RTU in Bama

Rock That Uke in Bama!
(for the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival)

September 20, 2003

We haven't been sending RTU out to film festivals all that much--but there are exceptions. Like the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, AL, whose festival director Erik Jambor kindly approached us to submit. It's hard to say no those types of invites. RTU co-directors Sean and Bill both attended this one. Birmingham is a cool place--an oasis of progressive dreams and artistic ambitions in the misty, kudzu-strangled state of Alabama. In addition to RTU, Sidewalk screened two of the Cinemá du Ukulele shorts that have accomnpanied us on occasion--Skizz Cyzyk's Damn You Mr. Bush and Ryan McFaul's Gay Boyfriend. To our delight, Gay Boyfriend won a Special Jury Award for Music Video. RTU came away a winner as well--of the somewhat less than adrenalizing ProductionHUB.com Best Use of Internet Technology Award.

William Preston Robertson prophetically poses beside a garbage can before taking to the stage at the Sidewalk Cafe in a pre-screening uke concert, where he played the first song he ever learned on the uke: Wild Thing. The RTU co-director then died the agonizing death of all non-performers who take to the stage on a whim.

Seasoned musical performer and fellow director, Skizz Cyzyk, in striking contrast to Bill, seemed to have memorized the songs he performed to the great delight and appreciation of the, actually now that we think about it, not all that interested cafe audience. Skizz's uke short, Damn You Mr. Bush, also screened.

RTU co-director Sean Anderson (far right) poses in a bean chair-filled, mylar-covered room with fellow director George Goehl (center) and his associate producer Will Wall (left). The mylar bean-chair room and the 3-D glasses that were handed out at the door were features of an excruciatingly trendy festival party that boasted an oxygen bar, but that on the upside also featured an elaborate spermatazoa-and- egg sock puppet tableau suspended from the ceiling.

George Goehl, a banjo player himself, strikes a pose with Skizz's ukulele as Will's pasty white knee looms in the foreground. George's King of the Bluegrass: The Life and Times of Jimmy Martin, a bio-doc of the eccentric, Opry-dissed bluegrass genius Jimmy Martin is well worth the viewing and quite deservedly won a Sidewalk Film Festival Special Jury Award.

Shy hipster Skizz Cyzyk and his supportively shy hipster wife, Jen Talbert, lounge restfully in the shiny cloister of mylar-stapled walls as visions of spermatazoa-and-egg sock puppets dance above their festival-weary noggins.

While no personal snaps of the screening were taken, here's a stock photo of the screening venue, The Brick Room with Sean's effigy posing out front--this time wearing his 3D bespectacled head from the mylar room.