Mad Matthewz
by Leonard Klady

Looking at the young man reclining on a couch in the Media Center of the Los Angeles Film Festival you'd be apt to say that he looked relaxed, composed, at ease, friendly, maybe even delighted. So, how did this seemingly unflappable dude get stuck with a name like Mad?

The Hunting of A President
Ferenc Toth: Unknown Soldier
Mario de la Vega: Robbing Peter
Yasuaki Nakajima: After The Apocalypse
Michael Mann's L.A.: Realizing Collateral
Tarnation
Up for Grabs

Ferenc Toth: Unknown Soldier
by Leonard Klady

Toth believes that the rise of digital filmmaking has provided a new generation with the tools to make movies. He looks upon it as a mixed blessing. The costs and risks are low but the instances in which films escape the festival circuit are rare. His first feature, Unknown Soldier, has already played in Miami, Philadelphia and Dallas to good to excellent reviews. Still he doesn't expect his story of a teenager in Harlem left homeless and side-stepping urban pitfalls to be snapped up by a studio specialty division and given a significant commercial release.

Mario de la Vega: Robbing Peter
Robbing Peter
by Leonard Klady

Mario de la Vega has one of those smiles that draws people in like a magnet. He also has the sort of name that carries with it the suggestion of old world charm and demands a resonant Banderas accent.

Instead one of his producers is berating him for using the long signature and he simply shrugs and says off hand that it just means "of the." Though he sports a three day stubble, Vega looks and sounds like just another American kid. Though born in Mexico, he grew up in the States and attended business school at the University of Colorado.

Yasuaki Nakajima: After The Apocalypse
After the Apocalypse
by Leonard Klady

It took Yasuaki Nakajima almost five years to complete his debut feature After the Apocalypse but even a brief encounter with the Japanese-born, Manhattan-based filmmaker suggests resolve more than obsession in his working methods. He said notions of survival and communication (the apocalypse has rendered the last people on Earth mute) formed the basis of the film but adds the fact that there's a limited number of things one can say about the end of the world.

The Hunting of A President
by Gary Dretzka

The Hunting of the President can stand alone both as a cautionary political thriller and as an indictment of the media pawns who allowed themselves to be played like a fiddle, first by a handful of anti-Clinton good ol’ boys with too much time on their hands and, then, by a cabal of rich and powerful right-wing thugs. The President, of course, didn’t do himself any favors by succumbing to his basest instincts with a chubby intern in the anteroom of the Oval Office, or, for that, matter lying about it to his wife and constituency.

Michael Mann's L.A.: Realizing Collateral
by Andrea Gronvall

"I'll be watching you." The speaker was Tom Cruise.

And so began IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival first weekend kick-off tribute: a thoughtfully constructed, artfully paced and well produced evening boasting one of the biggest marquee names on the planet, honoring the vision of one of America's top directors of crime thrillers, and saluting the city that is the mecca of movie-making. "Michael Mann's L.A.: Realizing Collateral" cut right to the chase.

Tarnation
by David Poland

I will tell you this… it is a true-life fairy tale. There is a beautiful princess trapped in the castle tower of her fate. There is the child who is being raised by kind, but non-royal parents, barely aware of the existence of his fairy tale mother. And there is the handsome prince who wants to make it all right… though in this story, the prince has to save himself first, evolving from another one of the story’s “characters”, and may or may not be able to live up to our fairy tale expectations… or his own.

Up for Grabs
by Leonard Klady

"I'm a lifelong baseball fan and the day after it happened I saw this article in the paper with the headline: Fan Loses Fortune at Bottom of Pile," recalls Wranovics. "I thought this would make an interest movie."

The wrinkle in this yarn was that he had never made a film. He'd never evened picked up a movie camera though he'd taken one film history course as an elective when he attended Stanford University. But earlier that year he'd been a victim of the dot.com bust and when he considered a new career decided he'd like to write and direct movies.