Guy Maddin and Ben Meade team up to make 'Death of the Reel'
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
Canadian movie legend Guy Maddin and local filmmaker Ben Meade devoted last Sunday to collaborating on a seven-minute film.
Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin (left) buzzed Johnson County's New Century AirCenter in this WWII open-cockpit airplane for a film he's making with his Kansas City colleague Ben Meade (right).Maddin, creator of such film oddities as "The Saddest Music in the World" and "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs," was in KC to show a couple of his idiosyncratic movies at the Kansas International Film Festival, which ended Thursday.
On Sunday morning Maddin donned aviator goggles and a flight jacket to take a few passes over Johnson County's New Century AirCenter in a World War II open-cockpit training airplane. He filmed from the sky while Meade and local cinematographer Bill Pryor shot from the ground.
The tongue-in-cheek project, titled "Death of the Reel," is being shot in classic Maddin style, which is to say silent and on high-contrast black-and-white film. Sound effects, music (by Boston's Alloy Orchestra) and title cards will be inserted in post-production.
The story? Well, it begins in a Winnipeg bar where filmmaker Guy Maddin (played by, yes, Guy Maddin) reads a newspaper article declaring the death of cinema in the United States. He decides to ride — or fly — to the rescue.
"Guy is filming shots from his point of view, and no doubt that footage will have his very specific slant on things," Meade said. "I'm filming from my end. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out."
Canadian
filmmaker Guy Maddin.Maddin was a bit jet-lagged, having been called back to the Toronto Film Festival on Saturday to receive the City of Toronto Prize, the fest's highest honor for a Canadian filmmaker. The $100,000 prize was for "My Winnipeg," a movie about Maddin's hometown, which he narrated live.
"I haven't seen the script for this film we're making. … Ben has it all in his head," Maddin said as pilot Ron Wright readied the Fairchild PT-19B, owned by the not-for-profit Commemorative Air Force.
"The idea is that the young people of Kansas have been zombified by their iPhones and iPods and have become celluloid illiterates who watch postage stamp-sized movies on tiny screens. I'm here to save cinema."
Additional filming for "Death of the Reel" took place at the Glenwood Arts Theatre, the Gaf tavern in Waldo and at the south Kansas City home of film producer and distributor Wade Williams, who has an extensive collection of movie memorabilia (like Gort the robot from "The Day the Earth Stood Still").