Update: Six months later...

Oops, I'm six months behind. Much has happened in that time: As the last entry mentioned, the movie won a big prize in Indianapolis (Best North American Independent Feature Film, according to the Web site) and went on to play in Santa Cruz at the Del Mar Theater. The Santa Cruz crowd was somewhere south of 100-strong, less than I expected after that spectacular Metro Santa Cruz cover story, but certainly critical mass in the gorgeous Art Deco Del Mar and an extremely enthusiastic and inquisitive crowd--the festival director said it was one of the festival's longest and most involved discussions. Santa Cruz gave the movie a "Special Director's Award," and a few months later it picked up an honorable mention at the Indie Gathering in Cleveland.

I spent the summer working on the second draft of my novel-in-progress, and found in August that the movie had won me admission to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where I am currently in the middle of a two-month residency. I spent the first couple of weeks here working on new revisions to the movie, adding Justin Bond as Kiki and cutting enough things so that I got the length down to 52 minutes from 54. And then, on November 9th, Rooftop Films, the Premiere Commission, Great Music at St. Bartholomew's Church, New York Magazine and Dewar's sponsored a screening of the film at St. Bart's that was absolutely spectacular. Rooftop set up a big screen with great sound in the middle of the sanctuary, and online notices in the New Yorker and the New York Times attracted about 400 spectators. The movie screened, and then William Trakfa played the Messiaen (St. Bart's has New York's largest pipe organ). After a Q&A with me, Bill, Bruce Levingston of the Premiere Commission and cast members Albert Fuller, Manoel Felciano, Nancy Anderson, Wayne Koestenbaum and Ricky Ian Gordon, the Dewar's reception got going and everyone got plastered on free Scotch. In church! Somehow it seemed so appropriate.

A couple of nice blog postings came out, one immensely quotable one ("a genuinely sublime documentary") before the screening and this one afterward. Now I have a bit of post-screening blahs--there are no more scheduled screenings, though I did submit it to a handful of festivals and an LA distributor asked for a copy. Hopefully I'll have more news before another six months go by.