SXSW DAY 1 SUNDAY

  Whoo-Who! I am finally here in Austin. I arrived a little after lunch on Sunday. Between the elections on Tuesday and the Rodeo kick-off shows we did on Thursday and Friday I feel like I am wrapping up a week long binge of late nights and information overload. You try going from politics to rodeo, it’s a little crazy. I am sure there is a joke in there somewhere. 

  I finally made it to the holy land. A place with butt numbing movie marathons, and in two days, a buffet of bands to gorge myself. Here’s a link to their website www.sxsw.com which includes anything and everything you would want to know.

    The Austin Convention center is the mothership of the operation. Walking up it looks kind of like a beehive, people darting in and out and scurrying all around. Inside, things are really buzzing. For the first part of the festival, they have all sorts of panels, classes and just plain interesting conversations.

It always takes a while to get my bearings and get used to the action and pace of the festival, so I decided to pop into one of the rooms upstairs. It turned out to be an acting workshop with Jeffrey Tambor, that’s right Arrested Developments, George Bluth.  He had two actors on a platform and he was coaching them about their style. You can see a little bit here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJUSZgMbggc

It was a packed room and among the regular festival goers were first time directors, writers, actors. Tambor turned the coaching session into somewhat of a comedy/spoken word performance.

  He told a story after story, like this one about a nervous director, “the director said we will be great but he put his hand on my elbow and I could feel him shaking. I thought great we are sunk.”

  The idea of movie making as art came up a lot. Tambor told wannabe actors in the audience, “the more you live the more people hurt you. Gather those moments, that’s your pallet.” 

 It was really fun to watch. And lucky for anyone who missed it, Tambor is putting all of his wit and wisdom in a book using his experience as an actor and coach to talk about perseverance. He told me he thinks the same wisdom works for anyone who feels rapped in life and wonders how to get the dream.

  Next, I popped in to hear Helen Hunt talk about her first feature film as a director/writer”. It’s called And Then She Found Me. Hunt describes the movie by it’s tagline, “You can’t know love until you know betrayal.”

  Hunt told the audience, “Funny movies dealing with difficult things appeal to me.”  She says it did not ,however, appeal to movie buyers, “I heard every kind of no in the world.” Until she finally heard a “yes” at the Toronto film festival, Hunt received a 2:30AM phone call from Think Films. The movie stars Bette Milder, Colin Firth and Mathew Broderick, as well as Hunt.   She says it will open within the year in Dallas, then New York and LA, after that it should go nationwide.

  One last thing I thought was funny, the audience asked Hunt if she had seen any good movies lately. She brought up There Will Be Blood, and quipped “I thought it was about Dick Cheney… only one other person thought so too.” The crowd thought that was really funny. Hunt followed with,”Is that bad? What do you think is going to happen to me now?”

  Okay -one more thing… more interestin than fun. hunt’s 4 year old daughter watches NO TV and NO Movies! Hunt says the school doesn’t want the students to be exposed to any outside media. WOW!

  I went to a another panel, this one called “Blogs, Buzz and Buddy Lists”.  It was a combination between the Film and Interactive divisions. I felt like I was in a foreign language class. I didn’t get much out of it, except that I need to spend way more time on the internet! Karina Longworth, writer of www.Spout.comsays she is basically “trafficking in cool.”  I like that term, and from the sounds of it, not that I ever thought I was, but I am way far from cool. There was an interesting discussion about the word “blogger”.  Longworth and Allison Willmore, another professional – as in paid- blogger, prefer the word journalist. There was a lot of debate about when a blogger becomes a journalist.

  The title of the next session should have been a big clue that things were going to get a little crazy… “Gossip”. It did not dissappoint! The tagline on this blog should read ”where movie geeks meet music freaks and drama queens rule“. The film people are once again sharing a panel with the interactive folks and let me just say – WOW! are there some issues there!

  It was kind of like watching a telenovela, I didn’t understand all of the nerdspeak but the drama was hard to miss. Apparently, panelist Owen Thomas, who writes the blog www.Valleywag.comwhich covers the surprisingly sexy tech world of Silicon Valley, posted something about Julia Allison, a Star Magazine commentator. Thomas was pimping a job opening at his magazine saying “if you like gossip, like i like gossip, call me!” Allison yelled out, “You hurt people and hurt people’s lives.”  Turns out, Thomas put a picture of Allison and a man on his website with, according to Julia the word “canoodling”.  Someone in the audience spoke out about Allison posting so much of her love life online.  The moderator Heather Gold, brought Allison up on the panel and that is when things got really interesting.

  Thomas – “The internet has changed who is a public figure. People are choosing to make themselves a public figure.”

  Allison – “I’ve learned, basically don’t put your relationship online.”

  Thomas – “I live to serve.” 

   In the middle of this soap opera the audience was all “atwitter”, literally, they were receiving Twitter messages about this debacle.  http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/sxsw-mark-zucke.html The founder of Facebook’s interview with Sarah Lacy apparently went south when she DIDN’t ask the tough questions. More gossip in the gossip panel. Go figure.

  The most interesting piece of information to me came from Alan Citron, the general manger of TMZ when he said of the 7 million people checking out his website last month, half were men. Citron, who claims NOT to be interested in gossip aside from his job description, says he does get it. “There is an insatiable appetite for it, whether it bull, or good for you or a distraction from life.” Citron said,”It is like a mental vacation.”

  I finally made it to a movie about 6:00pm. I saw FullBattle Rattle. It is a documentary about an Iraqi city here in the United States. What is interesting about it, is the entire village is fake. It is an Army training facility. The movie was really pretty good. They shot it kind of like a news story, that is if we shot a story for two weeks continuously, and had 85 minutes to tell the story. I stayed for the crosstalk with the producers and the some of the soldiers featured in the movie, but that will have to wait. I need to get ready for Tuesday’s attack.

~ by sxsworbust on 1, March 10, 2008.