Brewer Wrapping MTV Drama; Online Debut Next Year
By John Beifuss
Shooting is expected to wrap Sunday on “$5 Cover,” the Memphis music-inspired Web series created by writer-director Craig Brewer for MTV New Media.
The 15-episode program is expected to debut online early next year.
Shot on a relatively low budget of about $400,000 with essentially an all-Memphis cast and crew, “$5 Cover” chronicles the interconnected romantic and artistic lives of several struggling characters in Midtown Memphis. Each episode will showcase a performance by a notable local musician, including Amy LaVere, Harlan T. Bobo and Kate Crowder . Most of the musicians also act in the series, which MTV plans to launch with much hoopla to expand its online audience.
Shooting began July 17. The all-star lineup of local filmmakers working on the project includes Morgan Jon Fox, assistant director, and John Michael McCarthy, script supervisor, who characterizes “$5 Cover” as “‘Days of Our Lives’ meets ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.’”
‘Team’ out on DVD
Memphis director Kentucker Audley’s “Team Picture,” a modest and much-praised movie about an elusive young Cooper-Young resident who chooses to resist rather than confront the pressures of job, family, romance and school, makes its DVD debut Tuesday on the Benten Films label.
List-priced at $21.95, the DVD is available through such sites as Amazon.com or directly from Benten at bentenfilms.com.
It also will be on sale at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, 387 Perkins Ext. in Laurelwood, and Cats Music, 1569 Union.
Winner of the Best Narrative Feature award in the “Hometowner” competition of the 2007 Indie Memphis Film Festival, “Team Picture” was named one of the 20 best films of the year by The Commercial Appeal .
The movie also won praise from critics in Boston, Chicago and New York, and Audley was named to Filmmaker Magazine’s annual list of “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”
For a movie produced on an almost nonexistent budget of about $1,500, the “Team Picture” DVD seems impressively lavish.
The disc will include a commentary track by Audley and co-star Timothy Morton, deleted scenes, a new epilogue to the film, music performances by Audley and Morton and other bonus features.
An excuse to snoop at work
If you are reading this, you are invited to send a photograph of your desk, office or work environment to Robert Snowden, a Memphis- born artist now in New York who is curating an exhibit of workplace pictures titled “While You Were Working” that will be displayed in an “online gallery” and, eventually, in shows in New York and Chicago.
“Everything is fair game as long as it comes from an office,” said Snowden, who said he is interested in those “forgotten semipublic and semiprivate spaces that people inhabit every day.”
He said he hopes people will “revisit” their own belongings, “snoop” in their neighbor’s cubicle, “open old cabinets, roam the hallways,’ and “discover strange relics, personal items, food, photographs, Post-it Note and office trinkets.”
E-mail scanned photos or jpeg images to springbreakneedsyou@ gmail.com.
Art stars
The first ArtsMemphisTV “webisodes” – short films featuring interviews and behind-the-scenes visits with people in the local arts community as they prepare stage plays, ballet performances, gallery exhibitions and so on – launched this week on ArtsMemphis.org.
The Web site is a project of ArtsMemphis, the chief fundraising organization for the arts in the Memphis area.
The short films that will be featured on ArtsMemphisTV are the creations of Christopher Reyes and Sarah Fleming of Live From Memphis (which has its own arts Web site loaded with short films and music videos at LiveFromMemphis.com).
This week’s first ArtsMemphisTV episodes take viewers behind the scenes at Theatre Memphis during preparations for the musical “Oklahoma!”
Future programs will focus on the National Ornamental Metal Museum, the Indie Memphis Film Festival, the Hattiloo Theatre, Ballet Memphis and Opera Memphis, among other subjects.
– John Beifuss: 529-2394
Originally published by John Beifuss .
(c) 2008 Commercial Appeal, The. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.