Table Scraps: Notes on Babette's Feast

The story of the early days of Deadwood, South Dakota; woven around actual historic events with most of the main characters based on real people. Deadwood starts as a gold mining camp and gradually turns from a lawless wild-west community into an organized wild-west civilized town. The story focuses on the real-life characters Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen.

Loosely based on a section of Mikhail Lermontov's classic Russian novel of the same title, the film involves a displaced cowboy (played by Kevin Jarre, the screenwriter of Rambo), a sociopathic record producer (Dennis Hopper) and, caught between them, a gum-chewing valley girl who would rather be somewhere else (Natalie Zimmerman). Lermontov's 19th century novel leaves a vapor trail on the action, but A Hero of Our Time is more precisely a portrait of contemporary Los Angeles, a tale of wayward heroism played out against a landscape of yearning and desolation. Director/writer Michael Almereyda, whose screenplay for Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World will be produced this year, completed principal photography for A Hero of Our Time in October of 1985. Dennis Hopper's participation occurred during a break in the filming of Blue Velvet.

In 1999, a woman's life is forever changed after she survives a car crash with two bank robbers, who enlist her help to take the money to a drop in Paris. On the way, she runs into another fugitive from the law — an American doctor on the run from the CIA. They want to confiscate his father's invention – a device which allows anyone to record their dreams and visions.

The daring experimenter Dr. John C. Lilly dedicated his life to radical self-investigation and unlocking the mysteries of consciousness and communication. “My body is my laboratory” was the motto, and his research on the language of dolphins and whales – as well as psychedelics and sensory deprivation – assured his own cult status in 20th-century pop culture as the basis for Ken Russel’s Altered States and Mike Nichols’s The Day of the Dolphin. Directors Michael Almareyda and Courtney Stephens, along with narrator Chloë Sevigny, explore the life of a determined scientist and his experiments into the psychonautical unknown.

A gambler comes to live with his sister and discovers his young nephew can predict the winner of horse races by riding on his rocking horse.

Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram designs a psychology experiment that still resonates to this day, in which people think they’re delivering painful electric shocks to an affable stranger strapped into a chair in another room. Despite his pleads for mercy, the majority of subjects don’t stop the experiment, administering what they think is a near-fatal electric shock, simply because they’ve been told to do so. With Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram strikes a nerve in popular culture and the scientific community with his exploration into people’s tendency to comply with authority. Celebrated in some circles, he is also accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster, but his wife Sasha stands by him through it all.

Men and women search for intimacy and meaning in their lives.

A service which creates holographic projections of late family members allows an elderly woman to spend time with a younger version of her deceased husband.

When successful businessman Sam Treadwell finds that his android wife, Cherry model 2000 has blown a fuse, he hires sexy renegade tracker E. Johnson to find her exact duplicate. But as their journey to replace his perfect mate leads them into the treacherous and lawless region of 'The Zone', Treadwell learns the hard way that the perfect woman is made not of computer chips and diodes.

Modern day adaptation of Shakespeare's immortal story about Hamlet's plight to avenge his father's murder in New York City.

A group portrait of filmmakers attend the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. Featuring Matthew Harrison, Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Todd Haynes, Greg Araki, Abel Ferrara, Atom Egoyan, James Gray, Robert Redford, Haskell Wexler, among many others. Co-directed by Amy Hobby. [Filmed in Pixelvision and blown-up to evocatively grainy 16mm.]

Escapes blazes a path through mid-20th-century Hollywood via the experiences of Hampton Fancher – flamenco dancer, actor, and the unlikely producer and screenwriter of the landmark sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Fancher recounts episodes from his life — romantic misadventures with silver-screen stars, wayward acts of chivalry, jealousy, and friendship — matched with a parallel world of film and TV footage wherein Fancher plays cowboys, killers, fops, cads, and the occasional hero. Escapes shows how one man’s personal journey can unexpectedly shape a medium’s future.

The story of the Promethean struggles of Nikola Tesla, as he attempts to transcend entrenched technology—including his own previous work—by pioneering a system of wireless energy that would change the world.

In a contemporary New York City, members of a dysfunctional family of vampires are trying to come to terms with each other, in the wake of their father's death. Meanwhile, they are being hunted by Dr. Van Helsing and his hapless nephew. As in all good vampire movies, forces of love are pitted against forces of destruction.

An oddball family on a Kansas farm are trapped in their farmhouse by an impending storm. The patriarch of the clan is a retired soda pop tycoon. He is currently dating a children's TV evangelist. Also living at the farm is his layabout daughter and her precocious 8 year old daughter, his would-be artist son, the son's fiancée, and the black maid. Also thrown into the mix is the daughter's ex-husband, a ne-er-do-well who is seeking to get back in his ex-wife's good graces.

Director Michael Almereyda's documentary on the weeks just prior to Sam Shepard's stage production of his play "The Late Henry Moss."