An Introduction to You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory

Note: In April, I directed my senior thesis film, titled You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, which received an Advanced Production allotment last fall from the Tisch School of the Arts. In order to receive the allotment, I had to pitch my film to Professor Yemane Demissie and the class in November. The first part of this blog entry is comprised of my pitch for the Advanced Production Workshop class, and the second part is comprised of text from my IndieGoGo campaign to fund the film (which was launched in February).

You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory Promo Video from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

The Pitch

To say that my Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels is auto-biographical would be somewhat accurate. The specific events in the movie never happened, but the film does kind of reflect how I feel about a lot of things, and maybe it represents some of the things I wish I'd said to my father, who passed away when I was eleven from alcoholism. But interestingly, making that film became a way of understanding him, and by the end of it, I actually feel more sympathy for his character than for the son. So, I don't know, maybe that says something about why we make these films.

My new film, You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory, is about Charlie, a socially inept twenty-six year-old who compulsively confesses every detail of his anti-social behavior to his mother, Hazel, with whom he still lives in Harlem. When his mother asks him to finally move out of her apartment, Charlie is forced to confront his greatest fears – losing his only life witness and living in a world without his only friend and confidante.

In the latest version of my script, there is no mention made of Charlie's father, but the implication is there - if his father so easily disappeared from this world (as an older draft stated, aside from an obituary and a few pictures around the house, you'd never know he existed), what's to stop Charlie from being forgotten completely, too? Particularly when the people around him – his girlfriend, members of his family, friends who abandon him – are, as he puts it, dropping like flies? At the end of the day, the only person who knows his life story, who has been a witness for his entire life, is his mother.

The film directly addresses so many of my fears and anxieties - of dying without being remembered, the need to be liked or to impress in social situations, fear of abandonment, the necessity of archiving and preserving memory, and wanting to have someone by your side who knows your entire journey, from start to finish. Psychologically, I'm not sure I can say where all of these obsessions come from. Maybe it is from losing my father, or watching the size of my family dwindle down to just a few people. At the beginning of this semester, about two months ago, my mom's sister, my aunt, passed away, and suddenly all of my worst fears embedded within this script were reconfirmed. If anything, that’s made me feel even closer to the project, and more certain that it expresses something that truly matters to me.

The way that the character in my film, Charlie, handles the loss around him isn't exactly mature. He's a self-obsessed character if there ever was one - crying out for love and attention from friends by acting like a buffoon, and then, knowing his behavior was unacceptable, confessing his behavior to his mother and expecting forgiveness, never once thinking of her struggles.

Along with the other three films I have made at NYU - With Love, Marty (2011), The Wheels (2012) and Jake the Cinephile (2013) - this new film represents part of a cinematic biography, with each of these movies dealing with a different aspect of my obsessions. These are all stories of alienated outsiders and social pariahs, of young men with strong, rigid moral codes, and the films concern their disenfranchisement with a world that doesn't share their values. You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory is the culmination of so many of these common concerns and themes.

In With Love, Marty, Marty obsesses over a new romantic conquest every few weeks. His desperate behavior drives his friends away, and his obsessive quest for love culminates in an ill-advised trip across the city to profess his love to a young woman he barely knows. She rejects him, and his night ends in disappointment. The obsessive behavior in The Wheels is the father’s unstoppable drinking – it destroys his relationship with his son, but he can’t seem to help it.

Disappointment plays a large role in these movies. In The Wheels, the son is continually let down by his father, and by the film’s end, he has distanced himself from his dad, not allowing himself to get hurt again. In Jake the Cinephile, Jake prefers watching films to having actual relationships with human beings, because the cinema has never disappointed Jake. When Jake tries to start a relationship with a young woman, his obsessive behavior eventually drives the young woman to throw him out on his feet. To Jake, though, this is simply a re-affirmation of what he already suspected – that people are disappointing and unreliable, and the cinema is his only true friend.

More than anything, though, these four pictures all seem to revolve around characters who are forced to come to terms with their unsustainable way of living. These men are pulled away from their comfort zones and pressured by outside forces to change their way of life. More often than not, however, they eventually retreat back to their original behavior.

When I think about why I've written these pieces, I think about the scene in my Advanced film where Charlie, in an act of desperation to form a connection with someone, goes overboard and starts overwhelming his realtor friend, Jim, with his deepest insecurities and fears. Jim becomes very uncomfortable, and withdraws from the conversation. And I think maybe that's what I'm doing with my work - reaching out and hoping that someone will understand me, or at the very least understand how I feel (without alienating them, hopefully, as Charlie alienates Jim in the film).

So what's different about this new film that I want to make in Advanced Production? If this is the same self-obsessed character making the same mistakes, why make another movie about him? This is what I want to address first.

Working with Yemane in this class has made me even more aware of how my movies deal explicitly with resistance to change. This theme has evolved over the four movies in a significant way. In With Love, Marty, I do believe Marty changes, even if only by a small degree. The Wheels, however, is pretty bleak. The father reverts completely back to his original state by the end of the movie – there is no indication that he will get sober. Jake the Cinephile is trickier. Jake loses both the girl and the cinema, and at the end of the movie, he comes face-to-face with himself for the first time. Is that progress? I don’t know.

Now that I’m aware of this reoccurring theme, however, I’m inclined to do something a little different with You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory. At face value, the ending – in which Charlie moves back in with his mother after being asked to move out – would seem to represent a total retreat back to Charlie’s comfort zone. However, I’ve always viewed the ending a little differently – I think that Charlie has learned how much his mother means to him, and how scary it will one day be for him to let go of her. Rather than moving out, however, I believe Charlie deals with this fear by treating his mother differently at the end of the film, with more care and compassion. Yemane and I have talked a lot about Charlie's journey here, and it's become clear that, although you can't expect Charlie to change radically by the end of the film, maybe we can see a character who is ready to listen to his mother.

Maybe it is unhealthy for mother and son to live together for the years to come. But the end of my Advanced film poses the question, what if they truly need each other? What if Charlie learns, over time, to be there for his mother, as his mother is there for him? There’s a strange sense of comfort, if not hope, in that ending, that I don’t believe exists in the other films. With this movie, I want to work toward a new kind of ending – something that’s still true and perhaps a little melancholy, but one that also acknowledges growth and, perhaps, hope.

Inspiration and Style

I'm going to cross over here to inspiration. With all of this talk of guilt, confession, social anxiety and obsessiveness, there's one filmmaker who I really respond to over any others, and that's Martin Scorsese, who is the king of the cinema of loneliness.

The visual style of Mean Streets (1973) is a big influence on the bar scenes in my movie, not only because they are stylistically similar to what I want to achieve, but also because the beginning chapter of Mean Streets was a major influence on me when thinking of how to introduce my character in my script. In one of the opening scenes in Mean Streets, we follow the protagonist, also named Charlie (Harvey Keitel), through the bar and observe his behavior with his friends. In this scene, Scorsese introduces the camera’s subjectivity toward Charlie, and the bar is also used to represent a world of sin. Look at the way Scorsese follows Charlie steadily as he dances through the bar and makes his way onstage to dance with the woman – this is not totally dissimilar to the kind of subjective camera movement I would like to do in my scene, perhaps when my Charlie walks up to the bar and starts ranting to the bartender, doing his Jack Nicholson impression. We also learn quite a bit about Scorsese’s Charlie based on his interaction with his friends – he’s immediately separated from the rest of his friends because he insists on punishing himself, or testing the fires of hell, by holding his finger above an open flame. We then understand that Charlie exists in a more emotionally conflicted universe than the people around him. We’re introduced to both his physical world and his internal, emotional world.

There are two very different worlds in my Advanced film. The first world, of course, is the world of the bar. It will be drenched in red light – open, spacey and a kind of platform where Charlie can go wild with his behavior. The lighting and production design in this scene will emphasize that we’re looking at this bar as a kind of hell for Charlie (very similar to Mean Streets). This is the world of sin, the world of Manhattan – the world away from his mother. The bar stands in contrast to the later scenes in Harlem.

The other world, of course, is that small, cramped Harlem apartment where he lives with his mother. These two environments will stand apart drastically with the film’s production design, as the apartment will be full of furniture, scattered boxes on the floor, and dirty clothes. My hope is for the apartment to convey a real sense of confession, as if Charlie is in a dark confessional booth, defeated by his own behavior. It is almost as if Charlie, squeezed into that Harlem apartment, is forced to come to terms with his inappropriate behavior, whereas the wide-open bar is a playground, where he is free to act like a buffoon and go wild.

The Campaign – The Crew and Logistics

I'm incredibly lucky to get to work with so many people who have been on my creative team for the past three films, as well. Our incredible crew includes producers Erica Rose and Harry Tarre, cinematographer Benjamin Dewey, sound mixer and sound designer Bobb Barito, and production designer David Jaffe – many of whom did outstanding work on my previous films. (Current Jack here – take a look at Ben’s latest cinematography reel below, which features footage from You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory and The Wheels).

Ben Dewey 2013 Cinematography Reel from Benjamin Dewey on Vimeo.

The Impact

We truly believe that if you help us, you will be part of a great and powerful movie. Without the proper financing, however, the film cannot be made. The costs for film equipment, location fees, transportation, and meals for the cast and crew, among many other things, are overwhelming, and outside financial support is critical to the successful production of this film.

As I’ve been making more movies and working with slightly larger budgets, with each new film I think I’m getting closer to achieving what I want in terms of style. For one, I’m trying to incorporate more and more expressive uses of camera movement. Jake the Cinephile is really where I started dipping my toes into a more subjective, expressionistic kind of filmmaking, experimenting with a moving camera – and that’s what I’m hoping to really embrace and expand on with this new film.

My Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels won the Best Student Film award at the 2012 Metropolitan Film Festival of New York, and was an Official Selection of the 2012 Coney Island Film Festival. The film also received high praise from professors at the Tisch School of the Arts. My previous film, With Love, Marty, was an Official Selection of The 2011 Big Apple Film Festival, the 2012 World Music and Independent Film Festival in Washington, D.C., and the Emerging Filmmaker’s Series in Rochester, NY.

We already have an incredible ensemble of actors line up to star in the film, including Mike Wesolowski, who will play Charlie. Mike is a senior in the Atlantic Acting School at the Tisch School of the Arts, currently studying acting under Alec Baldwin. Mary Goggin, an extremely talented actress who has acted in films such as Little Children (2006), will be playing Hazel.

What We Need & What You Get

We need your help. As you can imagine, as a senior thesis film, the scope of the picture is far-reaching. We truly want this to be a film where New York City itself plays a key character in the story, and so we are shooting in many different locations around the city – including a three-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, a bar in the East Village, a restaurant to double as the Times Square Olive Garden, another restaurant in the West Village, along with several night exteriors in midtown Manhattan and Harlem.

Our budget includes fees for these extraordinary locations, additional equipment rentals, transportation costs, anamorphic camera lenses, and meals for an entire week of shooting. The shoot begins in a little more than one month, and in that time, we need to raise as much money as possible.

As I head into rehearsals with the actors and continue pre-production with my longtime collaborators, I cannot tell you how much I would appreciate it if you would consider contributing to this campaign. We will not be able to make this film without your help. And if you are among those who were so generous to contribute to Jake the Cinephile last summer, I’m so excited to share that film with you in the very near future.

We are working as hard as we can to make this picture a reality by April. Any donation you can make – however small – would be absolutely incredible. Our deadline is quickly approaching, but with your help, we know that we can make this film. On the right, we have listed the perks for contributing to this production. (Current Jack here - thank you so much for reading about my new film, and lastly, please take a look at our wonderful Steadicam operator Patrick Morgan's reel, which includes footage from You Can't Put You Arms Around A Memory):

Patrick Morgan Steadicam Reel Spring 2013 from Patrick Huw Morgan on Vimeo.

Film Festivals - Screening With Love, Marty and The Wheels

Before the new semester starts, I want to write briefly about my experiences with a few film festivals over the past year. I have had the pleasure of screening my last two films - The Wheels and With Love, Marty - theatrically at festivals in New York. Earlier this summer, I received notice that my film The Wheels won the Best Student Film award at the 2012 Metropolitan Film Festival of New York City. The Wheels premiered at the festival on Saturday, July 14th at The Producer's Club Theater on West 44th Street, screening alongside two other films in the final block of the evening. I was very lucky to have some of my collaborators on The Wheels accompany me to the screening, including actor Tom Corbisiero (who played the father in the film), cinematographer Benjamin Dewey and sound designer and mixer Bobb Barito.

Together, we accepted the Best Student Film award, and I participated in a brief Q&A with the audience after the screening (along with the other filmmakers whose work screened with The Wheels). I was so honored to receive this award for the project, and it was fantastic being able to have a "premiere," of sorts, for the movie (although I showed The Wheels alongside a few other student films at a small screening in Tisch earlier this year). If you want to see the full list of winners from the 2012 Metropolitan Film Festival of New York, please click on this link to their official website. If you are interested in seeing the official pictures from the festival (including me accepting the award), please click on this link. I will include some of the pictures from the festival in this post (and other pictures in a later post).

At the same time, my film With Love, Marty was nominated for the Best Student Film Award at the World Music and Independent Film Festival in Washington, D.C. I will not be able to attend the festival, which takes place from August 19th to August 25th, but I am excited for a film I finished over one year ago to still be nominated somewhere! If you want to see the full list of nominees for the World Music and Independent Film Festival, please click on this link to their official website.

Last November, With Love, Marty first premiered as an Official Selection of The 2011 Big Apple Film Festival in New York City. The movie, which was nominated for Best Student Film, screened at Tribeca Cinemas on Thursday, November 3rd in Program 16, along with five other films. In fact, With, Love Marty screened back-to-back with my good friend and roommate Bobb Barito's film Lead Me To The Clouds, for which I served as Assistant Director (the movies were both shot around the same time in April of 2011). It was a bizarre coincidence that our films screened back-to-back, and we had a great time attending the festival together and participating in a brief Q&A after the screening with the audience.

With Love, Marty was a particularly fun festival premiere because not only did Benjamin Dewey and actress Karen McFarlane join me for the screening, but the lead actress, the wonderful Alexis Gay, brought a large group of her friends and family members to the screening, ensuring that With Love, Marty had a large support group in the audience. Before and after the screening, we took some pictures in the cinema alongside the posters for With Love, Marty (designed by the endlessly talented Mr. Dewey). After the festival, the Marty crowd went to Alexis' apartment for post-screening food and drinks. It was an incredibly fun evening, and a wonderful festival experience for both Bobb and me. To check out The Big Apple Film Festival's 2011 Program Guide (including information about With Love, Marty and Lead Me To The Clouds), please visit this link to their website.

With Love, Marty also screened as an Official Selection of the Emerging Filmmakers Series in Rochester, New York last December. Because I was in Austin at the time, I was unable to attend the screening, but I recently came across an online blogger who had some kind words for the film. Read what Jason Olshefsky had to say about the movie by following this link to his blog. Here's a brief quote from his review:

"Starting out was With Love, Marty by Jack Kyser in which Kyser plays the central character: a college-age man desperate for the affection of a specific woman. I found his presentation to be brutally honest from all angles - I know from experience how it is to desperately desire someone, and to resort to honest, direct means that work only to sabotage any possible relationship."

I want to thank all of the great people who made these two movies with me. I'm thrilled to work with so many talented people, many of whom also did outstanding work on Jake the Cinephile just recently. I'm hoping to hear back from some more festivals in the near future, but until then, I wanted to give you a brief rundown of my experience with New York film festivals thus far. Bobb and Ben are similarly sending out their Intermediate Narrative films, Max Ages and Quitting, to many film festivals currently, and I look forward to seeing their pictures premiere at festivals (I had the honor of working as Assistant Director on both of those films, as well as editing Quitting). It's really something else to screen your work for a live audience - unnerving, certainly, but also quite gratifying. Thank you so much to the festivals for screening my work. 

An Introduction to Jake the Cinephile

Note: This summer, I wrote, directed and starred in a new film titled Jake the Cinephile. In a series of new posts, I will describe in great detail the production process of this picture. On July 19th, my IndieGoGo campaign to finance Jake the Cinephile officially ended. Not only did my team and I reach our $3500.00 goal, but - thanks to the enormous generosity of our contributors - we exceeded our goal by more than $500.00! The following is an email I sent out to our extraordinary IndieGoGo contributors a few days after we wrapped shooting: 

Dear Contributors,

Last weekend, my crew and I successfully completed principal photography on Jake the Cinephile. Thanks to your incredible contributions, we were able to have the most wonderful film shoot possible.

Jake the Cinephile Promo Video from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

After a long day of renting out film equipment from several equipment houses on Thursday, July 26th, we began shooting early Friday morning at Tavern on Jane, a terrific West Village restaurant owned by the wonderful Horton Foote, Jr., who very graciously let us shoot in his establishment. After shooting there for five hours, we moved to our cinematographer Benjamin Dewey’s apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn to shoot one of the longer passages of the film, taking place on his apartment stoop and the sidewalk. The actress, the incredibly talented Bethany McHugh, and I shared one of our most important and poignant scenes, and this nighttime exterior accounts for some of the most beautiful footage in the film.

We shot Jake the Cinephile, by the way, on a Red Scarlet camera – one of the finest cameras available – thanks to the generosity of our 1st Assistant Cameraman, Justin Levine, who owns the camera. Ben and I decided to shoot the film with anamorphic lenses, which means the final film will have very wide frames.

On Saturday, one of our gaffers, Jon Annunziata, drove the crew and me up to Beacon, New York in a passenger van, where we were granted permission to shoot in the Beacon Theatre all day, under the supervision of its extraordinarily kind owner, Mr. Jim Brady. Our Assistant Director, Mike Cheslik, drove our equipment up separately with Ben, and we commenced shooting in the afternoon all the way into the late of night in the cinema. The footage from the theater shoot is quite fantastic – not only did the Beacon Theatre provide us with some outstanding production value, we were able to pull off some impressive camera movement in the space (and these scenes also allowed many of our crew members, including Mike, Jon, producer Erica Rose, gaffer Alexander Fofonoff and boom operator Charlie Rivera to make cameos in the movie as unruly cinema patrons). Also, actor Tom Corbisiero, who starred in my Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels, and actress Karen Mcfarlane, who starred in my film With Love, Marty, both joined us in Beacon for the shoot, and they did extraordinary work as even more obnoxious cinema patrons.

Because a large skylight overlooks the Beacon Theatre stage (and it is nearly impossible to block out the light with a tarp, as we did not have roof access), Ben and our G&E department ingeniously constructed a forty-foot tall, forty-foot wide silk on the stage with outrageously tall pipes that successfully blocked out the light for our entire day of shooting (until night set in) – you’d have to see this thing to believe it. After wrapping shooting for the day, the owner presented me with a souvenir from the theater – an original, large marquee letter (K, for Kyser) from when the Beacon first opened as a cinema in the 1930s (before then, it was an opera house that first began operating in the late 1800s).

After getting home late Saturday night, we set up early the next morning in my Lower East Side apartment for the most intense day of shooting yet – the ten-page climatic scene that ends the movie. This was a difficult performance day for both Bethany and me, as the scene gets fairly intense, and we had to run the oftentimes brutal and uncomfortable scene an endless number of times. Luckily, our art director, Madeline Wall, had already completed the outstanding production design in my apartment (including putting up wallpaper, re-decorating our bookshelves and kitchen area, and changing the look of the apartment entirely) the week before shooting began. This scene really makes the movie, and although it was a physically exhausting scene (I admit to losing my voice completely by the end of the shoot), it was an exhilarating thing to film, and I couldn’t be more proud of the work we did.

Throughout the shoot, producers Harry Tarre and Erica Rose (as well as Line Producer Liz DeBold) provided us with nourishing food and water at all times, and Mike ran our set with more energy and efficiency than I’ve ever seen from an Assistant Director (which was essential, given that I was both directing and acting in the film). It’s also worth mentioning that Mike drove our Budget Van with all of our equipment the entire weekend – I cannot thank him enough for that. Both Bethany and I received feedback and acting advice constantly from script supervisor Nicole Cobb, who accompanied me to many rehearsals and served as a back-up director and reinforcer of performance notes. And my roommate and good friend Bobb Barito was our sound mixer, and I feel so lucky to continue my collaboration with him (he’s well-known as one of the best sound designers at our school).

If you are friends with me on Facebook, be sure to check out some of our set photographs that I have posted in an album (taken by our set photographer and media manager Jeremy Keller, who backed up our camera cards of footage every day on several hard drives). This will give you an inside look behind-the-scenes of our massive shoot. In the coming weeks, I will post stills from the actual film. Ben and I are in the process of un-squeezing all of our footage at the Tisch School of the Arts Post-Production Center (which essentially means converting the footage to the right anamorphic settings). I hope you’ll find that the movie looks as extremely professional as I do – because of your generosity, we were able to shoot with state-of-the-art film equipment, obtain incredible locations, and provide for a crew that nearly exceeded twenty people at one time. In short, I have you to thank for the professionalism of this film.

I also want to thank the entire crew of Jake the Cinephile – I can’t begin to express my gratitude to Bethany and the outstanding crew of geniuses, including Ben, Mike, Erica, Harry, Bobb, Nicole, Justin, Madeline, Jon, Nicholas Giuricich, Tomson Tee, Alex, Jeremy, Liz, Dennis Dembeck, Tom and Karen. I’m so honored to work with these brilliant and talented individuals.

IndieGoGo will only let me post one image per update, and it’s incredibly tough to just show three pictures from our extraordinary shooting weekend. They don’t represent even one-eighteenth of the things you made possible with your contributions! I do not know how to begin thanking all of you for your enormous kindness and support in making this movie possible. I look forward to keeping you updated with the progress of Jake the Cinephile, as we finish shooting pick-up material this upcoming week and head into post-production on the film. Thank you so much for believing in me and this project.

Sincerely,

Jack Kyser

You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory

I had the most incredible spring semester interning at Sikelia Productions, and I am so excited to continue working there over the summer for my lifetime hero, Martin Scorsese - not to mention his legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and the rest of the gracious and wonderful people at the office. After heading back to Austin for a few days in late May, I am now back in New York City and currently jumping into pre-production on my next film, which I am planning to shoot in late July.

Here's a quick wrap-up of my spring semester, leading into my plans for an exciting and productive summer. In mid-April, my roommate Bobb Barito and I signed a lease on our first-ever apartment in New York City, along with our friend Adam Boese. We are now the proud occupants of an excellent three-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side - I have included a few pictures of my room throughout this post. Over the summer, in addition to working three days a week as an intern at Sikelia Productions, I will also continue working as a Technical Assistant at Tisch's Post-Production Center.

This past Spring Break, I was lucky enough to have two of my best friends from Austin High School - Cora Walters, who is currently attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon; and Bolton Eckert, who just recently started studying at the Art Institute of Los Angeles - visit me in New York City. It was excellent having them both as guests. Bolton, Bobb and I celebrated Saint Patrick's Day at Shades of Green Pub & Restaurant, where we somehow became fast friends with a very friendly Irish family, as well as members of the Irish rock band The Saw Doctors, who were just returning from a concert. It was great fun.

There are two movies that I've seen this year that I believe deserve extraordinary praise. Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom – the director’s first film since the should-have-been-Oscar-winning animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) – is the movie event of the summer. This is a poignant and hilarious picture, and on a personal level, I haven’t been so deeply affected by one of Anderson’s films since The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), one of the last films I saw with my father before he passed away. In a New England community in the 1960s, twelve year-old outcasts Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman) run away from home together, convinced beyond any doubt that they are in love (once on the adventure, they are aided by Sam’s considerable skills as a Khaki Scout). Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand and Harvey Keitel are among the adults and parents leading a search-and-rescue mission to find Sam and Suzy. Willis and Norton, in particular, do some of their best work in years.

In this film, Anderson beautifully expresses both the joy and melancholy of first love. Even though Moonrise Kingdom does end on a positive note, there’s still a hint of a dissatisfied adulthood waiting for our protagonists by the end of their adventure. Whether Suzy and Sam end up together in the long run is irrelevant – their love will never feel as real and as powerful as it does in their memory. Their utopian ‘moonrise kingdom’ is something the adults have long since abandoned, and soon enough, it will exist only in Suzy and Sam’s memories. Moonrise Kingdom is the only movie I’ve seen this year where a packed audience erupted in applause when the film ended. I would have joined them, but I was busy wiping tears from my eyes. After seeing the film, I got a little wild at Regal Union Square's Rock of Ages booth - here's a link to a truly astonishing video.

On Saturday, April 28th, I saw Bernie, the new film from Austin's own Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunset), at the Angelika Film Center. In this endlessly funny and sometimes achingly sad true story of small-town murder, actual locals from Carthage, Texas recount the tale of Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), a beloved small-town mortician on trial for murdering a disliked elderly woman (Shirley MacLaine). East Texas is an area that hasn't received much cinematic attention (and an area that I hold close to my heart, having spent quite a bit of my childhood in Hallsville and Longview), and it comes to vivid life as a loving and warped environment in Linklater’s film.

After the screening, Linklater held a Q&A with the audience. I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Linklater both during the Q&A and after the screening, and he remains the quintessential Texas filmmaker. We talked briefly about East Texas, Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, and when I first met him back in 2004 at the Criterion DVD signing of his film Slacker (1991) at Austin's Waterloo Video (see the comparison picture to the right, of Linklater and me through the years). He is such a nice person, and one of the best filmmakers out there. Bernie, which also features career-best performances from Black and Matthew McConaughey, is a testament to Linklater’s enduring genius.

Earlier in April, I served as Assistant Director for my friend Jordan Fein's Intermediate Narrative film White Carpet. It was one of the most ambitious film sets on which I've had the privilege of working - after four days of shooting in Sleepy Hollow, New York, the entire crew was exhausted, but we were proud to have worked so hard on a large-scale student film. In early May, I also served as Assistant Director for a music video directed by my friend Ben Dewey.

The Tisch Dean's Scholars program once again provided me with some extraordinary opportunities this semester. In addition to seeing the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (which I wrote about in my last blog entry), we toured the outstanding Harlem School of the Arts in late March, and for our final event of the semester, we went bowling at Bowlmor Lanes on University Place. As always, I was surrounded by incredible students and the most supportive professors and administrators at Tisch.

On Friday, June 1st, I was lucky enough to see Once on Broadway, the new musical based on the 2007 film. Once is nominated for eleven Tony Awards, and I'd say it deserves just about every one of them. The play manages to capture both the intimacy of the film (which is essentially a two-person movie) while effortlessly transitioning into rousing musical numbers by a talented ensemble of musicians-actors-dancers.

As far as classes are concerned, it was quite a whirlwind to finish everything by mid-May. For my last Developing the Screenplay class, I read the first fifty pages of my feature screenplay in class, and I wrote two final essays for my History of Modern Ireland and Introduction to Performance Studies courses. Finally, for my Intermediate Editing Workshop class, I finished editing my friend Ben Dewey's Intermediate Narrative film Quitting. Now, whether I like it or not, I have to start referring to myself as a senior.

I am very sad to report that the Tisch School of the Arts' Steenbeck Lab, where for decades film students have edited their 16MM Sight and Sound: Film projects by hand, has been dismantled, to be replaced by a computer lab for digital editing in the fall. As far as I know, Intermediate and Advanced Production students will still have access to film equipment for their projects, but all future sophomore classes will not have the opportunity to shoot on black-and-white 16MM film and then edit their pictures by hand, as students have done for over forty years. NYU was one of the last film schools to actively use Steenbecks, and it was only a matter of time before the powers-that-be decided that the machines be discontinued. Despite the fact that most of my larger projects have been shot digitally (mainly for cost reasons), I am a firm believer in the power and importance of film, and my heart sinks when I now pass that eerily empty Steenbeck room. Learning how to use that machine and edit five of my own black-and-white Sight and Sound: Film projects on the Steenbeck was one of the most valuable things I've learned in film school, and I feel fortunate to have been a part of the second-to-last class to take this extraordinary course in its purest form. In honor of the Steenbeck machines, here's my favorite of the five films I made in Sight and Sound: Film, Heart of Gold - shot on 16MM and edited by hand on a Steenbeck.


Heart of Gold from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

Although Moonrise Kingdom and Bernie stand above the rest of this year's theatrical releases, there have been a few other excellent pictures. Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea has the sad power of a fading memory, with a rich, melancholic atmosphere and an extraordinary performance from Rachel Weisz. Mark and Jay Duplass' Jeff, Who Lives at Home doesn't have a cynical bone in its body - the performances are so engaging, the actors so likable and the writing so good, that it's hard to imagine the film not winning someone over. Joss Whedon's The Avengers is a summer superhero thrill-ride with outstanding performances from two of the best working actors, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. (there was a certain satisfaction in seeing a mini-reunion between the two actors, after their memorable pairing in David Fincher's masterpiece Zodiac). Nicholas Stoller's The Five-Year Engagement is a very honest and heartfelt romantic comedy, and another home-run for Stoller, Jason Segel and Judd Apatow (I particularly enjoyed the steady stream of Van Morrison tunes).

In addition, I saw the restoration of Jean Renoir's masterpiece Grand Illusion (1937) at Film Forum this week, and it was an absolutely astonishing print of the picture (as I was heading out of Film Forum, John Turturro and his family were heading in to see Django). And a recent viewing of Elia Kazan's devastatingly powerful and hauntingly beautiful East of Eden (1955) confirmed that, much like John Steinbeck's novel of the same name, the film is a kind of reflection of my values and beliefs as a person.