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Now Playing
Me and Orson Welles
Featured Guest: Richard Linklater
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Directed by Richard Linklater
USA, 2008
Color
114 Minutes
Show Times:
Wed., Nov. 11 8:00 PM
November 11, 1937 … exactly 72 years before our festival´s opening night, Orson Welles opened his production of Julius Caesar on Broadway. The Mercury Theatre show had begun rehearsals only a month earlier, but the theatrical wunderkind (four years before he would become cinema´s wunderkind with Citizen Kane) had no doubt that its radical stagecraft would shake the foundations of American theater. Richard Linklater, Texas´s leading maverick filmmaker, here confronts the ultimate maverick director, Welles, as filtered through Robert Kaplow´s novel Me and Orson Welles. Playing the "me" of the title is none other than Zac Efron, graduating from teen heartthrob to serious actor, and displaying impressive range. Efron plays Richard Samuels, a young actor drawn into Welles´s production and orbit. There he finds, and is enraptured by, Welles´s Girl Friday, Sonja (Claire Danes). Sonja, like us, however, is in the thrall of the great director, played by the amazing Christian McKay.
The audience is invited to a reception in the museum galleries following the film.
Admission: $25
BUY YOUR TICKETS IN PERSON AT THE HISTORIC ALABAMA THEATRE (2922 SOUTH SHEPHERD) OR ONLINE AT WWW.CINEMARTSOCIETY.ORG
This film is part of the Cinema Arts Festival Houston film series.
Born in Houston, Richard Linklater took the love of film culture he had developed here to Austin, where, in 1985, he founded the Austin Film Society. His ambition was to not only show but also make great films. His film Slacker became one of the seminal American independent features of the early ´90s, as audiences found themselves gripped by a plotless, starless, meandering portrait of a college town´s characters that was provocative and thoroughly entertaining. Linklater continued to both challenge and charm audiences with the densely talky Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), the experimental animation of Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), and the complex intertwining of stories in Fast Food Nation (2006). Among his other feature credits are Dazed and Confused (1993), SubUrbia (1997), The Newton Boys (1998), Tape (2001), and The School of Rock (2003).
 Click here to read an interview about the film with the filmmaker.
Be sure to check back for additional screenings or changes in the Films schedule. You can also contact us with questions about future films at film@mfah.org.
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