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.

I cannot act.  I have no idea why I was asked to co star in a short film for The New Pop.  I guess it had something to do with the fact that I am an nightlife photographer and the character was a nightlife photographer.  I was flattered to be asked, and I have been trying to get my friends to put me in their movies for ages so I said yes despite my reservations about my poor acting and some questionable bits in the script. We rehearsed a few times and each time completely rewrote the script.  The director Trevz has shot music videos and has ten years of behind the camera experience but had never directed anything with scripted dialogue. I am not sure he was prepared for what he was getting himself into.  He thought we could finish the whole thing in a few hours, but we went all night.  It was the coldest day of the fall and have the shoot was outside and we were miserable.  No one really knew what we were doing and we kept missing parts.  I sort of took command of making sure we got everything while Trevz made sure he got amazing shots.  I think everyone was a bit annoyed at me when I kept making us redo things. Luckily we got everything shot, and if nothing else the footage looked incredible.  Trevz did a few edits that got better each time, but it never really came together the way he thought it would.  I just think we needed more time preparing, and it would have been nice to have shot on a warmer day, but you live and you learn.  Trevz clearly knows what he is doing behind the camera and has a vision, he just needs a little more practice.  I can’t wait to see his next attempt.

Anyway, the project was almost scrapped, but Trevz figure out away to keep some of it alive.  He cut it down from 7 minutes to just over two minutes and created a little snippet that is totally different from the original film.  It was a pretty great move to save it.  My favorite part was the end, which is completely gone now, but he told me that it might end up becoming the opening to his next film, so we will just wait and see. Read Trevz take on the whole thing here.

If nothing else, you get to see me looking really tired in a wife beater.  And while it is pretty clear I have no acting talents, I still want to be in all my friends movies, so please cast me already.  I need to start putting together a reel.  Oscar or bust motherfucker.

The Scene Episode 2 from trevz on Vimeo.

So I have managed to get on the press list for the WIRED store for whatever reason so I decided to check out another one of their parties.  I figured it would be good content for the Village Voice.  The event has something to do with global climate change, Kofi Annan and male models, but I am too tired to figure out how all that goes together.  Hopefully this link can explain some of it. I tend to be pretty interested in things without vowels.

Anyway, model Jamie Burke’s band Delilah played as did Theophilus London and Dan Black.  Mark Ronson supposedly DJ’d but apparently showing up two hours late for a 3 hour party was a mistake on my part.  I am actually pretty into Theo London after seeing him twice now (here’s pics from last time) and Delilah was not as bad as you would expect from a band fronted by a male model.

The publicists gave me a list of celebrities that RSVP’d several of which I know personally.  I made some inquires and found out they never actually RSVP’d but I guess convincing press to show up to your events is what publicists do. Not that I am killing myself to shoot celebs anyway, but it makes the Voice happy to get galleries like that. One celeb that did show up trumps pretty much everyone they had on their list. Abel fucking Ferarra.  If you don’t know anything about him, look him up.  He is pretty much the quintessential New Yorker and one of the least apologetic directors of all time. When he found out that the equally unapologetic Werner Herzog was remaking Bad Lieutenant he told him he could “die in Hell”. Getting to meet him was an honor and makes taking photos reality show stars feel even more empty than it actually is.

I didn’t shoot a ton of pictures from the night because aside from showing up late I spent a lot of time watching Ease Da Man harass models, put Mishka stickers on everyone/everything and shove as many CK One samples into his pockets as humanly possible. I also spent as much time as possible flirting with a rad cocktail waitress who mildly resembled Sasha Grey (The picture of her holding olives does not do her justice, but it is really funny). All and all despite a severe lack of sleep and a mild lack of things to take photos of I had a pretty good time, and I am pretty sure everyone else did since the place was still packed at 1030 when they started kicking everyone out.

Anyway, if you want to check out the pictures from the WIRED Tck Tck Tck party click here.

So normally I wouldn’t just copy and paste a press release, but I am on vacation and this is important. I know most of the readers of this site aren’t from Philly, but one of my favorite establishments is facing some problems and they are staging a series of events to reopen. If you are a fan of film or music or culture you could think about donating, even if you might never get a chance to visit. If you live in Philly you should do everything in your power to make it out to one of these events. The show tonight seems completely insane. Click below to read the press release.

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