Above is a still of a scene in "City Island" in which Vince (Andy Garcia) has just come from an audition for a part in the movie and is telling Molly (Emily Mortimer) about the whole rather surprising experience.
We shot this scene in the West Bank Cafe on West 42nd Street in New York City. The restaurant is a haven for actors--the employed ones sit at the bar and tables, the unemployed ones work as waiters--and was in fact the original location I'd written into the first draft script. (This tends to be unusual--whatever real places one writes into a script are somehow always either unavailable, overpriced or closed by the time you make the film). Enjoy the still and don't forget to click to enlarge.
Continuing my shameless plugging habit, here's a very nice review by Ken Francklin of my imminently to-be-released on DVD documentary, "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris. The movie is available on Amazon--the street date is 3/31. And here's another fine write up on the film which appears to have something to do with it screening in Nova Scotia . One of the rare joys to be savored in this business-of-show is making a film that receives near unanimous praise (as has "Tis Autumn") only to find, buried in the muck, the one isolated pan. Since it's always been my theory that for every movie ever made there is one person in the world who thinks it's the greatest movie ever made and one person in the world who thinks it's the worst movie ever made, I'm more amused at how correct my theory is then hurt by the review. In the case of "Tis Autumn", the dissenting opinion comes from a chap from Vancouver who posted his comments on imdb.com under the euphonious screen name of "Spuzzlightyear". Click here to read his moronic review, posted back in late 2006. Then watch the film and feel free to add your comments to the imdb message board of the movie which can be found here.
And now, continuing with our jazz piano themed clip selection from earlier this week, here's my second favorite pianist ever, the supremely majestically grandiosely brilliant Earl "Fatha" Hines. These two clips are from a jazz piano workshop he apparently conducted in Berlin in 1965. Part one is Earl playing "Memories Of You" by Eubie Blake. In part two he performs Harold Arlen's "I've Got The World On A String". Dig the ease with which he appears to sync himself into the music, the joy of the art that seems to be emanating from the man. He was in his mid-sixties here, had been playing professionally since the late 'teens and early twenties and would go on performing for about another fifteen years--truly a career that spanned the entire history of the music.
