After having the ‘World Premiere’ of How To Be Louise at the Sundance Festival (trailer below), I flew from Salt Lake City to Newark to pick up one year-old Frank at my parents in New Jersey.
(2:07) trailer for How To Be Louise starring Lea Floden as Louise and Bruce McCarty
On arriving at my parents, guess who didn’t recognize me? Guess who wouldn’t even look at me? Choking back tears, I wallowed in heartbreak until my mother suggested that I pull myself together.
Frank and I headed back to Brooklyn to join Mr. Green who had arrived from Japan to meet with students in his lab and to take over with Frank. Having schooled Mr. Green on what he needed to know, I set off for our European Premiere. (Premieres are a very big deal in the world of film festivals.)
Having never been to Berlin, I didn’t know what to expect but my hopes were high from what I knew from Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Marlene Dietrich, the Bauhaus and Max Beckmann. I was not disappointed.
The Departure by Max Beckmann
In spite of it being a bitterly cold February with the usual icy streets and sidewalks, the mood of the city was jubilant: the Berlin Wall had come down just two months earlier. Lea Floden and I stayed in a small hotel and had schedules packed from morning til night. We went to a festival party in a high-ceilinged room hardly bigger than an over-sized living room. The draw was neither movie stars or film producers, but rather the Soviet Army marching band in full uniform. They played Swing Era music with lots of brass and I can't find the words to describe how explosive, how loud and incredibly exciting it was. It was like the music was coming from inside my body.
And then there was Berlin. On one of my forays into the streets around the festival, I came upon a pharmacist who seemed to be trapped in the 14th century. The pharmacy had large windows through which I could see that it was a jewel box of exquisitely functional wood work - shelves, drawers, cabinets and mirrors. But it was the pharmacist himself who made my jaw drop. He wore a perfect white lab coat and his white hair was cut in an impeccable Prince Valiant bob with a page boy curl. This vision eventually inspired Everett Quinton’s character Ethelred’s hair in Season 3 of The Louise Log.
Everett Quinton in the Prince Valiant wig - (We didn't have the budget for the curl of a pageboy.)
Lea and I met up with some other filmmakers who were taking a trip over into what had been behind the Iron Curtain ninety days earlier. The drab and barren-looking architecture and the looks on the faces of the people in East Berlin were in striking contrast with the opulent and free feeling of the western part of the city. In the guarded way the East Berliners looked around (or didn’t look around} while sitting on a bus or walking past us on the street, it was clear that decades of a repressive regime had affected them.
I spent most of my time in Berlin at the festival, walking in one direction or the other of a very long hallway in the building which housed The Market. It was easy to meet new people and find old friends. Our friend and long-time champion Lynda Hansen who organized American Independents in Berlin was there and we met Josef Wutz, a producer and actor and many others I've lost touch with.
Like everyone, we had a few screenings set up at The Market. As you might expect, The Market is where the business happens in modest screening rooms for small groups of people in the industry. A very nice bonus of Market screenings was the Sign-In List which was handed to the filmmaker after the audience had been seated. I was thrilled to see that a number of film festival directors were at our first screening, including Richard Pena of the New York Film Festival. My first short had screened at New York before he was the director and I held my breath imagining that my first feature might be invited too.
Less than ten minutes into the screening, the bulb in the projector burst. Eventually the lights came up. Some time later, a technician poked his head in and asked for our patience in several languages. There was complete silence in the room. I was in the back row chewing off my nails. After a few more minutes, Richard Pena got up and left.
(to be continued)
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