Tag Archives: Nick Holle

A Movie in the Making: The Entertainers

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Fierce competition. Close camaraderie. A dying art form. And some of the fastest hands you’ll ever see.

That’s the premise of The Entertainers, a ragtime documentary being created by friends (and FLYMF co-founders) Nick Holle and Michael Zimmer, in collaboration with filmmaker Brent Watkins. The movie centers on the World Championship of Old-Time Piano, an annual competition held in Peoria, Illinois. As competitors gather to see who can wring the most swing from their piano, these guys are on hand to capture the love, joy and sorrow that accompanies the practitioners of one of America’s original art forms.

Their trailer gives a sense of the richness of the ragtime experience:

As The Entertainers web site says:

These talented, idiosyncratic performers represent a broad spectrum of the American experience, but they share one abiding love: for ragtime, the first great American music.

Like a combination of Spellbound and Best In Show, The Entertainers will explore a unique American sub-culture, whose eccentric and hilarious characters pursue the perfection of an esoteric art.

Help them make this movie a reality. In exchange for early contributions, the filmmakers are offering space in the credits, DVDs upon release and other exciting goodies. Nick and his friends at WutWutAlma Productions followed a similar fundraising strategy for their first movie, Illegal Use of Joe Zopp, and it worked out great.

Great movies need great supporters. You can play a role in telling this exciting story.

Illegal Use of Joe Zopp in the Beloit International Film Festival

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Illegal Use of Joe Zopp, the hilarious feature film created by FLYMF co-founder Nick Holle and his amigos in WutWutAlma Productions, will be playing in the Beloit International Film Festival the weekend of February 19-22.

The details:

Zopp will play at the restaurant theater at Atlanta Bread Company, 2747 Milwaukee Road, Beloit, Wis., on Friday and Sunday. The two screenings are:
— Friday, February 20, 2009 at 7:30 pm
— Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 5:00 pm

Anyone near the Beloit area should  head out to support the independent filmmakers. Their movie is great (aided, of course, by a gut-busting cameo by yours truly), and they deserve a big audience.

Illegal Use of Joe Zopp is Here!

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All in all, it’s a pretty good story. A group of friends grow up together in a small Wisconsin town, graduate from high school and then college, and start following their own career paths. One gets a job in insurance; another works for a software company. Some stay at home; some move away. My buddy Nick Holle, co-founder of FLYMF, makes it all the way to Los Angeles, where we attend the Professional Writing Program at USC together.

A couple years down the road, though, they start to get the itch. They want to do something. So they chat on a message board they’ve set up, kicking around one idea after another, and finally they come up with a movie. The concept: “a child prodigy turned social outcast returns to his hometown to investigate the circumstances of his own death.”

Continue reading Illegal Use of Joe Zopp is Here! →

Guess Who Has an IMDB Listing?

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This guy!

The listing comes from my brief-brief-brief cameo in Illegal Use of Joe Zopp, the film that FLYMF co-creator Nick Holle and a group of his friends created in their home town of Chippewa Falls. The movie’s great (you can my response to it here), and it’s been really rewarding to see a group of good friends take a big artistic project through to fruition.

The movie will have its theatrical debut  on August 22 in Chippewa Falls Micon Cinemas; I will definitely be there. The movie will also be featured in Iowa City’s Landlocked Film Festival on August 23, after which there will be a DVD release. If you can make it to any of the screenings, you should show up to support an innovative grassroots film project. Congratulations to everyone involved!