SUSIE RIVO’S HISTORIC DOCUMENTARY “LEFT ON PEARL” WILL COMPETE AT 14TH ANNUAL LA FEMME INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, OCT. 11- 14, 2018 - Janeane speaks with Suzi from our KUCI Studios 10/8/18 at 10am pst

LISTEN to today's featured conversation with Susie Rivo!

LOS ANGELES, September 29, 2018 - LEFT ON PEARL, an award winning documentary with “Me,Too” overtones, will be entered into competition at this year’s LAFemme International Film Festival and screen on October 13th@ 8PM at the Regal Cinemas at LA Live in downtown Los Angeles.

The acclaimed film takes us back to 1971 when International Women’s Day marchers took over a Harvard Building in Cambridge, MA. for a women’s center, on land sought by the largely African-American Riverside neighborhood for affordable housing? How and why did hundreds of women of diverse backgrounds decide to take a radical, collective action that would change their lives? How did this action intersect with the surrounding African-American neighborhood’s fight against displacement by Harvard University’s expansion? What is the legacy of this action almost 50 years later? 

Awards the film has won thus far include: Best Documentary, Boston International Film Festival, Best of Festival and Audience Choice Award, Cinema Systers Film Festival, Director’s Choice, Black aria Film Festival, Platinum Remi Award, WorldFest Houston, and Best Short Documentary, Hot Springs International Women’s Film Festival.

Director/producer Susie Rivo holds an MFA in Cinema Production from San Francisco State University. Her award-winning short film AMY screened at numerous film festivals, including Sundance and SXSW and was broadcast by WNET, KQED and other PBS stations and in the Czech Republic. She is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist award for filmmaking. Her documentary LEFT ON PEARL was supported by Mass Humanities, the Puffin Foundation, and a Blaufarb Award from the Tamiment Library at New York University. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.

According to Rivo: “The Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 60s and early 70s paved the way for my generation of women to more fully participate as equals in the world. Under the Trump administration, we are witnessing an unprecedented backlash against women, LGBTQ people, and people of color. An important part of our fight against this backlash is to make sure we transmit our stories and our history to the next generation.”

THE 888 WOMEN’S HISTORY PROJECT

International Women’s Day, 1971: Proclaiming a Women’s Declaration of Independence, hundreds of women gathered for a march at the Boston Common. They demanded equal pay for equal work, free community-controlled child-care, and free medical care including abortion and birth control. The march ended with the surprise seizure and occupation of a Harvard-owned building, renamed “The Women’s Center”. This action had a lasting impact, including the establishment of the longest continuously operating community Women’s Center in the United States

LEFT ON PEARL is a fruit of many years of organizing by the 888 Women’s History Project, a non-profit organization formed in 2001. Its members currently include Rochelle Ruthchild, Libby Bouvier, Susan K. Jacoby and Cheryl Stein. Determined to preserve the memory of this pivotal event, Rochelle Ruthchild, an historian, Libby Bouvier, an archivist, and Susan Jacoby, a community activist - formed the 888 Women’s History Project to record interviews and collect related material. They felt compelled, before memories fade even further, to document this transformational moment in women’s history through a documentary, produced and directed by filmmaker Susie Rivo, and edited by Iftach Shavit.

More at: www.leftonpearl.org

For more information on the film or to interview director Susie Rivo, please contact LA Media Consultants, Deborah Gilels at 818-758-6509.

10/8/18 at 9:45am pst - accomplished writer, faculty member at the New England Conservatory in Boston, and author of numerous articles...Tracy Strauss! We chatted about all this and more...and of course, her forthcoming #MeToo-themed self-help/relationships book cum epistolary memoir I Just Haven't Met You Yet, a modern-day Bridget Jones's Diary-meets-Eat, Pray, Love

LISTEN to today's conversation with featured guest Tracy Strauss!


Named by Bustle as one of eight women writers with advice to follow , Tracy Strauss is the author of the forthcoming #MeToo-themed self-help/relationships book cum epistolary memoir I Just Haven't Met You Yet, a modern-day Bridget Jones's Diary-meets-Eat, Pray, Love. 

Written as an open love letter to her future life partner, I Just Haven’t Met You Yet details Tracy’s dating history and her journey to dismantle the effects and stigmas of an abusive past, break free of destructive relationship patterns, and ultimately conquer her fear of truly being seen by the world, flaws and all. 

In her book, Tracy shares the transformative lessons she learned and self-empowerment she achieved while passing each hurdle (including her PTSD diagnosis and recovery) along the way to finding the love of her life. Tracy helps readers empower themselves by taking a challenging look at the ways the negative events of their lives, including sexual harassment and abuse, have shaped their self-perception and created obstacles to personal success, and how readers can change that troubled self-image along with their (love) lives. 

A book years in the making, after a Publishers Weekly Soapbox piece (subsequently reprinted in Ms. Magazine) aired about the cowardice of publishers to take on Tracy’s unflinching, all-too-real story, I Just Haven’t Met You Yet found a home with Skyhorse Publishing and is set to be released in May 2019.

The 2015 Writers' Room of Boston Nonfiction Fellow, former Essays Editor of The Rumpus, and winner of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award for Nonfiction, Tracy is the author of the recent article, "#MeToo: Crafting Our Most Difficult True Stories," a toolbox for nonfiction writers penning #MeToo-themed stories, published in the current September/October 2018 Poets & Writers Magazine. She is also the author of the six-month Ploughshares blog series, "Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence," as well as essays in Glamour, Salon, The Rumpus, HuffPost, xoJane, Poets & Writers Magazine, Writer’s Digest Magazine, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, The Southampton Review, and other publications. In 2014, during television's "November sweeps," The Steve Harvey Show featured Tracy as a relationship blogger for HuffPost on a double-episode dating makeover series.

Tracy is currently full-time faculty in writing and liberal arts at the New England Conservatory in Boston. She moonlights as a Zumba instructor at the YMCA, Boston Sports Club, and Cambridge Athletic Club. For more info on Tracy, check out her website or follow her on Facebook and Twitter!

10/8/18 at 9:30am pst - Bruce Blackman, the front man for the 1970s band “Starbuck” and writer of the song, “Moonlight Feels Right,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard chart.

 

Announcing the upcoming new release by Bruce Blackman titled “Moonlight Feels Right.” Mr Blackman was the front man for the 1970s band “Starbuck” and wrote the song, “Moonlight Feels Right,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard chart.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Every song has a story behind it, and this is the captivating tale, told with Bruce Blackman’s unsurpassable wit, that collects the nerve-endings of a time gone by . . . a time that is still revered to this day.

Moonlight Feels Right by Starbuck, a group in which Bruce was the front man with his familiar white cap, became one of the top-selling songs of the ’70s, and is still played in 54 countries across the globe.

Bruce takes you on a musical cruise through the ’60s and ’70s in a page-turning, laugh-out-loud memoir—from his Mississippi Delta childhood to adventures in Hollywood, packed with celebrities and filled with telling detail. Touching at moments and side-splitting hilarious at others, this engrossing memoir gives you lots of juicy tidbits.

Beginning with their breakout concert with his group Starbuck opening for ELO, he takes you behind the scenes of American Bandstand, Merv Griffin, Rock Concert, Midnight Special, and Dinah Shore. It’s all here—the back stories, the part you couldn’t see.

From his experiences with William Faulkner and Jim Morrison to his brief appearance in the movie The Graduate, you’ll enjoy a front-row seat on his one-of-a-kind trip to the top of the charts . . . The Road to Moonlight Feels Right.

“The Road to Moonlight Feels Right” by Bruce Blackman who was front man for Starbuck, one of the popular bands of the 1970s, and Moonlight Feels Right was one of the most popular songs of that time. The book was released August 19, 2018 and I think you’ll find the story both interesting and entertaining. Here’s a little bit about it:

Bruce Blackman takes you on a musical cruise through the ’60s and ’70s in a page-turning, laugh-out-loud memoir—from his Mississippi Delta childhood to adventures in Hollywood, packed with celebrities and filled with telling detail. Touching at moments and side-splitting hilarious at others, this engrossing memoir gives you lots of juicy tidbits. Beginning with their breakout concert with his group Starbuck opening for ELO, he takes you behind the scenes of American Bandstand, Merv Griffin, Rock Concert, Midnight Special, and Dinah Shore. It’s all here---the back stories, the part you couldn’t see.

From his experiences with William Faulkner and Jim Morrison to his brief appearance in the movie The Graduate, you’ll enjoy a front-row seat on his one-of-a-kind trip to the top of the charts . . . The Road to Moonlight Feels Right.



Here’s a little bit about the book:

Every song has a story behind it, and this is the captivating tale, told with Bruce Blackman’s unsurpassable wit, that collects the nerve-endings of a time gone by . . . a time that is still revered to this day.

Moonlight Feels Right by Starbuck, a group in which Bruce was the front man with his familiar white cap, became one of the top-selling songs of the ’70s, and is still played in 54 countries across the globe.

Bruce takes you on a musical cruise through the ’60s and ’70s in a page-turning, laugh-out-loud memoir—from his Mississippi Delta childhood to adventures in Hollywood, packed with celebrities and filled with telling detail. Touching at moments and side-splitting hilarious at others, this engrossing memoir gives you lots of juicy tidbits.

Beginning with their breakout concert with his group Starbuck opening for ELO, he takes you behind the scenes of American Bandstand, Merv Griffin, Rock Concert, Midnight Special, and Dinah Shore. It’s all here—the back stories, the part you couldn’t see.

From his experiences with William Faulkner and Jim Morrison to his brief appearance in the movie The Graduate, you’ll enjoy a front-row seat on his one-of-a-kind trip to the top of the charts . . . The Road to Moonlight Feels Right.

This is a commanding memoir that stands the test of time. After all, who doesn’t like a bit of moonlight magic?

The inaugural ReelAbilties Film Festival: Los Angeles takes place October 11 - 17, 2018 at Laemmle’s NoHo 7. On Monday 10/8/18 at 9:15am pst, Janeane is joined by Festival Director, Shamey Cramer and actor Danny Woodburn

LISTEN to today's conversation with
featured guest Shamey Cramer!

Coming to Los Angeles for the first time, ReelAbilities Film Festival is the largest festival in the United States dedicated to promoting awareness and appreciation of the lives, stories, and artistic expressions of people with different abilities. Founded more than ten years ago in New York City and now held annually in multiple cities throughout North America, the festival presents international and award-winning films by and about people with disabilities in multiple locations throughout each hosting city. Post-screening discussions and other engaging programs bring together the community to explore, discuss, embrace, and celebrate the diversity of our shared human experience.

The festival is produced by the City of Los Angeles Department on Disability in partnership with the City of Los Angeles Commission on Disability and ReelAbilities North America. Sponsors include Laemmle Theatres, USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, SAG – AFTRA, Jeffrey Pechter Family Foundation, the Writers Guild of America, and The Ruderman Family Foundation.

Opening the festival on Thursday, October 11 with a blue carpet and gala is Chloé Zhao’s quiet masterpiece, THE RIDER. After suffering a near fatal head injury, a young cowboy undertakes a search for a new identity and what it means to be a man in the heartland of America.

The festival will close on Sunday, October 14 at Laemmle NoHo 7 (5240 Lankershim Blvd, North Hollywood) with the Los Angeles premiere of SANCTUARY. This award-winning film is a heart-warming romantic comedy where Larry and Sophie, two people with intellectual disabilities, long to be together in a world that does everything to keep them apart. Screening with the film is animated short MACROPOLIS, a charming story of two toys who are thrown away for being different and their quest to be put on a store shelf.

The festival will also host a special screening of HOW SWEET THE SOUND: THE BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA on Friday, October 12 at The Pico Union Project (1153 Valencia Street, Los Angeles) complete with an arts fair, food trucks, and live music.

The wildly original dark comedy KILLS ON WHEELS, a tale of two young men in a Budapest rehab center who become involved with a wheelchair-bound hitman, will screen on Saturday, October 13 at the Laemmle NoHo 7. The film has been hailed by critics and was Hungary’s 2016 Oscar submission for Best Foreign Film.


OUR MISSION

ReelAbilities Film Festival is the largest festival in the US dedicated to promoting awareness and appreciation of the lives, stories and artistic expressions of people with different disabilities.
Founded in NY in 2007, the festival presents award winning films by and about people with disabilities in multiple locations throughout each hosting city. Post-screening discussions and other engaging programs bring together the community to explore, discuss, embrace, and celebrate the diversity of our shared human experience.

ABOUT ReelAbilities Film Festival

ReelAbilities Film Festival was initiated in New York at the JCC Manhattan in 2007, founded by Anita Altman and Isaac Zablocki. The festival was the first of its kind to present a series of award-winning films by, about and for people with disabilities. As the festival progressed, screenings continued to take place at multiple venues across the city and all films are followed by discussions that engage the community in promoting inclusion and celebrating diversity, while providing accessible conditions to match the different needs of our multi-layered society.
ReelAbilities International Program

In 2012, other cities across the US followed New York’s footsteps by hosting a ReelAbilities Film Festival, starting at Cincinnati, Ohio. Since then, Reelabilities events have been held in over a dozen cities across the world – transitioning from ReelAbilities North America to ReelAbilities International. ReelAbilities events have expanded from the US to Canada and soon – Latin America, and take place in many different forms – film festivals, year round screenings and special programming that goes beyond film. Since its start, ReelAbilities has been consistently receiving an increasing number of outstanding film submissions from across the globe.
The ReelAbilities International headquarters has recently moved back to the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan in NYC.

10/8/18 at 9:00am pst - New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins joined Janeane to talk about her latest novel, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT

LISTEN to today's conversation with Kristan!

New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins’s novel, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT (Berkley Trade Paperback Original; August 7, 2018), has caused a stir, challenging readers to think about their views of weight and body image. The passionate dialogue that followed proves how far we still have to go when discussing weight and our society’s definition of what’s too fat, too thin, perfect and problematic.

Thirtysomethings Emerson, Georgia, and Marley have been close friends since they met at weight-loss camp as teens. When Emerson tragically passes away, she leaves one final wish for her best friends: to conquer the fears they still carry as adults. For Marley and Georgia, Emerson’s death is the jolt that makes them look at their own lives, reevaluate their family relationships, reexamine how they view themselves, and understand why they still search for love and acceptance.

With GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, Higgins taps into the way women struggle with not feeling like they are “enough.” Every woman has benchmarks in her mind, even if unconsciously, of what will make her worthy. Those lists range from getting the right job and making more money, to finally earning a parent’s approval, to getting married and having children, to achieving their ideal weight.


Higgins expertly handles sensitive issues of body image, weight, grief, and self-esteem while delivering a novel full of humor, heart, and a rich cast of characters. It’s the laugh-out-loud, ugly cry book of the summer.

About the Author
Kristan Higgins is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly twenty novels, which have been translated into more than two dozen languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Her books have received many awards and accolades, and she is a six-time nominee for The Kirkus Prize for best work of fiction. Higgins lives in Connecticut with her family. Connect with Kristan online at kristanhiggins.com, twitter.com/kristan_higgins, and facebook.com/KristanHigginsBoo ks

10/1/18 from our KUCI Studios, Janeane spoke with Leslie La Page of the LA FEMME International Film Festival!

LISTEN to today's conversation with Leslie La Page of the LA FEMME International Film Festival!

For over a decade Leslie La Page has Produced, Directed and Line Produced/UPM for Film, TV, Music Videos, Commercials and Theatrical productions nationally and internationally in both the independent and commercial markets. She has worked for such companies as Black Entertainment Television Action Pay Per View (BET) HBO, Lifetime TV, MTV, Paramount and Nickelodeon just to name a few. 

While at BET she line produced their entire slate of original programming which aired on their network and additional achieved international and domestic video releases. Her production experience also involves her in the areas of marketing, developing scripts, creating promotional copy as well as promotional feature spots and trailers.

In 1997 Ms. La Page ran and operated TIGER’S EYE SOUND, a dialogue editorial company, with her partner Bruce Murphy. There she worked with numerous awarding winning dialogue editors and edited over 20 independent feature films in the company’s first year. Ms. La Page and TIGER’S EYE SOUND dialogue-edited such critically acclaimed films as: 1998 Academy Awards Nominee, Best Foreign Film – “Four Days in September”; 1998 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for “Smoke Signals”; and the film “Dead Man’s Curve,” which was a Sundance Film Festival Invitee.

In 2003, Leslie and her Partner Saul Stein, Co-Executive Producer of “The Holy Land”, formed BooYah! Films and have released through Cavu Pictures the critically acclaimed film “The Holy Land”, which opened domestically at the Angelica Theatre in New York City before rolling out to 45 cities across the nation. She still has her production company Infinity Films which is involved in feature film, music video, and commercial productions.

Ms. La Page also, consults independent filmmakers for feature films, script analysis, budgets, independent marketing, and film festivals and taught at the New York Film Academy and has taught as an adjunct professor nationally at universities. She was a Slamdance Film Festival Programmer for over five years and was the creator and Executive Producer for the Slamdance Filmmaker’s Bootcamp.

Ms. LaPage was the Director of Programming for the New Orleans Media Experience Film Festival (NOME 2003) occurring in Louisiana which platformed over 100 films. 50% of the films platformed at NOME went on to have theatrical distribution: Show Boy, Nursie, Hungry Hearts, Dog Walker and Flavors just to name a few.

Ms. LaPage launched in 2005 the LA FEMME International Film Festival which still operated today as one of the most prestigious women’s film festivals in Los Angeles. The focus of the film festival is to empower women in entertainment and to platform women artists with commercially viable productions. Ms. LaPage has been a forerunner in the empowerment of independent artists. Ms LaPage explored new technologies as the V.P. of Production for Fun Little Movies channel on the Sprint mobile network. She directed and produced the channel’s first animated series, “Spacey Movie, The Series”.

Ms. LaPage launched a “Christian Faith Based Network” for a philanthropic Christian organization. She held the title of Supervising Producer for all Original Programming in Production and Post Production for their scripted and non-scripted content.

Ms. La Page holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and a Master of Fine Arts in Film Directing from the California Institute of the Arts. She currently teaches as an Adjunct teacher at Columbia College Hollywood. Ms. LaPage is currently in development with Television shows for the major networks and writing a novel series.

10/1/18 at 9:45am pst - Janeane spoke with filmmaking team Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster of 'SCIENCE FAIR' - NOW PLAYING IN NEW YORK & LOS ANGELES AHEAD OF NATIONWIDE RELEASE SEPT. 28 - BEING CALLED 'ONE OF THE BEST DOCUMENTARIES OF THE YEAR' AND A POSSIBLE OSCARS CONTENDER

LISTEN to today's conversation with
filmmaking team Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S SCIENCE FAIR DOCUMENTARY FILM - THE TOP AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARD WINNER AT SUNDANCE *AND* SXSW FILM FESTIVALS - OPENS IN U.S. MOVIE THEATERS NATIONWIDE THIS FRIDAY



"Science Fair is so funny and so moving, it almost seems too good to be true."



UPDATED THEATRICAL RELEASE CALENDAR - OVER 40+ INITIAL CITIES BOOKED

NOW PLAYING IN NEW YORK CITY
AT THE LANDMARK AT 57 WEST
https://www.landmarktheatres.com/new-york-city/the-landmark-at-57-west/film-info/science-fair

NOW PLAYING IN LOS ANGELES
AT L.A. LIVE 14 & LAEMMLE'S MUSIC HALL (BEVERLY HILLS) PLUS ARCLIGHT SHERMAN OAKS

(SEE PASADENA, CA FOR MORE)

MANY OTHER LOCATIONS ACROSS THE COUNTRY!

Synopsis: Hailed by critics as "immensely likeable," "brilliant and quirky" and an "ode to the teenage science geeks on whom our future depends," and winner of the audience award at Sundance and SXSW, National Geographic Documentary Films' SCIENCE FAIR follows nine high school students from around the globe as they navigate rivalries, setbacks and, of course, hormones, on their journey to compete at The International Science and Engineering Fair. As 1,700 of the smartest, quirkiest teens from 78 different countries face off, only one will be named Best in Fair. The film, from Fusion and Muck Media and directed by the DuPont Award-winning and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaking team Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster, offers a front seat to the victories, defeats and motivations of an incredible group of young men and women who are on a path to change their lives, and the world, through science.





Social Media:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/sciencefairfilm
Twitter: @sciencefairfilm
Instagram: @sciencefairfilm