FREE JESSICA! Let Jessica Biel speak! Why has she been silenced like some Gitmo detainee? Why fly up the blonde Los Angeles star of The Illusionist, SIFF's opening night gala feature Thursday, May 25, drag her out onstage at the Paramount—this after we've suffered through Greg Nickels, the sponsor shill-athon, and the usual will-call ticket crush outside—and leave her mutely smiling next to director Neil Burger? You might as well put a bag over the young starlet's head. What good is glamour without empty red-carpet platitudes? Those assembled—dressed up with a vengeance to erase the memory of prom-night pimples—wouldn't even have cared if she'd just lied to us like any good Hollywood trouper. ("It's really great to be here in Seattle! I love this town! And, like, the coffee, too!") Or if she'd told the truth. ("Sorry about Stealth. The Illusionist can't be any worse than that stink bomb.") Or if she'd said what most of the near-capacity house probably wanted to hear. ("I'm pleased to announce we're making an R-rated movie version of 7th Heaven!")
Again the post-screening gala was held in an annex of the sky-blotting architectural abomination that is the Washington State Trade and Convention Center—the possible future home of MoHaI (Museum of History and Industry). All the SIFF staffers with their radio headsets somehow made me think of the Department of Homeland Security. Despite the endless food and drink lines, and with the addition of a pretty good DJ spinning oldies (sorry, no live music this year), the MoHaI space begs to be made into a nightclub when it's not sitting empty the other 364 days of the year. It's basically a gigantic loft; you could play the music as loud as you want in that Pine Street no-man's-land without upsetting the neighbors, but those windows have to be able to open to let in some fresh air.
This year's main party innovation seemed to be the red plastic wristbands worn to permit one to imbibe the sponsors' hooch. (On which subject, what the hell is wrong with you people? Applauding a gin commercial shown before the Paramount festivities? It's a commercial, folks, just like at the multiplex or on TV back home. You should be booing, not clapping. At least check your BlackBerry for e-mails and look impatient.) All over Seattle that night, and even on the midnight bus home, I saw tired moviegoers wearing those red bracelets, like they'd come from some kind of emergency drill—their wrists ringed as if from triage. "Nurse, I need 50 mls of Bombay Sapphire Gin, stat!" BRIAN MILLER
Mount Vernon: Tinsel-town
When people say "Hollywood North," they mean Vancouver, B.C. Anyone hoping to build a career in film usually leaves Seattle for there or Los Angeles. But who moves to Mount Vernon, of all places, to make their first movie? Jennifer Shainin, for one, who actually left the Hollywood film biz (where she worked as a title designer) in order to co-direct Apart From That in her hometown. She and her partner/co-director Randy Walker had been collaborating on short film ideas since grad school in California. Fed up with the "jaded" tinsel-town attitude of wanna-be filmmakers, the two rejected your typical indie film scenario of navel-gazing slackers living in the city. "We didn't want to do that," Shainin says. "If you're going to work outside the system, go all the way."
Like 3,000 miles away to Mount Vernon, "not the center of that indie type stuff," where the two moved in 2002 and immediately began writing. "We would each go off and write little scenes," Shainin recalls; to these they added scenes from their own lives, and observations of life in the Skagit Valley—including the Swinomish Indian reservation. Then they dumped the pages on the floor and assembled a script, inspired by the examples of Cassavetes and Jarmusch, that valued character and slice-of-life naturalism over strict plotting.
The result is an ensemble piece, something like Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, with many characters coping with problems large and small. Women at a mortuary beautician's school practice staging an intervention for a friend they presume to be an alcoholic. An adopted kid keeps nagging his banker father about having fired the father of his best friend. An Indian tries to avoid the subject of a friend's imminent death. An old woman tries to seduce the firefighters she calls via false alarms.
Though some roles are filled by professionals, Shainin explains, "We cast for over six months . . . [from] Bellingham all the way down to Seattle. In a way, we cast people who were already those characters." Among them is 78-year-old debutante Alice Ellingson, whom Shainin scouted at a Daughters of Norway meeting. If these first-timers went off script during the film's fall 2004 production, she and Walker let them. If you've already cast in character, ad-libs are in character, too.
Apart From That is also the rare indie that's entirely self-financed. "We were very lucky," Shainin notes. "We had a lot of family support." Her father produced the picture, and her two brothers did the music. (Local composer Christopher Shainin's work is regularly performed in Seattle.) Thinking back to her student and industry days in Hollywood, Shainin remembers her peers' attitude toward their grandly gestating first feature screenplays. It was like "they're waiting for permission" to make a movie, she says. "We didn't wanna wait for someone to tell us we can or we can't." BRIAN MILLER
