Short Cuts

Mixed Nuts, Cannes-d, & Otherwise Dept.: It’s mid-May, baby, which around here means Austinites are stuck under that semiannual pall of Mexican agricultural fire-smoke (seriously, you’ve got to worry when the haze is thick enough to bend the sunsets at the Oasis into something resembling a giant purple mushroom cloud). On the film front, however, it means it’s time for the 56th annual Cannes Film Festival on the gorgeous French Riviera, where the only smoke you’re liable to be choking on are the plumes emanating from Troma Team‘s The Toxic Avenger and the occasional puffery from Nicholas Cage‘s cigar. You may remember a couple fests back when local filmmaker Bob Ray (Rock Opera) and the gang at NoDance Film Fest dropped in on the Frenchies’ film festival and ended up getting in a street fight with some of the locals. Don’t expect that to happen this year — Ray, busy with his roller derby documentary, won’t be in attendance. One Austinite who will be making the rounds of the most celebrated film festival on the planet, however, is University of Texas RTF legend-in-the-making Helen Lee, whose film Sophie has been chosen by Kodak to be part of their 2003 Emerging Filmmakers Showcase at Cannes. Twenty-two filmmakers from across the globe have been selected to take part in the event, which “is designed to help young filmmakers bridge the gap between the completion of their formal education and the realization of their dream,” according to one John Mason, the director of Kodak’s Student Filmmaker Program. Our congratulations go out to Lee — drop by the Riviera Theatre at 4pm on May 19 if you happen to be floating around Cannes with a few hours to spare… Speed kills, but only if you let him drive the bus: Occasional Austinite and the focus of Richard Linklater‘s short film “Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor,” Timothy “Speed” Levitch (he of the freakishly original mindset, flowing robes, and Jerm Pollet fixation) snared a mention in the New York Post‘s Page Six last Thursday, thanks to a typically excitable evening following the TriBeCa Film Festival‘s screening of “Dance Floor.” According to the report, Levitch “invited 130 guests including Julie Taymor, Susan Sontag” and others aboard a double-decker bus for an impromptu rendition of his justly famed New York City tourspiel. The catch this time out (apart from having Sontag and Taymor on the same bus together) came in the form of a sudden rainstorm which apparently drenched the upper-deck passengers and the liberal consumption of bottles of Glenfiddich (“which came with a Dean & DeLuca box dinner” according to the report). As Trixie would say, “Go, Speed, go!”… Congrats also to Austin filmmaker Charles Burmeister, who nabbed a Special Jury Prize at the first annual Independent Film Festival of Boston last Saturday evening for his documentary on Gerry Van King, the King of Sixth St. King, the funkadelic musician with the purple crown who can frequently be found outside of Jazz on Sixth Street any given weekend evening, has had more than his share of troubles with the overzealous APD boys in blue of late, which makes Burmeister’s win (at the film’s debut screening, no less) doubly cool. Now, Mr. Burmeister, how do we get to see a copy of the finished doc around Austin? Inquiring minds wanna know, man — it’s been two years since we saw that rough-cut.

This article appears in May 16 • 2003.