CURTIS IMRIE

Performer/Mediamaker

Inquiries Welcome - 719-395-8065

CURRENT WORK IN PROGRESS

KID COLORADO A saga about triumph, love, loss, ketchup and what it means to make a buck in Central Colorado; an omnibus, a contemporary western; a false memoir. Big ideas for your small screen. Modest, funky media. Your TV is now the only place where truly personal, intimate drama of off-beat vision can be seen. This work-in-progress is presently unavailable to commercial venues. People have noticed pearls of possibility in its dog-eared, rambling style; fearless "epoch donkudrama" with warts and all...a cinematic equivalent to a non-fictional novel that uses a hybrid aesthetic in dealing with love, work, sport, friendship and loss... a movie made by a man who knows he's going to die... an omnibus that forms one multi-part tragi-comedy, a material focus on everyday life in the '60s through the '90s. A bittersweet journey. Raw emotion and radio rhetoric with the scratches, burns and fading "stepped on," look of the opus. Audiences have to look deeper and take their time with each short sequence. Watching these chronicles reminds some of a semi- autobiographical fable and others of watching the Special Olympics. This is found footage. It's not your homogenized made-for-TV special. It's hand and home-made. What will happen? Reality TV mini series blurring the lines between spin and news, fact and fiction. No Budget movie-style. It's about clarity, simplicity and transparency. What you see is what you get. There's dead ahead coverage and accounts with MTV cutting and '60s painterly graphics and lots of face time for yours truly. It's a mutant, a union of fact and fiction. There's some navel gazing, self searching and authorial presence. Some reminiscent narration. What's real and unreal is scrambled to the point that you know this character is not what he seems. What is credible? What is true? What is spin? There's a spirit of inquiry; it exists on a number of levels - image, speech, effects, titles, music, and clashing time frames. It's the intersection of personal and subjective rumination and social history that makes for a prismatic story. It's a modest film that can serve as a calling card. It's an out of nowhere feature, shot in places faraway from Hollywood, with a cast that looks more like ordinary people than movie stars and holds out the deeper, more fragile promise of genuine newness. In this epoch donkudrama, personal tragedy, horror, humor and love meet. The work goes beyond autobiography. Imagination plays a large role but not in the conventional sense. The personal has universal repercussions. The funky style chronicles the ebb and flow of life, probes deeply, and responds to events rather than trying to control it all through traditional narrative. The Hungry Ghost realm is projected when we are habitually overcome by grasping and greed. There's a long time mythology about hungry ghosts. They have huge stomachs and tiny mouths and necks and they can never get enought to eat. Whatever they do eat turns to fire. The tradition includes rivers of fire. Hungry ghosts live in a world rich in resources like the earth and the West, but as far as hungry ghosts are concerned, they're wandering in a desert; nothing satisfies. This is microcinema. It's a cinematic microbrewery and it derives most of its power from "amateurish" immediacy. It thrills by keeping it real and documents part of a stubborn subculture that has taken root in a high desert environment. I thought I could add a certain authenticity and trick the viewer into believing it if I used my real name and said, "Look, I was there," and the viewer might forget this is an invention afterall how many petty street criminals evolve to activist leaders? This idiosyncratic piece often takes the form of video dream diary steeped in a lyrical sense of landscape, human particularity and critters. Bill Pruitt, independent filmmaker in LA, says, "This video almost plays out as a film adaption of Edward Abbey's "Fool's Progress," the book he wrote as he was dying. He called it "an honest novel" and Imrie's quite obviously an honest filmmaker." What is gained by the public exhibition of the "false" private self? What is needed to match this level of social engagement and passion is the ever present need for more resources. The sequences delight in their own ambiguity. They blend traditional documentary style with a fictional technique to be the cinematic equivalent of a nonfictional novel pioneered by Jack Kerouac. It's a hybrid aesthetic that synthesizes narrative and nonfiction to take the character on a life's journey. This is where documentary meets the avant garde. It's paean to passing decades. There's a Peckinpah nostalgia for the mythical world where Real Men roam the open range and mountains. There's the ever encroaching modern world. The guy is independent, stubborn, a loner and loyal to his friends. We've watched the rise of talk shows and reality TV. This is a different approach to first-hand accounts. There are risks in sharing an American life with an audience. There's a dead certainty in this brave new world of 500 TV channels and video cameras where sameness chases out difference: where the sensational and shallow push out the literate and challenging; and where reality takes a back seat to fantasy compensation. There's a need for a fearless epic like this. Sometimes you show the truth and no one comes; sometimes you show the truth and the planet holds its breath. Sometimes major motion picture refers to the scope of the idea, not the budget. There's the hope that your encounter with this style of filmmaking will not only provide personal rumination and spirited discussion but inspire others to pursue this mode now that camcorders are everywhere. We need to start trimming the scenes and giving them uniqueness and character so the parallel stories will move more naturally, clearly and coherently. Color quality and different filmstocks are used to evoke nostalgia and period. It was shot on 16-millimeter, 8mm, 35mm film and regular VHS, super VHS and high-8. I guess digital is next. I feel like Rip VanWinkle trying to tell this yarn as the evolution in technologies keeps rocketing past me but somehow adds to the aesthetic of the yarn. I didn't set out to make a hit, and the truth is if I had to I'd write these stories in pencil, copy them and give them to my friends, family and certain strangers. It can't be overstated that this is not an easy film. I don't know if it can be viewed in one sitting. If you can get your hands on it, decide for yourself. I'd like to get through the misunderstood, marginalized, outsider point of view on this project, but finish the thing and keep it personal and low budget. This "donkey" has gone through so many incarnations, people have suggested I never ever intended to finish it. But I do! Process is one thing, and this film has a life of its own, and it is READY to be birthed. I can't go through life anymore as a 10-pound chicken trying to lay a 20-pound egg, and I didn't set out to be a provocateur or an artist. I'm basically just a lunch bucket laborer trying to say truths about life as I've seen it. Maybe you can help me finish it. Granted it has taken awhile to find the path for this "donkey." Attentive amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. I tried to be as amateur as possible because the piece is a labor of love. It's pitched at the level of a school/community play. Mock documentary. Emotionally unwieldly. The piece is about the dynamic of character and emotion. Never mind the production values. Feel the grip. Not about composition, but about tracking a character. Need to tell this saga and find audio visual/flesh and blood "writing" less onerous than writing a book. The two story lines are completely interdependent and influenced by memory, dreams and street reality. No matter how edited down it becomes, it will always have a loopy, lazy structure with lots of long spaces and a splintered narrative. Afterall, there's more to life than a three-act structure. And the blurring of past, present, and future makes for one long dream/death rattle. We see much of this stuff in short, temporal, rapid shots on every-night TV. This piece comes complete with faux commercials. The "story" is secondary to the uniqueness of the experience. My hunch is audiences are hungry for this kind of experimentation. The "beats" of the character are what remain of this porous structure. We jump from tenderness to slapstick and irony to longing within various scenes. Test screenings have made audiences question whether this thing is provocative, puzzling, obtuse, boring or idiotic. This is a proleptic process. Is the piece a memory? a hallucination? an odyssey? It's a dead man's tale for sure. A tombstone. A rock to throw through the window of the status quo with surprising juxtapositions and an epitaph for three generations. It's no more of an absurdist exercise than the subculture/sport it follows. It's about a "loser" indefatigueably struggling on the side of righteous causes. There's desperation and unlikely exaltation and small victories. You see a young man mature and decay. If you can deal with the rough edges and the rawness, you can soar with the piece. It's an elegy. Each episode shifts in mood and offers subtle changes along with the different film and video formats utilized to indicate shifts in time and space. They say your entire life can flash by your eyes before you expire. That's just about everything we crammed into this movie. Be bold; take a look. Enjoy it. Slow down and take your time viewing this thing. Turn it on; turn it off. Tune in. "These are very troubling times. Our resources and our great ingenuity, our artists and our scientists, are currently using their ability for the same old things: armaments, and things that don't enlighten people but ultimately kill them. What I'd like to say is this: I dream and hope the cinema in general can step forward, be something other than a means of employment, so that we too can offer possibilities on how human beings can inherit the beautiful future that they deserve, and this is a future that I am very optimistic about -- if we can ever get to really air the ideas that might make it possible." "The cinema and all the arts have that potential. Artists are the radar of society; they illuminate things so we can see and move in the proper directions. There are many paths to choose, as we know, and these paths have not always led to great happiness. A couple years ago this country had a wonderful surplus. And I was thinking, my god, maybe they'll decide to take all that money and use it on educating young people or funding institutions for our artists." Francis Coppola, Lincoln Center, May 2002. The culture is always ahead of our politics. Hildy in Hecht & McArthur's "The Front Page" Agate in Clifford Odets' "Waiting for Lefty" Julian in Lillian Hellman's "Toys in the Attic" Be careful with the roles you choose, because your mask is apt to become your face. Bo in William Inge's "Bus Stop" TRAINING Bachelor of Science in Communications, Northwestern University, 1968 American Conservatory Theater two year scholarship Norman Jewison internship Actors Ensemble Theater: Member Ray Rheinhardt: Classes Director, Chaffee County's musical, "The Fantastiks" Assistant to Roger Vadim, MGM Screen Test with Cybill Shepard (See "Cybill Disobedience," ISBN 0-06-019350-6, pp.82-83) Co-Producer, Knight in Glass Armor, 2001 Best Dramatic Feature, New York Independent Film Festival Truth is, everything -- even now -- is "training." See below. Return to Top PRODUCTIONS STAGE ROLE LOCATION/THEATRE Williams- The Glass Managerie Tom California Conservatory Theatre Gurney- Love Letters Andrew Leadville Hellman- Toys in the Attic Julian Live Oak Theatre Inge- Bus Stop Bo Live Oak Theatre Albee- Death of Bessie Smith Doc Berkeley Community Theatre Hecht & MacArthur- The Front Page Hildy Portland Odets- Waiting for Lefty Agate San Francisco Man w/the plastic sandwich The Man in pre production/rehearsal COMMERCIALS ROLE LOCATION Pontiac/Toyota Spokesperson Oakland Halston of Mexico The Guy San Francisco Mercury Cougar "Proud Mary" The Guy Bodega Bay No on Prop. 13 Joe Friday San Francisco Sears Roebuck The Guy Chicago Alberto Culver The Guy Los Angeles Classic Coke The Guy Santa Cruz PBS - Big Money Out of Politics Congressional Candidate Colorado Adelphia Cable - Iraq Attack? Congressional Candidate Colorado Springs Statewide Television Colorado Lottery (My asses; not my face) Prospector, donkeys, CO high country As the "Guy" and Classic Coke TELEVISION ROLE LOCATION Midnight Caller Zymack's Detective San Francisco Colorado 2000 - Spirit of Colorado The Guy BV Burro Race for Labor Day Channel 4 News The Guy Burros as Alternative Livestock and Teaching School 2000-CH 4 Congressional Candidate Denver -- 3 minutes of "free airtime" on the TV airwaves we the people are supposed to own 2002 - CH 4 Congressional Candidate Statewide - Big Money Out of Politics For more on U.S. 50

The Lost Frontier A feature-length movie on videotape about packburro racing, Big Brothers and living in the West as if the future mattered. Music by Norton Buffalo. Available for $15.00 plus $2.50 shipping/handling. "A truly cool feature length film about the changing West and pack burro racing...all people truly interested in the donkey or the West ought to buy it." (The Brayer Magazine, 10/98) "If you are curious about pack burro racing, or just want some good donkey entertainment you can order this video...." Mules and More Magazine July 1999 Special screening, 1997 - Westcliffe, Colorado "Western Film Festival" > Contact Steven Serafini at Phone Booth Films (707) 938-2887 Phone Booth "Dials" Again -- An Imrie/Serafini semi-sequel to the "Lost Frontier" now in pre-production .... "U.S. 50"

Gossamer Moon - a ZT Production. A sequel to "Prospects." (see above)

Contact Curtis Imrie (719) 395-8065 Vista Visions Buena Vista, CO 81211-1588

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Last Update: October 2004