [of] 1, 2, 3 percent.”

At the other extreme,he said, “there was another small percentage of people who were violent racists, maybe 10 [or] 15 percent.”

That meant, he explained, that “the rest of the people, 80-85 percent, just were able to kind of go on, and ignore what was going on” – hence his remark that the civil rights movement, in general, and the freedom rides, in particular, forced people to make a choice about which way to go.

How ‘Freedom Riders’ became a film

After the panel ended, Nelson told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner that the Freedom Riders project came to him while he “was working on a film for American Experience called Wounded Knee.”

The producers “called and said that they had purchased this book, Freedom Riders by Ray Arsenault, and would I take a look at it [because] they’re thinking of making it into a film.”

Nelson “said yes without even getting the book,” because he “knew a little bit about the story and realized it would be great, so that’s how that happened.”

Making the film took about 18 months from start to finish, Nelson explained. It will be broadcast on PBS as part of the American Experience series in May 2011, “which is the 50th anniversary of the freedom rides.”

Currently, Nelson is showing Freedom Riders at film festivals and also at schools, including a screening at Charlottesville High School earlier this month. In addition, some college students will be recreating the freedom rides next year as part of a fiftieth anniversary commemoration that will also promote the film.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 18, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

2018 Virginia Film Festival: Ben Mankiewicz Discusses Horror Classics

Ben Mankiewicz at 2018 Virginia Film Festival

Ben Mankiewicz is a journalist and film historian who is best known as a host on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), where he introduces movies, offering tidbits on how they were made or how they were received by critics and audiences, and what influences they may have had on producers, directors, and screenwriters.

Mankiewicz has been a frequent guest presenter at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville. In 2011, for instance, he introduced the 1973 Terrence Malick film, Badlands, and moderated a discussion with actress Sissy Spacek and designer Jack Fisk. This year, he will be interviewing Peter Bogdanovich (via Skype) about the “new” Orson Welles film, The Other Side of the Wind, and he has introduced two classic horror films.

Movies are in Ben Mankiewicz's blood: He is the cousin of screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz (credits include Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, and TV's Hart to Hart), grandson of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, The Pride of the Yankees, among many other credits), and great-nephew of screenwriter, producer, and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (inter alia, All About Eve, Guys and Dolls, Julius Caesar).

I spoke with Mankiewicz on November 3 after a screening of George A. Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead at the Violet Crown cinema on Charlottesville's downtown mall.  This transcribed interview has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity.

RS: Last night you introduced Bride of Frankenstein; tonight you introduced Night of the Living Dead, separated by about 30 years. What were their impacts on film making? They obviously are iconic films.

Night of the Living Dead is one of the most important horror films ever made. Bride of Frankenstein, I think, is one of the best, certainly from different eras. Night of the Living Dead was made during the era, 1967 to 1976, when independent, auteur filmmaking in America was taking over -- really the ten best years of American film making. It was, and then Night of the Living Dead is a good example of that.

Bride of Frankenstein is studio film making at its finest, so they came from completely different systems. Bride of Frankenstein is not as influential as Frankenstein, because it came first, although it’s probably a better film.

It seemed to be a better film to me, watching it last night. What animated George Romero in making this film? Obviously, he had a very low budget, was working largely with what looked like amateur actors, people from community theater…

A lot of just townspeople obviously playing the zombies.

How did he put it all together? Did he know he was creating a genre?

No, no. He certainly didn’t. I mean, he had an interest, there was already zombie culture that was already a thing but he sort of figured out how they looked, how they moved, how they walked (at least on screen). [He worked] creatively with writer John Russo, who he co-wrote it with. They just set the template because there was no rule, right? You can have them do anything. And so all the things we now know, like shooting a zombie in the head, or burn them [Romero invented], because he had the news man explain it.

If I’m not mistaken, the news man [played by Charles Craig], he wrote his own stuff. That’s why it sounds so authentic. He was a real news man, if I remember correctly. But that’s certainly the way it sounds to me. Romero was like, 'Look, here’s the information I want conveyed, now you frame that and say it like it was a real news story.'

Now obviously Romero went on to make several sequels but the actors in the film, I don’t think I’ve seen any of them anywhere again.

They acted a little bit. [Leading man] Duane Jones acted a little bit. He always thought that people would identify him as Ben throughout his career. Some others worked but no, nobody went on to win an Oscar.

That’s true. Well, Ben Mankiewicz, thanks for coming to the Virginia Film Festival. I appreciate your taking time to talk to me.

Oh, I love Charlottesville, I love coming. My pleasure.

The complete audio interview with Ben Mankiewicz will be available for listening on The Score from Bearing Drift, a weekly podcast, on November 10.

From the Archives: Witness to 1963 Kennedy assassination speaks at Virginia Film Festival

Witness to 1963 Kennedy assassination speaks at Virginia Film Festival
November 10, 2013 12:19 PM MST

Tina Towner was the youngest person who photographed events at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, as President John F. Kennedy's motorcade drove by. Seconds before the assassin's shots rang out, the 13-year-old's home movie camera ran out of film, but she captured the President and First Lady's car just as it turned the corner from Houston Street to Elm Street.

Now Tina Towner Pender, she spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner at the Virginia Film Festival after a November 9 screening of a new documentary, The Kennedy Half-Century, co-produced by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. She had participated in a panel discussion along with UVA political scientist Larry Sabato and another witness to the Kennedy assassination, Wesley Buell Frazier, a co-worker of Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas Book Depository.

The author of a 2012 book called Tina Towner: My Story as the Youngest Photographer at the Kennedy Assassination, Pender described what happened to the short piece of film she took that day in Dallas.

Was the film altered?

The raw footage, she explained during the panel discussion, was processed by local law enforcement authorities, who had put out a call for any movies or still photographs that may have been taken by onlookers but had not been developed yet. Her family did not receive the reel back for several weeks.

Asked whether they thought it might have been tampered with, Pender said, “Not at the time.”

They did notice something anomalous right away, however.

The assassination footage “was on the end of a reel of home movies so we knew we were going to have to watch the whole reel,” which included, she said, her “sister going off to college,” before they got to the newsworthy section.

“When we got there, it ran out and there was no assassination film,” she explained, “and for a few seconds we thought we didn't have it, that they didn't send it back to us.” It turned out that “it had been cut from the rest of the film and it was there” on the reel but “it was just not spliced on to the end.”

Mysterious splice

About a decade later, Pender and her father took the film to a lab to be examined at the request of some investigators.

“My dad didn't let it out of our hands, so I went with him” to Jack White's lab in Fort Worth, Texas, she said.

“There were about three or four people there looking at it while I was there and they turned to me and they said, 'Did you know that there's a splice in your film?'”

Startled by the question, Pender asked them what they meant.

A technician replied that “'there's a jump in the film and there's a splice,'” and showed it to her. Just at the point where the limousine is turning the corner, “you see a jump in the film.”

That was not a surprise to her in itself, because “we knew that was there but we just figured it was some sort of a blip in the processing” but it was actually “spliced together. You could see where it was spliced and it was not using materials my dad would have [used]. It was more professionally done and it was hard to see this splice when you looked at it.”

Pender conceded that she did not know “who did that and I don't know when it was done, either,” because the film had been in the possession of law enforcement in 1963, and Life magazine had borrowed it, along with 35mm slides her father had shot, for a feature in 1967.

Congressional inquiry

Later in the 1970s, Pender was questioned by investigators for the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded that Kennedy's assassination was the result of a conspiracy and not the sole responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald. She said her encounter with them seemed peremptory.

The meeting was “brief,” she explained.

“They called and said they wanted me to bring them the original film and the slides that my dad took,” but in the event the investigators came to her office, where she was working.

They questioned her “for about 15 or 20 minutes – maybe 30 -- but it didn't seem like that long. The questions were not very deep or probing. It almost was like they just wanted to get it done with and take the film and leave.”

Neither Pender nor any member of her family who witnessed the assassination was called to testify before the Warren Commission, which was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the killing of John F. Kennedy.

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 10, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

From the Archives: Lee Harvey Oswald colleague recalls aftermath of Kennedy assassination

Lee Harvey Oswald colleague recalls aftermath of Kennedy assassination
November 9, 2013 9:34 PM MST


Wesley Buell Frazier drove Lee Harvey Oswald to work at the Texas Book Depository on the morning of November 22, 1963. That was a day that changed his life, he said in an interview at the 2013 Virginia Film Festival on November 9. “That young boy who went to work that day, he has never come home.”

Frazier spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner after a screening of a new documentary, The Kennedy Half-Century, co-produced by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. He had participated in a panel discussion along with UVA political scientist Larry Sabato and another witness to the Kennedy assassination, Tina Towner Pender.

Just 19 years old in November 1963, Frazier had to endure a brutal interrogation by the Dallas police, who accused him of being part of the assassination plot.

'Innocent until proven guilty'

The police interrogator, he said, “wanted me to admit to being part of the assassination and I told the guy, 'I'm not doing that.' I said, 'That's ridiculous.'”

He added: “In this country, you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty but a lot of times you're guilty until proven innocent and our forefathers didn't intend for our country to be like that.”

During the panel discussion, Frazier explained that he had often driven Oswald from suburban Dallas to the book depository. Oswald's Russian-born wife, Marina, lived near Frazier's sister, while Oswald rented a room in the city. Normally, they carpooled only on Friday evenings and Monday mornings, and Frazier had pointed out to Oswald how it was odd he would need a ride on Friday morning.

That Friday turned out to be “a day like I've never seen before. I hope I never see one [like it] again,” Frazier said.

“It's a day that changed my life. I've never been the same. That young boy who went to work that day, he has never come home. For many years I wouldn't talk to anybody about any of it because I was so scared about what they might do to my family. There's some evil people in this country and when it comes to power and money they will do anything.”

The police interrogator handed Frazier a pre-typed confession and told him to sign it.

“I started reading it,” he explained. “It said I knew about and was part of the assassination, and I said, 'That's totally false. I'm not going to sign that.'”

Police brutality

That response made the police officer angry, Frazier recalled.

“When I wouldn't sign he drew back his hand to hit me. Matter of fact, he was standing just like you're standing there, and I put my arm up like this” – he raised his hand above his head – “to block, to keep him from striking me.”

The officer “got so mad when I told him, 'I'm not signing that,' and I told him, 'There's [another] policeman outside this door but before they get in here, you and I are going to have a hell of a fight. I'm going to get some good licks on you.'”

Reflecting on that moment, Frazier said, “For one time in my life, I think I scared the hell out of a man because I turned the tables on him – because that's what he did” as a matter of routine.

That policeman, he said, “badgered and beat on people to make them sign confessions and he found a kid who wasn't scared of him. I think it scared the hell out of him.”

Even though Frazier was “a young 19” at the time, that interrogating officer “didn't know what I had been through before I got there,” which heightened the tension in the room.

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 9, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

'Charlottesville: Our Streets' Premieres as Work-in-Progress at Va. Film Festival

Having its world premiere at the Virginia Film Festival exactly three months after the events of August 12 that it portrays, the Rashomon-like "Charlottesville: Our Streets" appears while psychic and physical wounds are still raw and the political repercussions -- especially for local government -- have not yet been fully played out.

The program notes provided by the Virginia Film Festival are deceptively understated:

A stark look at the devastating events that transpired in Charlottesville in August of this year, there will be much to discuss after this screening. A team of local filmmakers, photographers, and journalists has compiled footage and stills from over 30 cameras, with 20 interviews from first-person witnesses from the fateful Unite The Right rally of August 12th. The country watched as white supremacists’ demonstrations violently escalated, resulting in multiple injuries and the death of Heather Heyer. This feature documentary is an objective observation how the events unfolded, delivering a stark and sometimes brutal telling of individual truths from the perspectives of the people who were there.

Washington Post reporter Joe Heim listed the questions posed by "Charlottesville: Our Streets" in a front-page Metro section story in Sunday morning's editions.

...how that August weekend in Charlottesville will be most remembered is now in the hands of many different storytellers who will shape a shared history. Will it be seen primarily as the place where an ascendant white power movement came out of online nooks and crannies and showed its face to the world? Will it be remembered for those who took to the streets to stand up to the marchers and keep their rally from taking place? Or will it be recalled as a failure of leaders and police to keep the two sides apart and prevent a deadly outcome?

On Sunday afternoon in front of a packed house at the Paramount Theater, the producers of "Charlottesville: Our Streets," Jackson Landers (who also wrote the script) and Brian Wimer (who also directed), participated in a post-screening panel discussion moderated by radio host Coy Barefoot, along with journalist colleague Natalie Jacobsen -- who helped collect and sort the hundred of hours of video clips so they could be reviewed and chosen through a systematic process -- and two interview subjects from the film.

The movie drew both applause and jeers as it featured comments from both the neo-Nazis and Confederate nostalgists who invaded Charlottesville for the so-called "Unite the Right" rally over the weekend of August 11-12, and various counterprotesters from the clergy, antifa, and regular folks opposed to racism and anti-Semitism.

Landers and Wimer endeavored to be as objective as possible, letting the interviews and images tell the story and putting the burden of drawing conclusions on the audience, whose members are intelligent enough to interpret what they see.

Using a combination of talking-head interviews and "found footage" from among hundreds of hours of video taken by dozens of amateur and professional photographers on the scene that day, "Charlottesville: Our Streets" shows the chaos and the violence in a nearly unfiltered manner. Much of the video has not been previously seen by anyone other than those who took it, and one takeaway is that what did make its way to television news programs pulled its punches.

Writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Monday, Tony Farrell described the film as

an astounding feat of bootstrapping journalism: a near-definitive visual chronicle of a day that spun slowly but wildly out of control, told through the mostly dispassionate points of view of countless cameras that captured all sides of the action.

He added:

Landers and Wimer also conducted 32 interviews with people who took part in or witnessed the violence that day — pastors, peace activists, Charlottesville residents and even members of the white supremacist groups that descended on the city for the long-planned Unite the Right rally to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in the center of town.

Landers and Wimer, longtime area residents unacquainted before Aug. 12 but both witnesses to the day’s brawling and mayhem, connected in the weeks after the violence and saw the value in documenting events they felt had been incorrectly reported or misrepresented through rumor-mongering and conspiracy theories.

In a report for public radio station WCVE, veteran Charlottesville journalist Hawes Spencer sampled the opinions of audience members at Sunday's screening. He found three widely different reactions:

Militia member Daniel Bollinger appears in “Our Streets” and attended its premiere. “It’s almost undescribable because it brings back so many memories from that day.”

Filmgoer Jim Hingeley says the picture succeeds. “It pulled it all together in a coherent way.”

However, transgender activist Emily Gorcenski finds the film unfair. “This drive towards objectivity is just enabling the side that wants to kill all Jewish people.”

Speaking of local journalists, a few of them are interviewed on screen.  Chris Suarez of the Daily Progress and Lisa Provence of C-VILLE Weekly both describe what they saw that Saturday morning.  (WCHV radio host Joe Thomas is seen arguing with a protester in a video clip.)

One thing I learned from the film was that the violence on August 12 was much worse than I had thought, based on the TV news reports I had seen; "Our Streets" shows clearly how the local and state police failed to intervene when the street fights began, standing at a distance and observing without taking action. As former Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris says in an interview in the film, anyone who asserts there was no "stand-down" order is being "deceitful."

I earlier referred to "Charlottesville: Our Streets" as Rashomon-like, and this is borne out by its multiple points of view. One of the things that struck me was how, in almost every shot, there were several other cameras making their own recordings of the same scene from different angles. What those photographers captured could well compose another movie from which entirely different conclusions could be drawn.

"Charlottesville: Our Streets" does not yet have a distributor, but the producers hope to take it to other film festivals and to college campuses around Virginia and beyond. A "pay-what-you-can" screening is tentatively planned for next month. The filmmakers' aim is to return Charlottesville's name to what it was before it became a hashtag.

Full disclosure: Jackson Landers and I, along with Shaun Kenney, are weekly guests on Coy Barefoot's radio program on 94.7 WPVC-FM in Charlottesville, where we discuss local, state, and national politics for an hour beginning at 5:00 o'clock each Monday afternoon. The events of August 12 have been a frequent topic of our conversation since even before they occurred.  On November 13, with Jeff Lenert substituting for Shaun Kenney, we spent more than an hour in a panel discussion about the panel discussion.  Listen to the podcast.

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Note: This post is adapted and expanded from a previous article on Bearing Drift by the same author.

Anthony Michael Hall and James Hoare Discuss 'The Lears' at #VaFilmFest 2017

Last week, at the 30th annual Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville, one of the featured narrative films was The Lears.

University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson -- author of Why Teach?, Why Write?, and Why Read?, among other books -- led a panel discussion on the film, which is loosely based on William Shakespeare's King Lear.

The panel included the film's writer-director-cinematographer, Carl Bessai; its producer, Irwin Olian; and two of its cast members, Anthony Michael Hall ("Glenn Lear") and James Hoare ("Rory Lear").

Bessai has directed several previous films, including Emile (starring Ian McKellen), Sisters & Brothers, and  Fathers and Sons.  Irwin Olian also produced the 1999 film, Gut Feeling; he also has a cameo appearance in The Lears.  Although best known for 1980s films like The Breakfast Club, Hall has also spent a year in the cast of Saturday Night Live and has built a later career in as a character actor.  James Hoare is a newcomer -- The Lears is his first feature film -- but he has performed on stage and on television in his native Australia, where he will appear in the mini-series Picnic at Hanging Rock (based on the same novel as Peter Weir's 1975 film).

The film's cast also features Bruce Dern, Sean Astin, Aly Michalka, Victoria Smurfit, Nic Bishop, Stephen Ellis, and Ivy Matheson.

According to the Virginia Film Festival's program notes:

World-renowned architect Davenport Lear (Bruce Dern) summons his dysfunctional children to a weekend family retreat to test their love. Set in of one of Davenport’s signature architectural masterpieces, a quirky black comedy emerges in this modern-day reimagining of Shakespeare’s classic King Lear. Davenport announces he is to marry his younger personal assistant, setting off an explosive round of humorously devious behavior. Each of his children vies for his favor, consumed by self-interest, greed, and jealousy. The Lears raises fundamental questions about the nature of love, sexuality, family relationships, and honesty.

The video above was recorded at the Newcomb Hall Theatre on the grounds of the University of Virginia on Thursday evening, November 9, 2017.

Nick Robinson and William H. Macy Discuss 'Krystal' in Charlottesville

This past weekend, the Virginia Film Festival celebrated its 30th anniversary in Charlottesville, with several prestige-level feature films, including the coming-of-age drama Call Me by Your Name and the coming-of-age comedy Krystal.

Krystal was screened on Friday evening, followed by a panel discussion with actor-director William H. Macy, the film's lead actor Nick Robinson, and producer Rachel Winter.

Mitch Levine, founder and director of The Film Festival Group, moderated the panel.

According to the Virginia Film Festival's program notes,

Nick Robinson

Tyler Ogburn lives a sheltered life due to a heart condition that prevents him from going to college, playing sports, or pursuing love. That is until enticing ex-stripper and former heroin addict Krystal comes into his life, and he starts attending her Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in order to spend time with her. Also complicating Ogburn’s efforts to pursue Krystal is her son, Bobby, who is confined to a wheelchair and serves as the street-smart voice of reason for the dysfunctional family. This is the third feature from director-actor William H. Macy (Fargo, Shameless).

The cast of Krystal also includes Rosario Dawson, Kathy Bates, Grant Gustin, William Fichtner, and Felicity Huffman.

The video above was recorded at the Paramount Theater in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, on Friday evening, November 10, 2017.

From the Archives: Porn king Larry Flynt defends free speech in Charlottesville

Porn king Larry Flynt defends free speech in Charlottesville
November 6, 2011 9:24 PM MST

Self-described smut peddler and free speech advocate Larry Flynt appeared at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville on November 4 to discuss the 1996 Milos Forman-directed film based on his life, The People vs. Larry Flynt. The screening was sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

Flynt had earlier spoken at the University of Virginia in November 2000 with his friend and courtroom adversary, the late Jerry Falwell, as part of a lecture tour in which they talked about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), in which a unanimous court upheld Hustler’s right to engage in political parody even if the object of that parody (Falwell) had hurt feelings as a result.

That case originated after Hustler, one of many adult publications operated by Flynt, had run a satirical advertisement for Campari in which Falwell allegedly endorsed the liqueur and revealed that his first sexual experience was in an outhouse with his mother. Falwell sued for libel and lost, but won damages in a Roanoke federal court for “intentionally inflicted emotional distress.”

‘One Nation Under Sex’
After the film and discussion, Flynt autographed copies of his new book, One Nation Under Sex, for about 100 fans. The book, coauthored by David Eisenbach, looks at American history through the prism of the sex lives of presidents and first ladies.

As the crowd dispersed, Flynt answered questions posed by reporters from radio station WINA and the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

Noting that many people yearn for a simpler time when their own moral values seemed to be shared by the rest of society, Flynt said that “nostalgia affects people usually in a very positive way but the world goes on.”

What needs to be understood, he said, is that “the big thing is, you’ve got to accept the rights of other people. We pay a huge price in this country to live in a free society and we’ve got to tolerate things that we don’t necessarily like so we can be free.”

Reconciling religion with freedom
Flynt added that “unfortunately, my friend Jerry Falwell never seemed to be able to reconcile the Bible with people who wanted more individual freedom.”

Larry Flynt

Supporting the idea of moral values is fine, he said, “if they work for you or your family, but if they don’t, you should not seek to impose your values on other people.”

While Jerry Falwell is dead, his son continues to run Liberty University in Lynchburg, but Flynt is not impressed with that institution’s legacy or mission.

“I know that whole family,” he said. “I’m not looking to pick a fight with them [but] they bring people like Michele Bachmann to the college and the whole nation knows about it.”

Flynt chuckled and then trailed off as he shook his head ruefully: “If they’re holding Michele Bachmann up as an example of greatness, she makes people who find Sarah Palin challenging…”

Flynt’s dismissive tone indicated he does not hold either Bachmann or Palin in high regard.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 6, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

From the Archives: 'Our Nixon' producer Brian Frye recalls discovery of White House 'home movies'

'Our Nixon' producer Brian Frye recalls discovery of White House 'home movies'
November 17, 2013 7:16 PM MST

Forty years ago today, on November 17, 1973, President Richard Nixon declared “I am not a crook” before a nationwide television audience. Less than a year later, he had resigned in disgrace rather than face impeachment as a result of a cluster of scandals remembered as “the Watergate affair.”

Earlier this month at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville, film maker Brian L. Frye spoke about his new documentary, Our Nixon (co-produced by Penny Lane, who also directed). Frye participated in a panel discussion after a screening of the film with former Virginia Governor Gerald Baliles and Miller Center scholar Ken Hughes.

Our Nixon, which has been aired by CNN in addition to having a limited theatrical and film-festival release, is built upon a treasure-trove of Super-8mm “home movies” shot by top Nixon aides H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin.

The films – which include footage of Nixon's historic trip to China and visits to the White House by foreign dignitaries, as well as more quotidian events – were preserved by the National Archives as part of a cache of potential evidence in the Watergate investigation but did not come to light until about ten years ago, when Frye learned of their existence.

After the screening, Frye – who teaches law at the University of Kentucky in addition to writing film criticism and producing movies – spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about how he came into possession of home movies from the Nixon White House and the process of turning that material into a cohesive documentary film.

In the public domain
“Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Chapin,” he explained, “were receiving free Super-8 film from the Naval Photographic Center and also free processing and printing. I'm pretty sure that what was happening was Haldeman was distributing the films and after they were shot, he was collecting them, dropping them off at the Naval Photographic Center and then providing prints to all of his friends, so he probably got three prints of everything, more or less.”

When Ehrlichman, the president's domestic policy advisor, resigned as a result of the Watergate investigation, “he left in his office prints of the Super-8 films -- second- and third-generation prints,” said Frye. “Those were confiscated and ultimately became part of the Watergate investigation collection that went to the National Archives, so they were placed into the public domain in that way.”

The movies remained far from public view, however, because “they don't really relate to the abuse of power issues that people are most interested in. They were relatively low priority on the preservation ladder” for archivists.

Frye learned of the films' existence shortly from the film preservationist who “told me about his preservation work and showed me one of the reels, which I thought was fascinating but I didn't have the resources to make a transfer at the time. These were preserved but there weren't access copies available.”

After writing an article about the newly discovered movie reels for the film journal, Cineaste, Frye met his eventual producing partner, Penny Lane, in 2008.

They decided to collaborate on a documentary based on the movies but they did not know what the entire content was. Taking a risk, they invested $20,000 to have the films transferred to video so they could examine them in detail.

Novel and compelling
Once they had a chance to look at all 25 hours of film, “we realized right away that the movie that we saw in those home movies was the story of the Nixon presidency as experienced by Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Chapin,” Frye said. “That just struck us as a kind of an interesting, novel, potentially compelling way to look at the nature of a president.”

He analogized his film to how “people say you can learn a lot about a person by the way they talk to the waiter. Maybe you can learn something about the president from the way that he talks to his staff members.”

Of the three principal characters in the film, only Dwight Chapin is still alive. He has seen Our Nixon and appeared on a panel with Penny Lane after a screening at the AFI Docs festival in Washington earlier this year.

“As you might expect,” Frye recalled, Chapin is “critical of some aspects of the film. He feels like it focuses too much on Watergate and negative things about the president” and that it “doesn't reflect enough of Nixon's good qualities.”

At the same time, he added, “I hope he recognizes that we intended this to be a human, empathetic portrait of him and his friends, the people he worked for and with in the White House, and so, hopefully he can see that the film is a balanced and considered portrait of the administration.”

Goat testicles
Frye and Lane have intriguing projects that they are working on to follow up Our Nixon.

Lane, he said, “is working on a new film called Nuts, which is the story of [John R. Brinkley,] a quack doctor from the 1920s who claimed to cure impotence by transplanting goat testicles into men's scrotums” who also “went on to invent border radio [and] win the governorship of Kansas only to have it stolen away from him by the Kansas attorney general.” Brinkley “ultimately died penniless after being crushed by the predecessor of the FCC.”

Frye is working on two different projects on his own, a “documentary history of the representation of the gay rights movement” and a narrative film about the relationship of Andy Warhol and his mother.

Our Nixon will soon be available on DVD and is still being screened on the film festival circuit.




Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 17, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.