ROCK AND A HARD PLACE, 2005,(23 minutes), single channel video
Winner of the Programmer's Choice Award at CINEMATEXAS 2006.
This semi-narrative re-enactment video, compiled from bits of newpaper articles, a novel, an exposé, and an Oprah special, follows real events that took place between the years 1993 and 1995 between a young boy who writes a best-selling memoir of his abusive upbringing, his foster mother, and a famous gay novelist, whom he has never met in person. When a meddling reporter begins to snoop around, the triad is thrown into confusion.
With Dale Hoyt, Kevin McGarry, Jill Zimmerman, and Patrick Palermo. Special music by Nick Hallett and Sara Marcus.
Premiered at Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2006
Watch the trailer.
Jon Davies created my favorite context for this video http://www.jondavies.ca/BadBoys.htm in Toronto.
The true-ish story of Anthony
Godby Johnson’s rise to popular notoriety is a big fat slice of Dickensian
kitsch. Just when things could not get any worse, off goes a leg, in comes a
bubble, and up goes the fever. Thorson’s high camp re-enactment/rehabilitation
video reveals the universality in the artifice: men (even imaginary AIDS teenagers)
still have an easier time than women in getting what they need, and sometimes,
we have to invent people in order to get these things; whether they be love,
understanding, respect, a new computer, or a book deal.
-Ivan Lozano
CINEMATEXAS INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION PROGRAM #4
A RESPONSE BY JUSTIN GOLDWATER
Hazel Motes would fit in
real good with the motley assortment of guilty, pathetic, filthy characters
in this film program. Remember Hazel? He was the protagonist in Flannery O’Connor’s
WISE BLOOD, the youthful wannabe preacher with the deep-sunken eyes who was
constantly waggling his finger at townsfolk young and old while intoning in
a condemning voice, “I reckon you think you been redeemed.” He goes
on and on about how he hates Jesus, and longs to create a new church based on
this burning need to find redemption in the horrible, filthy world. He sinks
farther into depravity and self-mutilation in order to “pay” for
an indefinable cluster of sins than burns like a fire in his eyes. His downfall
is comic and self-wrought, tragic and Southern. He’s a real skuzzbucket,
like most of the characters in these sharp and funny films who are seeking some
form of redemption, or at least existential recognition, whether they realize
it or not.
So who’s the tragic character in Joshua Thorson’s weird Pinocchio-phantasm
story ROCK AND A HARD PLACE? Is it the HIV-positive suicidal kid who was neglected
and abused by his parents and offered up to their friends to be raped, who found
solace and shelter with a teen hotline counselor? Is it the counselor herself
who may or may not be concocting the boy, impersonating his voice, pathologically
injecting his tragic story into media outlets? Is it the writer who only knows
“Tony” through telephone conversations while mentoring him as he
turns his tragic tale into a best-selling book?
The film investigates our delicate relationship with modern MySpace-ian identity,
and how we perceive the identities of the tragic human-interest folks that blip
across our evening news, capturing the attention of a fickle, kleenex-dabbing
audience for brief episodes of time. Maybe the truly tragic are the ones who
are tricked into caring about yet another stupid kid who fell down a well....