ME AND ORSON WELLES

November 11, 1937… exactly 72 years before our Festival's opening night, Orson Welles opened his production of Julius Caesar on Broadway. The Mercury Theatre show had begun rehearsals only a month earlier, but the theatrical wunderkind (four years before he would become cinema's wunderkind with Citizen Kane) had no doubt that its radical stagecraft would shake the foundations of American theater. Richard Linklater, Texas's leading maverick filmmaker, here confronts the ultimate maverick director, Welles, as filtered through Robert Kaplow's novel Me and Orson Welles. Playing the "me" of the title is none other than Zac Efron, graduating from teen heartthrob to serious actor, and displaying impressive range. Efron plays Richard Samuels, a young actor drawn into Welles's production and orbit. There he finds, and is enraptured by, Welles's Girl Friday, Sonja (Claire Danes). Sonja, like us, however, is in the thrall of the great director, played by the amazing Christian McKay. McKay was recruited for this role based on his acclaimed theatrical performance as Welles in the one-man show Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles. John Foote writes in the Oscar blog In Contention: "When McKay appears on screen for the first time, all eyes go to him and never leave; it is as though Welles has stepped out of a time machine," and Todd McCarthy of Variety calls McKay's "extraordinary impersonation... the indisputable highlight of Me and Orson Welles."

FEATURED GUEST

RICHARD LINKLATER

Born in Houston, Richard Linklater took the love of film culture he had developed here to Austin, where, in 1985, he founded the Austin Film Society. His ambition was to not only show but also make great films. His film Slacker became one of the seminal American independent features of the early '90s, as audiences found themselves gripped by a plotless, starless, meandering portrait of a college town's characters that was provocative and thoroughly entertaining. Linklater continued to both challenge and charm audiences with the densely talky Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), the experimental animation of Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), and the complex intertwining of stories in Fast Food Nation (2006). Among his other feature credits are Dazed and Confused (1993), SubUrbia (1997), The Newton Boys (1998), Tape (2001), and The School of Rock (2003).

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

Me and Orson Welles
8:00 PM  |   MFAH, Houston TX

PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL ‘PUSH' BY SAPPHIRE

Since its world premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where it won three awards (including the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award), Precious: Based on the Novel ‘PUSH' by Sapphire confounded notions of what an "urban film" is, touching people of all backgrounds with its dramatic, vividly realized story of a Harlem teenager who overcomes tremendous obstacles to discover her own worth, beauty and potential. Precious is remarkable both for what it is—a film whose heroine is a dark-skinned, plus-size young woman in 1987 Harlem; and for what it is not—a static, standard-issue treatise on the disadvantaged. Directed with passion and imagination by Lee Daniels, written with elegant economy by Geoffrey Fletcher, and brilliantly performed by a fearless ensemble cast, Precious is the story of Claireece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a sixteen-year-old African American girl born into a life no one would want. She's pregnant for the second time by her absent father; at home, she must wait hand and foot on her mother (Mo'Nique), a poisonously angry woman. Yet beneath her impassive expression, Precious is a watchful, curious young woman with an inchoate but unshakeable sense that other possibilities exist for her. In the literacy workshop taught by the patient yet firm Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), Precious begins a journey that will lead her from powerlessness to self-determination.

Precious is filmmaker Lee Daniels's second directorial effort, but it is a film he has wanted to make since he first read Sapphire's novel, which was published in June 1996. Though the film world came knocking, Sapphire declined to entertain offers. A poet who performed her work in various venues, she had lived in Harlem for a decade and spent eight years teaching reading and writing to teenagers and adults in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Push was her first novel, and it reflected what she observed and experienced during those years. But Daniels's perseverance and his impressive work as producer of Monster's Ball and director of Shadowboxer eventually won her over: "Lee had a vision for adapting Push, and he also had the ability to put that vision in motion." As the film claimed its second Audience Award, this time at the Toronto Film Festival in September, there was no doubt that the vision had been realized and would affect a global audience powerfully.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11

Precious: Based On The Novel ‘Push' By Sapphire
7:00 PM  |  Angelika Film Center, Houston TX