Matt Dentler offers exciting news: the Jeffrey Tambor Acting Workshop, which began as a panel at SXSW featuring the sometime George Bluth, Greta Gerwig and Kent Osbourne, is becoming an actual acting workshop at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Extra layer of excitement: The Playhouse is the very place where Your Blogger was part of a young adults theater company in the early 1990s. There might even be a picture of her at age 13, in heavy stage makeup, on the premises. Be afraid.
Regardless, the class begins June 2nd, and it’s open to the public. Matt has details on how to sign up at his blog, where he also points to the above clip from the SXSW version…courtesy of the YouTube auteur who brought us Howl (For Lindsay Lohan).
We’ve spent the past three weeks previewing films that are going to be premiering at SXSW, but the festival also has a conference component, with four days packed full of panels. Karina (that’s me) will be speaking on the Blogs, Buzz and Buddy lists panel on Sunday at 3:30. I’ll also be moderating a panel at 1pm on Monday called Deal or No Deal: The Road to Self-Distribution.
As far as panels that don’t actually require me to operate a microphone are concerned, I’m really excited about the Jeffrey Tambor Acting Workshop. Yes, George (and Oscar) Bluth himself is going to let us in on his “process.” Even cooler, he’s gonna do it by coaching Hannah Takes the Stairs stars Greta Gerwig and Kent Osbourne through a reading of an excerpt of John Patrick Shanley’s The Dreamer Examines His Pillow. Yes, seriously. The magic happens at 1pm on Sunday.
There are tons of other great events going on and no one can attend them all, but after the jump you’ll find a list of a few I have my eye on. If you’re on a panel or have panels you’re particularly excited about, let us know in the comments.
At Slackerwood, Jette Kernion fills in the back story on this cryptic post by Matt Dentler, in which the SXSW Film Festival director teased details of “a production that will make its debut at SXSW 2008.”
If you attended SXSW Film Festival in 2002 — or if the culty word-of-mouth reached you later — you may have heard about the Burger Hut film-fest house ads that year. You know how film-fest house ads can often be incredibly lame and annoying, especially if you have to watch them before 15 or more movies in a week? Apparently that didn’t happen with the goofy Burger Hut ads. I wasn’t there in 2002 and I haven’t tried to watch the ads 15 times in a week, so I can’t vouch for this personally, but word gets around. People are very nostalgic about the Burger Hut.
The Burger Hut promos were co-written by and starred Kent Osbourne, recently of Hannah Takes the Stairs fame, and even more recently pictured in Burger Hut-character on that Dentler blog post. You can watch one of the old promos above, and the rest on YouTube; for new Burger Hut, it looks like you’ll have wait until SXSW 2008.
Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg recently married Kris Williams, his girlfriend of 7-plus years, who has appeared in/collaborated on most of Joe’s projects, and who is a filmmaker in her own right. Kent Osbourne, who occupies one corner of the love triangle that forms the meat of Hannah, has produced a video in three parts documenting the festivities. If you’re familiar with this whole “mumblecore” crowd, you’ll see a lot of familiar faces: Greta Gerwig, Kevin Bewersdorf, Ry Russo-Young, etc. SXSW impressario Matt Dentler posted just the third part on his blog; I’ll post the second part here, because the drawing of Kris and Joe captioned “this is the only relationship that should ever exist” is so cute that it brought tears to my eyes. Also, I love the stuff with the ducks.
We’ve spent the past three weeks previewing films that are going to be premiering at SXSW, but the festival also has a conference component, with four days packed full of panels. Karina (that’s me) will be speaking on the Blogs, Buzz and Buddy lists panel on Sunday at 3:30. I’ll also be moderating a panel at 1pm on Monday called Deal or No Deal: The Road to Self-Distribution.
