Paul Festa's last gasp

I hate to intrude on Socheata's tour, but I couldn't bear the thought of just vanishing from the blog without saying goodbye, as though some horrible disease had come and carried me off midsentence. That was only part of the problem.

Albert Fuller onscreen in Mobile, AL

In fact, the conspiracy against my blog was joined by several agents, disease being just one of them, and if I may say so it was overkill.

Justin Bond as Kiki DuRane onscreen in Mobile, AL

Even if I hadn't been denied Internet access at every turn, and even if I hadn't fallen prey to a numbing demoralization and loss of will facing down my Oh My God deadline, it was certainly enough to have gotten that nasty bug that left me, from Beaufort to Orangeburg to Montgomery through New Orleans (canceling my Mardi Gras) to Baton Rouge to Palm Beach to Mobile, writhing in bed with fevers in a sea of mucus, praying, in my secular-humanist way, for death.

John Cameron Mitchell onscreen in Mobile, AL

So now here I am, midway through someone else's tour, and I've just filed the final draft for the first edition of the book, and the mucus has dried up, and I'm preparing to head to New York for the screening there at St. Bart's, which will double as the book launch and triple as the New York premiere performance of Messiaen's Fantaisie for violin and piano, with my Yale and Juilliard classmate Melvin Chen tinkling the ivories.

Shanti Carson onscreen in Mobile, AL

I can't express how luxurious--almost irresponsible--it feels to be blogging after the nasty, brutish and short deadline of putting that book together, conception Thanksgiving to first edition Feb. 27th.

Ned Stresen-Reuter onscreen in Mobile, AL

And so I hate to waste my last Southern Circuit blog entry complaining about all the things that went wrong on my tour--they were acts of God, for the most part, and clearly she did NOT like my movie.

Elizabeth Povinelli onscreen in Mobile, AL

But amid the viruses and tornadoes there were incomparable moments of human error, such as scheduling my movie to coincide with both the Superbowl (Orangeburg) and Ash Wednesday (uber-Catholic Baton Rouge), and screening my movie at a South Carolina high school for 10th graders without bothering to look at it beforehand (Wayne Koestenbaum: "It also sounds--this is obscene--like being fucked by light. Fucked by light!" "OK THAT'S ENOUGH, THIS SCREENING IS OVER AND NOW WE'RE GOING TO SPEND THE REST OF THE CLASS PERIOD TALKING ABOUT CENSORSHIP.").

Wayne Koestenbaum onscreen in Mobile, AL

Since I know full well you get what you pay for, should I have been surprised that there was a dead pizza in my fridge at the Montgomery airport Motel 6? And I got so much great press that it would be absolutely churlish to point out that the Mobile Vanguard chose to alternate spellings of my name between Festa and Zesta.

Justin Bond as Kiki DuRane onscreen in Mobile, AL

The abovementioned conspiracy against this blog and its author had so many layers of redundancy built into it, so that before long an elaborately choreographed dance of fuck-ups began to emerge from the ruins of my Columbia happiness, and I saw that I could literally set my watch to the pace of disasters.

John Cameron Mitchell onscreen in Mobile, AL

Something went wrong approximately every 12 and a half minutes. I missed my flight out of Columbia after Orangeburg. I left a Thin Man book-on-CD disc in the rental car and my computer lock on the keychain. In Montgomery, I had to rent an SUV. I continued getting hate mail from Athens. The wheel on my suitcase broke. The Motel 6 WiFi in Palm Beach was broken. The Motel 6 WiFi in Baton Rouge didn't exist. I cannot blog under these conditions!

Michael Warner onscreen in Mobile, AL

My movie played to audiences of a dozen people. In Beaufort it played to fewer than that in the back of an office.

a sold-out screening of Apparition of the Eternal Church in Beaufort, SC

In Montgomery, my name on the marquee of the Art Deco Capri Theater brought in a total of 13 people.

"Control Paul Festa"

I am box office poison!

I have seen my name in lights, and it isn't pretty

In Baton Rouge, in the most beautiful modern theater I've ever seen, much less screened in, I forgot to give them the new DVD and the one they had tiled up and froze halfway through, eliciting a panic attack by the director.

In Baton Rouge they didn't know I was box office poison and gave me a star dressing room.

In Florida the movie screened at the Palm Beach Community College to an audience of 11 undergraduates who made NOT ONE SOUND from the moment they entered the theater to the moment they fled from it. A perfectly silent Q&A, which calls into question my use of the letter Q.

Harold Bloom onscreen in Mobile, AL

And then--Mobile. Closing night. In a jewelbox theater at the public library, following blanket press coverage--two stories in the Mobile Press-Register and ads and write-ups in every tabloid and posters around town--a full house!

wrap that blanket press coverage around me

More people saw the film in Mobile than the rest of the tour combined--including Greenville.

Squeaky Blonde onscreen in Montgomery, AL

Great questions afterwards, good sales at the Bar Nothing Boutique. And then, after sushi with the delightful and miraculously competent Charlie Smoke of the Mobile Arts Council (on whose Website is posted the unedited transcript of the Mobile Press-Register interview), a celebratory Oreo McFlurry at the downtown MacDonalds and a glorious, complimentary night's rest at the Holiday Inn, with a 14th-floor view of Mobile and a bed with a 1000-thread-count sheets and a pillow menu.

Manoel Felciano onscreen in Mobile, AL

At the Motel 6 I'm not 100 percent sure those things on the bed were pillows.

Ilan Greenberg onscreen in Mobile, AL

And the next day, feeling like Jack Bauer speeding down the highway on a mission of harrowing consequence, I drove my PT Cruiser into the French Quarter, parked it, and staged a commando raid on the Cafe du Monde, where I slammed down a plate of beignets and a cafe au lait before I ran back to the car, returned it, and got my flight out of Louis Armstrong International with minutes to spare and powdered sugar all over my shirt.

Jackie Beat onscreen in Mobile, AL

Socheata, back to you.

Columbia, S.C. ROCKS!

What day is it? I’m writing all these entries in the early hours of the next morning, and Blogger doesn’t honor the idea that the day before and the day after are distinguished by my having gone to bed. Technically today is Friday, February 1, 2008, and yesterday, or earlier tonight, was the screening of my film at the Nickelodeon.



Think of the Athens screening as having taken place among the sarcophagi in the museum, and Columbia as the middle-of-the-night show when the dead are raised and the liquor comes out. My first screening with beer in hand! Public screening, anyway. (There was free Dewars in New York, but only after the screening.)




So much laughter, so much connection, such great questions afterward, and such good sales at the Bar Nothing Boutique, where several people ordered fully illustrated copies of Oh My God. After all the all-nighters and the relentless, monumental stress of turning that thing from idea to book between Thanksgiving and Southern Circuit, I couldn’t have been happier if Knopf came up to me after the show and offered me a half a mil for my novel (which doesn't mean I would turn it down).

Afterward I had a terrific time with my Nickelodeon hosts, despite the fact that my guardian angel art yenta Laura had to skip out early with a migraine.

Like John Mitchell and Harold Bloom,
Laura got a headache from
Apparition of the Eternal Church

The rest of us went to some fabulous underground tavern and then to the Strom Thurmond memorial and then to the Art Bar and then the Nickelodeon’s Andy Smith--


--who, it turns out, went to Swarthmore with my boyfriend James—took me to the old theater, now a beauty shop, that they bought and are raising money to restore. Here are pictures:






Sorry no time for more detail or captions (this one is "ghost theater")—it’s well past 2 in the morning and I have to drive three hours tomorrow before reporting to Beaufort High School by lunch hour. Caffeine is my friend.

Columbia, S.C. ROCKS!

I feel like I'm in a museum

ATHENS, GA--I was bored in my own screening tonight so I took pictures of the screen with people’s heads silhouetted at the bottom (as always, remember to click on these images for full size):












I was bored because I thought the audience was. The crowd at the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium at the Georgia Museum of Art was so reserved I wasn’t always sure they were actually there. Just shy of 40 people spread themselves out equidistantly in the 200-person theater, and I was so insecure after their display of silence, especially on the heels of the laugh-riot in the Burgiss Theater at Furman, that I actually asked them, from the stage, “Did you like the film?” Almost as though I had some baroque punch line I was building up to, like Hedwig’s routine about what poor animal hadda die so that she could wear that fur (her Aunt Trude). But I had no routine and no punch line, I only had a more than slightly pathetic question. Miraculously, in the reading, in the Q&A and in the conversations that followed afterward it seemed that most of them did like the film. They were just very, very quiet about it. Was it because they were in a museum? Maybe they were afraid if they laughed, a docent would come over and smack them. Maybe--this is a terrible thought--it was an elaborate art installation and they were in fact a representation of an audience. Oddly, the biggest laugh of the night came during the reading from Oh My God, in the part where I recall the time, after the New York premiere at St. Bartholomew's Church, when someone came up and said it was the first time he'd heard the word "blowjob" in church. "And if this film achieves nothing else..." (Note to self: Georgia audiences like blowjobs-in-church humor.) Lo and behold, after the show the Bar Nothing Boutique was down one e-book.

Southern Circuit cruise director Allen Bell has posted the podcast of the interview we did by phone a few days ago, after I’d slept two hours following an Oh My God editing all-nighter (here a page with the MP3 file). Allen is a good interviewer, and an ace radio editor. He took a junkyard of stunned pauses, conversational U-turns, yawns and stuttering to make me sound half human, even occasionally awake. When I listened to the final product I was relieved, but then felt sheepish about my closing remarks, urging believers to come out and see the film even though it was a pack of atheists cracking jokes about their lord and savior. Why did I feel the need to pander? But sure enough, after the film, guess who made a point of coming up and saying how much they liked the film--two church choir members, a church organist, and a devout Catholic. My audience! Does the Vatican have, like, a film series?

Flushers, waffles, detours, loops, wheels, work

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

These Furman University students seem happy--but
have they fulfilled their CLP credit for the semester?

GREENVILLE, SC -- Tonight’s screening at Furman was a qualified success. On the one hand, it was a room full of laughers, and that’s the most immediately gratifying response available to a filmmaker or performer. Pin-drop silence is a finer gratification, but I’m happy to make do with guffaws, which proliferated throughout the Burgiss Theater almost the whole way through (Elizabeth Povinelli's remark that "There's a whole creepy side to Catholicism--which I experience in the south, actually--" got an especially nice laugh). And the auditorium, which seats 150, was perhaps 2/3 full. Furman has a handy program called CLP--the Cultural Life Program--handy for visiting filmmakers, that is, because students get credit for attending gallery exhibits and oddball experimental documentaries about how coastal homosexuals, Jewish intellectuals, and drag queens respond to French-Catholic organ music. After the show, in the lobby, there were two tables set up, one with Apparition-related merchandise and the other where the audience got its CLP ticket validated, like a parking chit. One of these tables was mobbed by cinephiles.

My only real disappointment was that the 30-inch extravaganza in the Sunday Arts section of the Greenville News didn’t appear to have convinced many people to brave the balmy evening to see the show. Were there even ten people there who weren’t Furman students or faculty? I really am being such a whiner for pointing this out, because it was a very good and good-sized audience, but there’s just this feeling of—exactly what kind of press do you need to fill a theater? Thirty inches above the fold on the front page of the sports section? The crime blotter? If thirty inches doesn't cut it in this town, exactly what kind of organ--but now I sound bitter.

The day was good. Lunch with long-lost Liz Lopez, Lowell '88, now Liz Lopez Anderson with a 3-year-old and a 3-month-old and a husband who teaches religious studies at nearby Wofford College. Perhaps Apparition has a future in Greenville. Shouldn't the film that introduced the word "blow-job" to church screen at BJU? With a Google News alert that the Mobile Register had posted their story, I felt justified in taking an hour to finally design a press page for apparitionfilm.com. It has three—count them!--features, and zero reviews. I’m looking forward to seeing what became of my interview with the Beaufort Island Packet, which I enjoyed doing, and with any luck I’ll pick up some more ink over the next ten days. Meanwhile, I have to thank Thomas Harrison at the Register for this line in particular:

"Festa, based in San Francisco, has put together 31 colorful interview subjects that likely would chase Ken Burns off the premises."

And if this film achieves nothing else...

Media frenzy in Greenville

Let's face it--the people of Greenville, S.C., are tired of politics. They are ready for art. And so, in today's (Sunday) edition of The Greenville News, on page 9D of the Lifestyle Arts section, there is a half-page above-the-fold feature about Apparition of the Eternal Church with a color shot of blue Eisa Davis yowling, a greenish Harold Bloom scowling, and me looking too serious by half in that black-and-white Greg Gorman shot I ungallantly cropped James out of. The online version lacks the pictures of the others (so I put them above) but it includes a video clip from the opening which works pretty well as a G-rated trailer (by contrast to the one I have on the film Website).

The story is really well done. I'm a pretty autistic interview, but Greenville News arts writer Ann Hicks cleaned up my quotes. She also rounded out the piece talking to a Furman University organ prof about the music itself, which I thought was a nice touch.

Ann didn't reveal too much of her opinion of the movie in the story, but she did to me privately, and with her permission I've added her luminously flattering comment to the apparitionfilm.com praise page. I love this page--it's one of my favorite destinations on the Internet. I turn to it when my spirits ebb and alcohol and easy sex are not readily available. I get a warm feeling in my heart to think that, when they are put down in the inferno, all the dozens of film festival adjudicators who turned down this movie will be forced to stand at a flaming chalkboard and write down these comments for all eternity while listening, on headphones, to Messiaen's Organ Book.

After picking me up at the airport holding a sign that said "PAUL FESTA" (my first!), Furman University junior Jeff Heinzl, who runs the school's Independent Film Society and his classmate and film society colleague Jonathan, along with another film society officer and a faculty sponsor, took me to a sushi dinner. It felt a little like breakfast sushi, since I spent the day sleeping on the plane, having pulled yet another all-nighter, this one panicky, trying to get myself onto that 6:10 a.m. plane with everything required by ten screenings in nine cities plus Mardi Gras (I found a suitable outfit but will need to do some grommeting before showing up in New Orleans).

I should point out that this Greenville date isn't technically part of Southern Circuit--Jeff saw the Southern Circuit line-up and invited me to Furman beforehand, and the Southern Arts guys were very accommodating about getting me here a little early and a little out of the way of the tour. After Southern Circuit, the movie will screen in Knoxville, but I won't attend that one, the first time the movie has played without me since the Park City Film Music Festival screened the film--and awarded it a Gold Medal for Excellence--quite without my knowledge (a Google search turned up the information months later). Film festivals!

I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Greenville before Jeff contacted me and then there I was waiting for my flight at SFO and reading Lawrence Wright's story in the Jan 21 New Yorker and learned that Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence, America's chief spy, is not only from Greenville but went to Furman. This follows on the other confluence of Greenville energy, the fact that my high school and middle school classmate Liz Anderson, nee Lopez, is a copyeditor for the Greenville News, a fact I learned just a week ago on the Lowell '88 reunion ning.com site. Any suggestion that today's media frenzy in Greenville was the result of some sort of Lowell 88 backroom nepotism is simply inaccurate. Everyone knows it's because the Jews control the media.

Miles to go until I sleep

The tour approaches and I feel like I'm in the fourth quarter of a season of 24. I remember looking at the clock today at about 4PM and thinking, that's it, twelve hours left, with 20 hours of shit left to do. I've been jamming ever since, and James has been good enough to take some of my errands off my hands despite having just had his wisdom teeth pulled and being in the middle of his own dissertation deadlines. But there's something hard and fast about a 3:55 a.m. shuttle pick-up and he took pity on me so I didn't have to do the laundry or walk the dog or wash him when he came back mostly black from the mud pit formerly known as Dolores Park. Last night's storm was of Biblical proportions so it was a miracle the Berkeley screening was so well attended. This reminds me I should print out the 10-day forecast for Greenville/Athens/Columbia/Beaufort South Carolina/Orangeburg area. Oh good, another errand. What else I did today: Voted (undecided until I marked my ballot--and then--sorry Barack), deposited checks, abortive pharmacy trip, abortive AAA visit for maps (they are closed Saturday because...), tested audio recorder, packed DVDs, paperbacks, t-shirts, e-books, started detailed itinerary, got audiobooks from library (Hemingway, Hammett, Sean Wilsey) fielded emails and phone calls, fed myself, lost my compact flash card, bought another one, made lists. I would list what remains to do before 3:55 a.m. but unfortunately I am pressed for time.