Update -

  Local filmmaker Bill Richardson won awards in two different film festivals recently.  His movie Crash Gordon won a Gold Award in the Comedy Feature category at the Worldfest International Film Festival.  This festival is older than Sundance,
Toronto or Tribeca and is one of the oldest film festivals in the world.  It also helped launch the careers of such filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and David Lynch.

Crash Gordon also took away an award at the Appalachian Film Festival.  This festival focuses on filmmakers in the 13 state Appalachian region – which includes
New York.  It won 2^nd place in the Feature Film category. 

http://www.appyfilmfest.com/pages/winners.htm 

Bill Richardson, the award-winning filmmaker from Williamson, will have three showings of his feature film “Crash Gordon.” It will be shown in Huntington, April 19th, 3 PM next Saturday as part of the Appalachian Film Festival. It was just shown at the First Take Film Festival in Augusta, Georgia. Finally, it is a finalist for an award in the Worldfest International Film Festival in Houston. This festival is older than either Sundance or Toronto and bills itself as the oldest independent film and video festival in the world.  It also touts itself as discovering luminaries such as Spielberg, George Lucas and others.
The film had its world premiere a few years ago at The WV Intl. Film Festival. 

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 Original poster for the film

 Update - I finally saw a very rough cut of this doc about WV’s first indie horror film. Congrats to Richard and I hope to see the finished version within a year. Go Richard!

Richard Bartram is still working on his documentary concerning WV’s first indie feature film, “Teenage Strangler.”(1964) As I reported on this website in August 2007, Bartram  cablecast the film, made in Huntington, for the first time there on cable TV. He is also working on a documentary about the film, interviewing local people who were in the film, etc. I happen to be the person who programmed the first WV showing since it was “banned” in WV because of the real identity of the strangler - a former teacher who was accused of sexual harassment, forced to become a janitor. ( Shades of the daily news on teachers, priests, piano instructors, whomever….) Mike Fennimore, now deceased, is the first person to tell me about the film. Here is what Richard told me recently -

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Update - I was unable to attend the WV premiere but Rev. Jim Lewis told me that all went well. About 60 attended including local workers from the Nitro plant and there was a fine discussion. Thanks for everyone involved including the staff at the SC Convention Center, WV Patriots for Peace, the NY filmmakers, and others for making this a successfull program with such short notice.

Janet Gardner and her colleague Susan Hammond, director of the War Legacies Project, mailed me a copy of Gardner’s new film, “The Last Ghost of War.” I saw the pictures on her website of the armless children of Viet Nam, but fortunately, the film was much more than a horror/freak show. It powerfully showed that the Viet Nam War (my friend Sandy Berman just convinced the Library of Congress to call it a “war” after using the term “conflict” for 30 years) is not over for lots and lots of people, both Vietnamese and American. It shows the Nitro plant that blew up in the 1950s while making Agent Orange, affecting hundreds of people right here in our own back yard. Hopefully lots of local retired chemical workers will come to see the film. (New WV Patriots for Peace webinfo.)

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Robert Schlesinger, the son of perhaps the most famous White House speech writer since WWII, the late Arthur Jr., published his new book, “White House Ghosts - Presidents and their Speech Writers.” There are several parts about “Kenneth Hechler” concerning his  life as a speech writer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t cover his work with Adlai Stevenson. Hechler is too prolific for any book, even this one.

The inscription refers to the Judsion Welliver Society, the group of White House speech writers.

Pare Lorentz, a native of Clarksburg, WV, raised in Buckhannon, has been receiving a lot of attention during the last few years. In Chicago, The 75th anniversary of the New Deal Film Festival will show “The Fight for Life.” “The Plow that Broke the Plains” and other New Deal films. 

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Bookmark made by Marshall Universities Librariespremiere of film they produced, “Ken Hechler - In Pursuit of Justice.” It sets a new model for WV filmmakers and librarians working together to produce “content.”

The Huntington Herald Dispatch has done an excellent job covering the new Ken Hechler documentary. Here’s their recent editorial about the film and Ken’s years of work. I spoke with co-director Russ Barbour recently on the phone who said he’s wanted to make such an extended film about Ken for 15 years.

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State Librarian Fred Glazer and Steve Christo, now asst. director of the Cabell County Public Library, co-founded the world’s last new 16 mm collection in 1976 after years of preparation. I arrived from Minnesota in 1978, September, and together with asst. director Frani Stone, Patty Wills, Delores Kelley, Steve Wiseman, and other staff made it the best program in the U.S. by 1987.

WVIFF is opening with the WV premiere of a major new film made here that has already been shown commercially in NYC and LA, “Burning the Future.” Heavy on docs as always, some other great films like “Lust, Caution” will finally premiere. I am especially excited that Kevin Carptener’s film, “One Earth - Makutano on Kilimajaro” to be shown at 5:30 PM on Saturday, April 26th. ( I only wish they could have squeezed in another new WVSU-Tanzanian film, “Video Huts,” both premiering at last October’s WVFFF in Sutton.)

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