Pink House • the filmmakers
As contributing author to the non-fiction bestseller,
13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail
(Random House),
Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation
(W.W. Norton), and the novel
"Quickening," Ian spent some time pretending to speak for his
generation. His writing career began as an undergrad at Chapel Hill
where Ian penned the "Wednesday's Child" column for
The Daily Tar Heel.
He has written cover stories for
The Washington Post
Magazine, and his work has been featured in The New
York Times, Newsweek, and
The Atlantic Monthly. He has shared the sofa on
The Oprah Winfrey Show and was profiled on
CNN.
Lately, Ian has split his time between LA and NYC,
focusing on journalism and writing for television.
Tessa's debut feature film, Five Wives,
Three Secretaries and Me, a documentary which examines the rarefied world
of her multiply-married, oil-tycoon father, opened to rave reviews at the Quad
Theater in New York in October 1999 and has since gone on to play art houses
across the country. It was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &
Sciences for the 2001 Outstanding Contemporary Documentary series, and ran for
a year on the Showtime cable networks.
It will be released on DVD in December, 2002.
Asset Pictures, the company she founded in
1994, has produced theater and film projects in New York and Los
Angeles. Her new documentary,
Project A.L.S.,
is a film about an activist organization created
to combat Lou Gehrig's Disease, a fatal and rapacious affliction for which there is
neither treatment nor cure. The short feature won both the
Media That Matters
award at the Human Rights Film Festival and the audience award at the
Nantucket Film Festival.
She recently served as Chairman of the Board for the noted New York theater
company, Naked Angels, where she founded the Naked Angels School.
Tessa is a graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall and a Morehead Scholar at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Prior to forming his own production company,
cinéBLAST!, Gill worked
for October Films,
The Independent Feature Project and the
French Film Office. In addition to conducting seminars on filmmaking at The
Reel School, Gill is an adjunct professor of film at the prestigious
New York University Graduate Film School. An Indie Spirit Award
nominee, he writes for the leading trade magazines
Filmmaker, and
Independent Film and Video Monthly and
has served as a juror at film festivals from Sundance to Scandinavia.
Gill's many producing credits include: Morgan J. Freeman's triple
winner at Sundance 1997, Hurricane Streets,
and his follow-up, Desert Blue;
the current Sundance Selection,
Spring Forward, starring Ned
Beatty and Liev Schreiber; the 1999 American Film Institute Winner
Bobby G. Can't Swim;
Tim Kirkman's documentary, Dear Jesse;
Mikey Jackson's dark comedy, Shooting Vegetarians,
Julie Lynch's Getting Off,
Jamie Yerkes' Spin the Bottle.
A reformed lawyer, Gill was a
Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Penny Franks started her career working as a
writers' assistant on various television series and pilots, most
notably NBC's
St. Elsewhere with
Bruce Paltrow, Tom Fontana, and Mark and John Tinker. She moved to New York to assist on
Lifetime's The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, as well
as the feature The Super. After three years she went
back to L.A. and continued to work as not only a writers' assistant on the Fox series
Bakersfield P.D., but also with producers
and directors, including Debra Hill and Christopher Guest on
Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. She recently line
produced the short film Baby Steps starring Kathy
Bates. Currently, Penny produces commercials in Los Angeles.
Stephen Akin, Associate Producer, Second Unit Assistant Director
Stephen, a Chapel Hillian and veteran of many pink house parties,
graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in Radio
Television and Motion Pictures. A staple of the Chapel Hill music
scene since a teenager as singer for seminal Chapel Hill punk band A
Number of Things, he, upon graduating, began working with
Peyton Reed and
went on to direct his own videos for the Sex Police, Superchunk, The
Veldt, Dillon Fence and others, many of which are featured in the
"Chapel Hill Young Rock" documentary/compilation. The Pink House is
his first feature film (unless you include being an extra in Patch
Adams). As far as being a Morehead Scholar, he did take an Astronomy
Lab in Morehead Planetarium.
Jodi Collins, our vivacious casting director, works primarily out of New York. Her
recent casting coups include Whipped, starring Amanda
Peet, Callie Thorne, and Brian Van Holt; Something
Sweet, AFI Film Fest-2001, starring Anne Jackson, Daniel J. Travanti, Nick Chinlund, and Lauren
Stamile; Endsville, starring Kyle Secor, Alan Ruck,
David Moscow, Larraine Newman, Jay O.Sander--co-cast with Jennifer Low-Sauer; and
Kill By Inches, Toronto Film Festival '99
premiere, directed by Arthur Flam and Diane Doniol-Lacroie.
She has also cast animated and live series for VH1; four seasons of
The Chris Rock Show for HBO; the original pilot for Comedy
Central's Strangers
with Candy; and voices for the new animated series TV
Funhouse for Robert Smigel. Of course, her biggest contribution to America's collective
unconscious was the Whaazzzzzzup! Budweiser
campaign for Charles Stone.
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