Cinema Arts Festival Houston 2009

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.

McKay was recruited for this role based on his acclaimed theatrical performance as Welles in the one-man show Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles. John Foote writes in the Oscar blog In Contention: “When McKay appears on screen for the first time, all eyes go to him and never leave; it is as though Welles has stepped out of a time machine,” and Todd McCarthy of Variety calls McKay’s “extraordinary impersonation ... the indisputable highlight of Me and Orson Welles.”

Featured Guest: Richard Linklater 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).