So everyone I know only cares about SXSW Music and over the last few years everyone in the tech community is raving over SXSW Interactive but as someone who has done nine South by Southwests I will tell you that by far my favorite part is SXSW Film.  I work my ass off during music week so I use the film fest as a mini vacation. I still work and cover the red carpets and things but I also get to see a bunch of movies. This year I think I saw 8 films and as with every other year they were all at least interesting if not fantastic. I also set up a few mini shoots with actors/directors from movies in the festival so I got some shots of something other than people standing on a yellow back drop.  Here are some highlights…

My favorite film of the festival was Safety Not Guaranteed. It’s a “quirky” film about a three journalists trying to do a story on a guy who posted a classified ad looking for a partner to travel back in time with him. It stars Mark Duplass and my biggest celebrity crush Aubrey Plaza. The film is absolutely hilarious, has fantastic performances from all the main rolls and ends with a bang. I got five minutes with Plaza, Duplass and Jake Johnson to do mini photo shoots which would have been awesome except about 30 seconds before I met the cast I stuck my hand in my pocket and when I pulled out a pack of gum I ripped open a cut on my hand and just started bleeding everywhere. It was really awesome meeting one of my favorite actresses with “I would shake your hand but it’s covered with blood.”

The most fucked up film of the festival was far and away was William Fridkin’s Killer Joe based of the Tracy Letts play of the same name. Matthew McConaughey stars as lawman turned hitman who has been hired by Emile Hirsch to kill his drug addicted mother so he can collect on her life insurance policy and pay back some scary people that he owes money. The also features Juno Temple, Thomas Haden Church and Gina Gershon in secondary rolls that they knock out of the park. Haden Church gives a really dark film moments of much needed hilarity with his dead pan delivery. Another one of my all time celebrity crushes, Gershon is involved in one of the most fucked up scenes ever put on film which I cannot even mention without ruining it but it involves fried chicken.

The most suprizing film was 21 Jump Street.  Every year at SXSW Film there seem to be one or two big blockbusters that premiere there and you aren’t exactly sure why. Festival curator Janet Pierson defended the Hollywood film before it’s introduction as saying they just like good movies and 21 Jump Street is hilarious.  She was right. I loved 21 Jump Street as a kid so I wanted to see it but I had very low expectations but the film ended up being one of the funniest movies I have seen this year. (I know it’s only March but I watch a lot of movies…) Jonah Hill was his normal funny self but he also produced the film and brought Channing Tatum on board. Tatum was unbelievably good in it and you have to give a lot of credit to Hill for believing that Tatum could actually be funny. If you aren’t aware, the 80′s TV show 21 Jump Street was not a comedy and instead of doing a remake the movie just takes the basic premise of the show (young looking cops going undercover in high schools) and making a really funny movie at it. Unlike other TV show film remakes they only took a few shots at the original show and instead focused on making a solid comedy that didn’t feel like a remake.

Lastly I wanted to talk about the premiere of HBO’s TV show Girls. I am gonna probably get into this show a lot more soon since it is written, directed and starring my friend Lena Dunham (and I even have a line in episode 7) but I wanted to at least mention it. Lena came to SXSW two years ago with her film Tiny Furniture and I was standing a few feet away from her when it won Best Naritive Feature and I was super proud of her and knew she was going to do big things.  I had no idea that she would blow up as quickly as she did. She showed the first three episodes of her Judd Apatow produced HBO comedy and they were even better than I imagined. Two Showtime execs were sitting next to me in the crowd and even they had to begrudgingly admit that the show was going to be a hit. Just be in front of a TV April 14th and you will see what I am talking about.

So yeah, SXSW Film was fucking awesome. I saw a bunch more stuff too so I just wanted to give quick nods to Mike Birbiglia’s Sleep Walk With me and Fat Kid Rules the World. Both were fantastic films that are well worth seeking out when they are released. And I also should mention that I shot photos of the stars/directors of Sun Don’t Shine, Beauty Is Embarrassing, Compliance and Small Apartments. I did’t get a chance to see any of the films but they all looked great and I hope to get a chance to see them soon.

Now click here to see all the photos I took during the 2012 SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX.

Today we are going to take a break from photos and just regale you with stories.  I was thinking about what I was going to update with today and I realized I didn’t really have anything which led me to realize that I haven’t shot many parties or anything really. But I feel like the last week or so has been pretty productive and interesting so I guess I will just tell you a few stories and you will just have to imagine the pictures in your head… at least until I get my film developed.

I think my week of reasonable productivity began last Sunday when I photographed Veruca James naked in public.  Those are the last pictures I took that you have actually seen.  On that shoot I found out that my friend Colin had died two weeks prior and no one had told me. I missed the Facebook invite to his funeral. I was on very little sleep and while I had been expecting his death for some time it really had an effect on me. I had been planning a trip to Virginia to go to his memorial service for a few months ever since he checked into hospice and finding out that he died and I didn’t know about it really fucked up my head.  I wanted to see a movie to get my mind of things so I tried to get my friend Promise to go see Pirates 4 with me because it would allow me to zone out for a while but she wanted to see something with a little more substance so we went and checked out a movie called Blank City about the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression underground NYC film movements of the late 70′s and early 80′s.  The movie was so inspiring and so depressing to me. Here were these people making so much art and collaborating and just living in NYC when it was this burned out shell of a place where you could live for $50 a month. And here I am 30 years later taking photos of drunk people instead of making something relevant or important.

So this post ended up being obscenely long so I need to create a jump. If you want to keep reading click below unless of course you came to this post directly making these instructions just confusing and unnecessary.

Fueled by energy drinks and lack of sleep I hit the streets of NYC trying to take photos and talk to people and try to do something that seemed to me to be more meaningful than the bullshit I have been doing. Boy N Girl and Trouble Andrew were doing a show at the Canal Room and so I brought three film cameras with me and left my digital at home. I grabbed a roll of film that expired in 1998 and a few rolls of black and white and went down to the show.  I kept talking to people about the meaning of art and I shot off a few rolls of film back stage that will probably be terrible but it seemed somehow more important at the time.  I came up with an idea for a movie and made out with this girl I have had a crush on for like three years and then went over to Sway for last call. I love Sway on Sundays because even if I only go there once every six months there are always new and different people that seem really happy to see me. The door guy excitedly Q hugged me on the way in and I knew it was going to be a fun few moments before the club kicked us all out.  I ended up getting in a conversation with DJ Fancy that was very inspiring in itself and we stayed there until way after four only leaving when all the lights were turned off.  We decided to start doing dinners at his place and only inviting the few actually interesting people we know to try to foster some conversations other than the “Sup yo?” conversations that we have in night clubs 20 times a night.

Monday was productive on a personal level and I got a lot done but nothing really worth talking about.  That night I ended up meeting Veruca and her Chicagoland crew out and taking a bunch of crazy photos in bathroom that you will see some of one day. We ended up hanging out on the roof of the Burning Angel building until sunrise.

The next day I slept for a long time and did almost nothing all day. It was so antithetical to the previous days. Some people blame my moodiness on my Gemini birth but I am sure everyone is like that to some degree. I was awake for a few hours and I remember thinking I wanted to go to the #PPP party or Le Bain or to the Wolf Party and it seemed like I was going to actually do something but I slept until midnight and I woke up feeling awful and ended up talking to two friends from Canada on Skype until 2am. At this point I watched movies until 6am and then I decided since I wasted my entire Tuesday I would need to get my shit together and I actually went on a jog for the first time in… ever really. I made it about 8 blocks and then I felt like I was going to puke. Two days later my legs still hurt.  On a positive note I have lost 9lbs in the last two weeks. Just 10 more to go and I will be back to my fighting weight.

After my run I slept for about three hours and headed up to Long Island City to check out my friend Lena Dunham’s TV show that she is doing for HBO called “Girls”. You perhaps have read about Lena on my site before. She is a friend of mine who made a hilarious super low budget film called Tiny Furniture with some friends, shooting it mostly in her parents apartment. It won the Best Narrative Feature award at the 2010 SXSW Film Fest and I was there to document the whole thing. It was really exciting to have a friend blow up like that in an instant and I signed on to run the Tiny Furniture twitter account for her. Since the movie came out Judd Apatow saw it and they went to HBO and eventually sold their pilot.  Lena is writing, starring and producing the damn thing and I could not be more proud of her.

So she invited me to check out the set the other day and I got to watch them spend about 7 hours shooting roughly 90 seconds of screen time that involved Lena awkwardly watching someone masturbate complete with a fake dick and fake cum shot.  The whole thing was completely absurd but I have a feeling it will be really funny and not even in a gross out way.  The funniest parts are Lena’s reaction shots to the whole thing. It was great to see Lena again and I had some good conversations with producer Jennifer Konner and talked Twitter with episode director Jesse Peretz. I got to talk to the still photographer a bunch who shoots with the same camera I do. She was pretty great and showed me this insane contraption that goes around her camera so it doesn’t make any noise during the takes. Plus Lena’s assistant and I spent a while talking about how weird it was to see shitty Brooklyn apartments recreated on a sound stage and all the insanity that goes into creating a big budget show.  It must be so weird for Lena to go from shooting a movie on a DSLR in her parents house to shooting with two cameras on a huge set with 50 people working for her at any given time.  I am excited to come back to the show to play a party photographer extra in a episode that takes place in a Brooklyn night club. Seems appropriate.

Later that night I was exhausted and ready to go to sleep by 10pm but I was reminded by Twitter that photographer Dave Naz was in town for his lady’s book release party. Oriana Small aka Ashley Blue wrote a book about sex and the sex industry called Girlvert and had her opening at Powerhouse Books Arena. I have talked to Dave a lot online and we did a print trade but I had never met him in real life so I got my shit together and jumped in a cab to Dumbo. I had a bunch of great conversations there and got to meet Dave and legendary photographer/photo editor George Pitts. I had my longest conversation to date with Bob Coulter and briefly caught up with JM Darling and his lady. It was really great to talk to these very established erotic photographers and show them some of my 35mm work that no one has seen. Dave and Bob seemed really into the work which was super encouraging and everyone gave me ideas for publishing. Also Orina signed my copy of her book with a giant dick and ended up being cool as shit so you should fucking buy her book already.

Now this update is getting absurdly long so I am just going to quickly mention that I went down to the Vice Mag/VBS.tv offices for the filming of a new Off! video.  Off! is Keith Morris’ new punk band and they are fucking awesome. I saw them at SXSW and they blew me a way. I have started this punk cover band and we do two Keith Morris songs, Depression by Black Flag and Live Fast Die Young by the Circle Jerks. I figured I should pay tribute to this legend (Who once sent me a very thoughtful thank you note after I photographed the Circle Jerks) by trying to help out with the video.  They filmed each person who showed up to the video shoot one by one spitting colored Jello and water out of their mouths into a baby pool. I am kinda boring looking so I knew if I had any chance to be in the video I would have to really kill it so when it was my turn to spit I put my hand up to my mouth like I was trying to hold it in and spit it as hard as I could into my open hand sending jello and water all over the fucking place and coating my face with sticky redness. I washed it off but hours later I could still feel this stickiness on my eyelids.  It was a lot of fun.

Anyway, this post was so epic and probably painfully boring for anyone not desperately interested in my personal life so to make that up to you I am going to leave you with some fun and related videos.  Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

South By Southwest is more than just a music festival. The Interactive part of SXSW is getting bigger and bigger every year but it seems like SXSW Film gets a bit over looked. This is a mistake. The SXSW Film Fest is amazing. I have probably seen 25 movies at the festival over the last few years and I can’t think of one movie I didn’t like and I have seen a bunch that I loved.  This year I didn’t get to see as many as I would have liked to but I saw some great movies. I am not going to write anything up because I went in a lot of this stuff before.  You can read my write up of a few of the 2011 SXSW Films here. But I did want to get up all my red carpet shots for you guys. I know the ladies will be psyched to see the Jake Gyllenhall pics from the Source Code premiere. So yeah, get excited.

Click here to see all the 2011 SXSW Film red carpet shots at the Paramount in downtown Austin, TX.

I just wanted to update you guys with SOMETHING since I know you guys miss me so much while I am on vacation.  I am sure I am losing tons of Twitter followers too because I am just talking about SXSW all day. It’s all a shame.  I need to throw you guys a bone or something content wise.  So I decided I would do mini reviews of the films I have seen and then drop a few red carpet shots to sweeten the deal.  Okay, maybe you still don’t care… well you know what? I am sorry I can’t just post drunk and/or naked people all the time. Damn.

The first film I got a chance to see was also my favorite.  It was James Gunn’s Super starring Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page.  It was about a guy who’s wife left him for a drug dealer played by Kevin Bacon so he flips out and decides to become a superhero by dressing up like one and hitting people in the face with a fucking wrench. It is ultra violent, very funny and actually heartfelt. Rainn and Ellen are both pretty amazing it in and Kevin Bacon is an amazing bad guy.  James Gunn used to work for Troma back in the day and if you know what that is than you will appreciate that this film is pretty much a Lloyd Kaufman movie if Lloyd had a budget, great actors and a little bit of restraint. It also happens to be a lot more thought provoking than you would expect from an ultra violent comedy super hero movie. It’s just simply very very good.

The next film I saw was Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins.  Miike is one of my top 5 favorite directors and I have seen at least 35 of his films and 13 Assassins is well up there with the best. It is a pretty typical samurai flick but with the twisted Miike touches you expect from the guy who brought you Audition and Ichi The Killer. You sometimes forget you are watching a Miike film until he throws a limbless naked girl bleeding from her severed tongue at you… maybe I have said too much.  The film has great sword play, fantastic characters and some Ernest Goes to Camp like elements that make it really fun to watch. If you get a chance to see it you really need to do so. Sadly Miike couldn’t get out of Japan for obvious reasons so he missed the screening. I was pretty disappointed since I am such a huge fan but he sent a letter to be read to the audience that was extremely touching and he wanted us to all watch his movie and think about Japan in it’s time of crisis.

Next up I saw Paul the newest movie from the Sean of the Dead guys Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. It is about two comic book nerds from London who come to the states to go to Comic Con and then travel to a bunch of famous UFO sightings. On their journey they meet up with an actual alien named Paul who is voiced by Seth Rogan and is running from the government.  The movie was funny and entertaining but I thought it was a little uninspired. One of the reasons I loved Sean of the Dead so much is that it was an interesting take on an over done genre. Paul was filled with pop culture references and cameos but it felt very much like Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back but without the great Kevin Smith dialogue. But then again maybe I am just not nerdy enough to appreciate all the Sci-Fi jokes.

Lastly I saw Paul Fieg’s Bridesmaids. I have seen trailers for this and it didn’t look that great but I was really hoping it would be good. I pretty much like everything Judd Apatow as produced but this was his first film targeted towards women. The TV show he is producing for HBO is also targeted towards women (It’s just called “Girls”) and Girls just happens to be written, directed and starring my friend Lena Dunham.  I just know that Girls will be compared to Bridesmaids and so I was hoping it would be funny for Lena’s sake even though the two projects don’t have much of anything to do with each other.  Fortunately Bridesmaids was hilarious. Kristen Wiig stars in this as the Maid of Honor in her friends wedding and it all becomes disastrous and then everything ends up okay in the end like pretty much every movie about a wedding but there are the laughs and strong character development you expect from Apatow’s film tree. This movie is going to make a star out of Melissa McCarthy who plays the brides tough and overweight sister-in-law. She kills in every scene and according to her IMDB is Jenny McCarthy’s cousin. Weird.

Kristen Wiig not only starred in Bridesmaids but was also Simon Pegg’s love interest in Paul.  She also clearly hates me as you can see below…

Tonight around 4AM I will be headed to John F. Kennedy airport and then off to Austin, Texas for the South By Southwest Music, Film and Interactive festival.  I will be covering Interactive and Film for the Village Voice and then shooting a number of parties during SXSW Music.  I will undoubtably take thousands of photos and there will just be tons of amazing content and that sort of thing.  Unfortunately I will be super busy during this time which means a lot less updating. I always think I am going to have time to update but I never do.  During the film and interactive part of SXSW I should have sometime time. I also have a new art project/web site launching next week so you will have that to look at.  But duing SXSW Music, from the 15th – 20th I would, not expect a whole lot from me over here.

All that being said… I will be updating my Tumblr every day with highlights from the fest. If you don’t have Tumblr you should be following me on Twitter because I post all the good Tumblr stuff to my Twitter. Then again during SXSW most of my Tweets are just name dropping, eating BBQ and bragging about cool shit I am doing in Texas. So I will probably lose more followers than I gain next week.  But such is life.

Today in the interest of actually updating my site with content instead of just me giving you a bullshit post explaining why I am not going to be posting I am going to give you links to some highlights of past SXSW trips.  This will be my 8th SXSW trip in a row, although several of those trips were when I was managing The Gaskets and I wasn’t shooting photos so these high lights all come from the last few years.  If you mouse over the photos it will tell you about them and clicking them will bring you to more photos from that day or event.

And for all of you who will be at SXSW this year… I will see you mother fuckers in Austin.

In the coming months Driven By Boredom is going to get a make over. The facelift is tentatively scheduled for April 1st but knowing how these things work, and on my limited budget, it could be 2015 before it really happens.  Part of that redesign is going to give the party photos their own part of the website so that I can do more blogging about other things without bumping the photography down to the bottom of the page.  This is going to let me do a lot of shorter blogs and do posts on videos, music, events and other things that I usually just post on my Tumblr account. I really want to do a lot of shorter posts like I was doing when DBB 3.0 first launched and soon I will be able to do that.  I mention this for two reasons, one is to keep you updated on things on DBB, and the other is because I am about to do one of those type of posts right now… (This actually ended up being a lot more substantial than I thought it was going to be…)

Hulu Plus announced recently that it has worked out a deal with the Criterion Collection to stream their films uninterrupted.  Criterion owns the digital rights to over 800 films and over 150 films are available now.  The films will be shown with commercial before the movie so that you don’t have to have unnatural breaks while watching.  Some Criterion films will be available on a rotating basis with commercial breaks as part of Hulu’s basic service.

I actually just quit my Hulu Plus subcription. Many of the TV shows I wanted to watch weren’t available to stream on mobile devices. It seemed totally pointless. I have no real interest in watching every episode of Cougar Town or The Dick Van Dyke show. I am pretty sure the addition of Criterion Collection is going to get me to sign back up. If you aren’t familiar with the Criterion Collection you probably have no business watching any of their movies anyway (although they do have a couple of Michael Bay films in there…) but they have one of the largest libraries of film classics around.  All their films are amazingly restored and are usually the best (and in many cases only) versions around.  Criterion DVDs run between $30 and $40 for a single film so being able to watch them all for $7.99 a month seems like a steal.

I am a huge film nerd and one of the main reasons I moved to NYC was so I could watch movies. I was driving 6 hours to NYC from Richmond, VA every month just to watch films that I couldn’t get in Virginia. When I was living in Richmond I was watching more than 30 movies a month and amassed a DVD collection of well over 1000 films (Including 36 from the Criterion Collection). Unfortunately when I moved to NYC I had much less time and much less money to devote to my film habit. I watch maybe 5 movies a month now and usually they are Hollywood films because I don’t devote the time to figuring out what is playing at Film Forum or the Angelka.

I just wish that Netflix streaming and this Hulu Plus Criterion thing existed when I was living in Richmond. I probably would have watched 50 movies a month and had an even deeper understanding of film history.

Anyway, here are the trailers to 3 of favorite films in the Criterion Collection.  More than 20 of their films are in my top 100 list so it was impossible for me to pick my three favorites so I picked 3 films that you may not have seen before that are also easily accessible.  I understand that not everyone has the patience to sit through hours of silent Stan Brakhage films.

My first pick is Man Bites Dog which is in my top 10 films of all time for sure. It is a French mocumentary about a serial killer that is unflichingly realistic and one of the most brutal, and often funny, films I have ever seen.  My second selection is The Harder They Come. Another one of my all time favorites, it is about a Jamacian guy who can’t make it as a musician so he turns to crime.  But after he becomes famous for his crimes his record becomes a huge hit and he becomes a folk hero.  The movie was made entirely in Jamacia and features Jimmy Cliff in the starring role. The soundtrack is one of the best Reggae records of all time.  The last film I chose was F For Fake. It is a documentary about art forgery directed and hosted by Orson Welles. The movie is a documentary unlike any other I have ever seen and has an amazing twist ending.  If you haven’t seen it you need to.  Enjoy the trailers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last Sunday I got asked to come down to shoot a screening of Tell Them Anything You Want a 40 minute documentary about Maurice Sendak.  Sendak as you probably know is the creator of Where The Wild Things Are and about 100 other children’s books.  The film was directed by Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze who were on hand to do a Q&A after the screening.  The screening was the third film in a weekly series presented by Oscilloscope Laboratories’ The Circle of Trust Screening Series at Liberty Hall at the Ace Hotel.

The film was fantastic, I got free food and after I ate I got to watch the Jets lose on the movie screen.  What a great night.  Honestly if you get a chance to see this film you should.  It’s available for sale from Oscilloscope and worth going out of your way for. Sendak is an interesting and hilarious man in the last years of his life who has accomplished so much but is much more concerned with what he hasn’t done.  I have a feeling if I make it to my 80′s I will be just as pissed off about it, although probably with a much less impressive resume to look back on. Spike Jonze befriended him in the 1990′s and made the documentary over the five years that it took to make the Where The Wild Things Are movie. Sendak really trusts and loves Jonze and it comes out in the film and makes for a really intimate portrait of a brilliant man.

This write up is probably really poorly written because I am trying to write it and watch Obama’s State of the Union address at the same time.  So I am just gonna go ahead and get these photos up. But two things I should note.  The first is that I didn’t really shoot this like I would a party. These pics were for press and in house reasons for the Liberty Hall screening series so I mostly just took environmental shots to show the big crowds and then some photos of the introduction and the Q&A.  The second thing I should mention that a long with the directors of the film Catherine Keener showed up for the Q&A.  She is in the film and happened to be in town so Spike and Lance brought her a long.  I am a pretty big fan of all three of them so it was really great to shoot them and talk to them for a second after the film.

Okay, let’s do this. Click here to see all the pictures from the Tell Them Anything You Want Screening at the Ace Hotel’s Liberty Hall.

Ps. Oscilloscope Laboratories is way worth checking out as well. They have released several documentaries that I have loved and pretty much every film in their library looks well worth watching. They have a subscription service that you can order for $150 that sends you their next 10 films (on DVD or Blue Ray) before they have been released to the public and you don’t even have to pay shipping. Hell of a deal..

My attempt at doing a weekly, or at least semi-weekly Mp3 post continues today with a few selections from the Every Which Way But Loose soundtrack.  I have been talking about getting the poster art for Every Which Way But Loose on me forever. It features Clint Eastwood looking like a total bad ass while being hugged by an orangutan. We don’t even have to talk about how awesome that is. I mean, it is life changing and you know how much I love dumb tattoos of old conservative white guys who have starred in movies with apes. But even though I have wanted the tattoo for several years I didn’t actually watch the movie until a few months ago.

I loved it even more than I thought I would. Clint Eastwood plays a street fighter who goes from town to town fighting for money and trying to rescue a girl who doesn’t want to be rescued. Totally unrelated to the plot is his pet orangutan Clyde who spends the movie getting drunk and looking cute. The movie would be barely changed at all if you removed the ape, but the movie poster would probably only have been 1/10th as awesome.

One thing about watching Every Which Way But Loose is that you will finish it with Eddie Rabbit’s title track stuck in your head.  For me it was probably a week before I stopped singing it aloud to strangers on the subway. I knew I needed the album so I went on eBay and picked it up on vinyl and after some desperate searching found a download of it online.  The soundtrack is pretty amazing. I am not even really a country music guy, but there are a bunch of really amazing songs on it.  There are also a bunch of random instrumental songs that I don’t really care for, but luckily we live in a world where you can just delete those from your iTunes library.

For your listening pleasure today I am going to pull three of my favorite tracks. The first is the previously mentioned title track, Eddie Rabbit’s “Every Which Way But Loose”. It is super slow and twanggy but somehow it is the most catchy damn song on earth. It will probably be in my head from now till Christmas.

Eddie Rabbit – Every Which Way But Loose

My second choice is “A “Six Pack To Go” by Hank Thompson.  I have loved this song ever since my friends punk band in covered it nearly a decade ago. It’s a rocking country tune about getting wasted instead of paying rent. How can you not love that?

Hank Thompson – A Six Pack to Go

My third choice was a bit harder to make. I wanted to go with a Charlie Rich song because he is actually in the movie playing live at one of the country-western bars in the film. I also considered Mel Tillis song “Coca Cola Cowboy” because it is fucking awesome but I figured I should figure a lady since Sondra Locke is one of the stars of the film and has two songs on the soundtrack, but her character is sort of a bitch, so fuck her. I went with the Carol Chase song “I Can’t Say No To A Truck Driving Man”. It is a fantastic little ditty and super catchy.

Carol Chase – Can’t Say No to a Truck Drivin’ Man

Anyway, this write up is not super coherent so I am going to go, but you should probably watch the movie as soon as you can and do what you can to track down the damn soundtrack. Have a good day.

So there is this movie Tiny Furniture. I have talked about it before and I will talk about it again but what you really need to know is that it comes out Friday at IFC Center and that it is very good.  It won best feature at SXSW and Lena has been tapped to direct an HBO series produced by Judd Apatow and she is going to adapt and direct movie version of the next book by the people who wrote Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. It is being produced by Scott Rudin. If you don’t know who he is… Google him.  It is all fucking very impressive. And we are all very proud of Lena. On top of Lena’s awesomeness, the music for the film was done by my good friend Teddy Blanks who I have plugged on here a billion times.  Anyway, you must see this movie. (It opens in LA next Friday, btw.)

Last night they held the New York premiere at Moma and I didn’t go because I have already seen the movie twice and I had seriously important things to do like update this stupid website.  But I did go to the after party but of course I got there late and Lena and Teddy had already left and so had my brother so I hung out, took a few photos, chatted with friends of exes and exes of friends and then left and stuffed my face with a giant cookie, a cannoli and a McRib. It seemed like the thing to do.

Anyway, the important thing is that you must see Tiny Furniture and then you need to click here to see all the photos from the Tiny Furniture after party at Santos Party House.

By the way, you should watch the Tiny Furniture trailer here, but I promise the movie is way better than it looks. If you think it looks good you will like it, and if you think it looks insufferable, I promise you that it is not nearly as self indulgent as it looks. I give you my word.

Also, you should read Lena’s profile in this weeks New Yorker because it is really funny and my ex-girlfriend Isabel is interviewed for it and she is hilarious.  Okay bye.

Marlon Brando. Robert De Niro. Denzel Washington. Johnny Depp.

What do I have in common with these men?  Absolutely nothing. Those bastards don’t hand a candle compared to my acting chops.  As one of the worlds greatest, if not THE greatest living actor you that I have never really acted on film before .  I did play Bambi in “Bambi” in my first grade play, my stirring cameo as Prince Charming in “Sleeping Beauty” and of course I was King Arthur in the third grade… and who could forget my performance as the Mad Hatter in “Alice In Wonderland” nearly 20 years before Depp tackled the role? But after the 6th grade plays were no longer mandatory in school and I stepped off the stage for the last time.

But as far as film goes my work has been fairly limited. I have never really found a starring role that stretched me enough as an actor.  I did take a completely silent part in a music video, as I wanted to know what it was like to convey all that emotion with just a look or a glance, without being able to rely on the power and emotion of my famous voice. Plus I did play an extra in two different porn features, but we will just ignore those for the time being…

But today I return to acting and I am giving out the goods for free.  I bet  you never thought you would be able to watch me act any time you wanted from your very bedrooms! The treat for you is almost too much to imagine. I almost envy you. TreV from The New Pop asked me to be in a short film. I instantly refused the part because the internet is clearly beneath me and he could not afford my $40,000,000 fee.  But when I found out he was looking for an actor to play a nightlife photographer from Brooklyn I had to reconsider. Could this be the challenge of a life time?  When would I ever get to push myself this far.  I wanted to know if I was up to it.

Fortunately for you I was.  I bring to you, for the first time, my greatest work as an actor.  Nay, I bring you the greatest work of ANY actor. I bring you a story of mystery and intrigue, love and loss, and both South and North Williamsburg.  Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself as best you can for… Halfway There.

Ps. Yeah, I posted a similar film before, but it got redited and reshot and now you have this. This is better.

The Scene Episode 3 – Halfway There from Trevz New Pop on Vimeo.

I got to see Tiny Furniture again and it was still fantastic the second time.  My friend Lena Dunham’s second feature had its NY premiere on Friday at BAM Rose Cinemas and then they had a special outdoors screening as part of the Rooftop Films summer movie series. It was a very cool event where they had a huge inflatable screen set up in the parking lot across from BAM. It was really cool to watch a movie outside like that and the distractions of the city and the sometimes questionable sound were offset by the surprsingly great weather.  It rained during the day and the event was almost called off, but the rain let up a few hours before the screening and didn’t really start again until the credits were basically rolling.  The Q&A was pretty wet and just a few brave die hards with umbrellas stuck around for the free beer and after party, but the whole event was great none the less.

One thing I have yet to mention was the opening entertainment for the movie.  My good friend Teddy Blanks did the soundtrack and the title sequences to the film and he preformed a short set before the movie.  Video artist Christian Shultz creates videos for all of Teddy’s songs which were projected behind Teddy on the giant inflatable screen as he played.  One of the videos features a man dancing while a girl behind him masturbates on a bed.  I was wondering if Teddy was going to perform it at such a family friendly out door event… he did. They turned the video off within 20 seconds but let him keep playing.  I think it is a pretty great acomplishment to be censored by BAM.  To see more weird video art and madness from Teddy and Christian you should check out their insane website: Too Hot For The Internet.

One other thing of note, my parents came with my brother and me to the movie and while it was great to have them there it was very awkward to watch some parts of the movie with them.  If you have ever seen your mother laugh at a joke about a “cum omelette” you know what I mean. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of my parents in the gallery though because they abhor my website as any good parent should.

The gallery is pretty small because I expected to do most of my shooting afterwards but the rain put a stop to that, but you should click here to see the pictures of Teddy Blanks & Tiny Furniture at BAM anyway…

Tiny Furniture is out nation wide and on IFC On Demand in October.

Wow. What a crazy evening. I got a chance to cover the Anthology Film Archives 40th Anniversary benefit “Return To The Pleasure Dome” at the Hiro Ballroom for the Village Voice.  It was honoring the legendary Kenneth Anger and featured performances by his band Technicolor Skull, Jonas Mekas performing with Now We Are Here, plus some other bands… the Virgins, Sonic Youth and Lou Reed. On top of all that Moby DJd, actor Ben Foster hosted and we were treated to appearances by Phillip Seymore Hoffman and Julian Schnabel. It was a pretty crazy night… and for $500 a seat I am pretty sure it had to be…

I really wanted to attend because while I have enjoyed his films, I really appreciate Kenneth Anger as this sort of legendary film icon.  Aside from making some of the most ground breaking experimental films in history the guy wrote two amazing books, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II.  I am a big movie nerd and his tales of old Hollywood have prominent spots on my bookshelf.  When I heard that not only he was going to be there, but that he would be playing a theremin I had to be there. Music in his films is so important I needed to see what he was going to do for himself.

I got there a little bit late and unfortunately I missed most of the Virgins’ set.  There guitarist is a friend of mine, and I hadn’t seen them so I was pretty excited about finally seeing them. Like I said, I didn’t catch most of their set but I feel like the toned it down a little bit for the film benefit crowd.

After the Virgins Sonic Youth played. It was the second time this year I have had a chance to shoot Thurston Moore but last time was with his punk band at SXSW.  I have never been a very big Sonic Youth fan, but they are a band I have always greatly respected and their documentary “1991: The Year That Punk Broke” was a pretty important film in my musical development.  It was great seeing them live. Kim Gordon was awesome.

Between sets Moby DJ’d and played a lot of weird spacey avant gaurd music which seemed to be the theme for the night. I guess I should point out at this point that the bands all played behind silent experimental films that the Anthology Film Archives has restored.  I noticed films by Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas and of cours Kenneth Anger.

When Lou Reed played everyone was amazingly excited.  Philip Seymore Hoffman gave him a bit of an introduction after asking everyone to donate money to the Archive. As soon as he got on stage we were told that we were not allowed to even dare to photograph him or he would walk off stage.  Now I have to say I am not a huge Lou Reed fan, and I am not even really a Velvet Underground fan, (I know, I’m sorry) but even I was pretty excited to see the great Lou Reed… At least until he started playing.  He just played feedback while he watched Maya Deren’s Meditations On Violence. Another guy was distorting his feedback from the side of the stage. He played in the back in the dark and didn’t even address the crowd. This, combined with his anti-photo decree, makes Lou Reed a total dick. I’m sorry, but I have been to a lot of terrible noise shows in my life, but at least guys wrapped in tin foil playing Game Boys and yelling into toy megaphones is at least entertaining.  People paid $500 a seat to see Lou Reed, the least he could do was say something to the crowd.

After that it was Kenneth Anger and Technicolor Skull’s time to shine.  They played super weird music that you would expect from any band with a theremin combined with smoke machines and Kenneth Anger films in the background.  The whole thing made for a very weird experience that while not exactly pleasant was certainly a lot more genuine an interesting than Lou Reed’s seven minute set.  The one problem I had with the set was that because of the smoke and the lighting it was very difficult to photograph, but when I later looked at the shots I had, it reminded me a lot of stills from an experimental American New Wave film, so I guess that seems extremely appropriate in the end.

After Anger’s set Jonas Mekas came up and gave Anger an award for life time achevement.  Mekas spoke of how no living filmmaker had done more for cinnema than Anger.  He then asked the crowd to take up arms and attack the NEA and the Library of Congress and demand they create government run faclities to make film stock to preserve movies on film instead of digitally.  After his impassioned plea he recieted some sort of poetry over music as Now We Are Here played behind him.

The whole night was completely surreal and I think I would need an advanced film or music degree to understand it all but it certainly made for an interesting night.  From Julian Schnabel getting on stage to yell at the people in the back for talking to the guy who kept calling Thurston Moore “big guy” as he got off stage, it was a very weird fucking night.  I am very glad I was there.

If you want to see pictures from Anthology Film Archives “Return To The Pleasure Dome”  at the Hiro Ballroom click here to see it all…

And please, if you want to help preserve important works of cinema that are slowly turning to dust, please donate to the Anthology Film Archives… or at least go see a movie there… it’s only three block from Lit on 2nd and 2nd…

Despite being hosted by the hilarious Eugene Mirman, this might be the most boring gallery I ever post on here. It’s a bunch of people you don’t know standing at a podium. That being said, SXSW Film’s theme is “Tomorrow Happens Here” and my guess is that a number of these people will be familiar faces in a few years.

One of those faces will hopefully be my friend Lena Dunham.  Her film as I mentioned before won Best Narritive Feature.  She also won the Chicken & The Egg award which honors the best emerging female director. I went with her to the after party so there are a few shots from that thrown in with the film awards photos.

You can check out the list of winners here and try to dedicate your life to figuring out who the hell is who.  Most of these pictures are of presenters.  My hatred of captioning is why I don’t work for Getty or Wired and instead run a party blog, so you are going to just have to deal with it.

I just want to give a shout out to Travis Senger and his producer who made White Lines & The Fever: The Death Of DJ Junebug. I met those dudes during the music fest and they seem like good dudes. I haven’t seen their film yet, but it’s playing at Tribeca so hopefully I’ll get a chance to see it.

And lastly, I didn’t get a chance to see many of the films that won, but nearly every film I saw at SXSW I loved.  Janet Pierson and her staff did an amazing job of curating this festival and any of the films who won awards are well worth tracking down… especially Tiny Furniture….

Click here to see some extremely boring photos of people standing at podiums accepting and giving awards!

Aside from doing these film portraits, I signed up for some red carpets.  I sort of hate doing step and repeat stuff, but it’s a good thing to have in my portfolio when trying to get jobs at Sundance.  Plus knew the Voice would run it and I quickly found out that it was a great way to get into movies without having to wait in line.  I mean, I had to wait in the press area taking photos for the same amount of time, but at least I was being productive, getting paid and shooting the shit with other pro photographers which is always fun.  Complaining about light and step and repeat walls is one of my favorite things to do.

Cool stuff was getting to shoot Chloe Sevigny who I have had a crush on for 15 years and have never spoken to despite being in the same room with her several times.  I didn’t get to speak with her this time either, but I did shout “look right here!” at her a few times. Clearly the Get Low carpet was amazing. I had met the crew earlier in the day as per my last post, but it was still great.  Robert Duvall flicked off all the camera guys when we weren’t paying attention as a joke.  Not one person got the shot, that guy is a pro.  Sissy hugging me as per the last post was amazing too.  MacGruber was the only one of these films I didn’t attend because I think SNL is horrible. It was cool to see Val Kilmer despite him posing for less than 10 seconds.  Fortunately there was a lot of him to shoot… Of all the celebs who did the red carpet, Will Forte from SNL was the most generous.  After his time on the carpet, he left the ropes and went into the crowds of screaming girls and posed for pictures and signed autographs for another 5 minutes. It was a really classy move.

I shot the red carpets for Barry Munday, Cryus, Lemmy, MacGruber, and Get Low. If you want to see who everyone is, check the Voice gallery for captions.

Click here for the 2010 SXSW Film Red Carpet gallery.

When I got a pretty decent gig working SXSW Music I realized that I could afford to spend another week in Austin and check out the film festival.  To do that I would need to get a film badge.  I asked the Village Voice if they would hire me to shoot SXSW Film and Interactive for them and they agreed. Originally I thought I could just shoot a film party or two and just watch a bunch of movies, but then I got all these press junket invites and realized I could do a pretty cool portrait gallery for the Voice.  The odd thing is that the Voice still hasn’t run these portrait yet, although they tell me they are going to.  A lot of the people in the gallery you might not have any idea who are, and frankly I don’t want to explain it all, but I will link the Voice gallery when it’s up and it will have all the captions.  Also if you mouse over the photos below it will give credits for my favorite shots.

The highlight of course was shooting the Get Low junket.  I got there late due to the cabs in Austin being the worst things ever so I was worried I was going to miss my chance to shoot Bill Murray, Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek.  Luckily they squeezed me in, unluckily I only had 2 minutes with them and they weren’t so excited about posing for me.  Bill Murray made fun of me, Robert Duvall was mostly trying to just eat lunch and Sissy Spacek was worried about me shooting with a wide angel.  But when I showed Sissy the photo on my camera and she loved it and later on the red carpet for her movie she came over and hugged me and told all the other photographers that I was amazing. Speaking of amazing, while I was waiting to shoot the cast of Get Low I got to shoot Sissys daughter Schuyler Fisk, who is a musician, actress and totally rad girl, not to mention absolutely stunning.

The other thing really worth mentioning was that I went down to shoot portraits at the Tiny Furniture premiere.  Tiny Furniture was directed, written and starred in by my friend Lena Dunham and my boy Teddy Blanks did the score. Their film won best narrative feature and I was so excited for them.  I am going to do a full review of it right before it screens in NYC so you will get to hear more about it, but it was amazing and I am so proud of those kids.

Anyway, I shot people from the movies Get Low, Tiny Furniture, MARS, Monsters, Helena At The Wedding, and fucking Lemmy from the movie Lemmy.  Amazing.  Click here to see all the portraits from SXSW Film 2010.