This is the latest newsletter on the documentary I have sent out by e-mail. If you interested in getting on the list for these notices, please let me know at editor@taucrossbooks.com. Please not also that the PayPal set-up has now been fixed, so that when you donate at the documentary’s website, the extra $3.75 for shipping isn’t added any longer.
Dear Friends,
I’m happy to say that the first showing of a rough cut of A Woman For Our Time: St. Elizabeth of Hungary on June 1 went very well. Some 80 people attended the screening at St. Elizabeth’s Church in Melville, and there was very enthusiastic applause and much comment afterward. This is a great way to help toward finalizing the editing, because I now know what works and what doesn’t. The temporary narration for the showing was provided by an actress friend of mine, who agreed to donate her services at short notice.
There is still a lot to be done not only for the final editing, but completion of narration in different voices, final music score and preparing subtitle tracks, as well as making copies for distribution. Not to mention the outstanding bills for photo and video rights.
Unfortunately, I have come to a complete standstill on the financial side. A very generous donation from a Franciscan friend helped me get a much needed transfer of some of our original HDV tapes to disk (the original transfer had been lost, and the only thing left was the bad DVD version that caused all sorts of trouble). Because the tapes from Rome used an older camera, a camera I couldn’t seem to rent anywhere, I had to go to a video house to have them do the transfer; in all that cost $750.00.
So once again, I’d like to urge people who are interested in the film to make a donation. You can donate HERE, using your Paypal account or credit or debit card.
Or you can send a check or money order to Lori Pieper, Tau Cross Books and Media, 30 W. 190th St., Apt. 6N, Bronx, NY 10468. If you donate $10 or more, you will get a free copy of the DVD. Please be sure to include your name and mailing address. I’m hoping this will give me the last push necessary to put the film out.
In a short time, I hope to put one last short trailer on YouTube, using some of the beautiful recreation footage of Elizabeth’s life we shot last fall in LA. It will also include a bit from Elizabeth’s childhood I shot in May in Queens, with little Isabel Mogollon playing Elizabeth.
And also hopefully I will soon be able to announce the distribution date.
Please keep reading these updates to learn of future showings. If you are in the New York area and are interested in having a showing in your church, school, SFO fraternity, etc. — anywhere that has a TV and DVD player, please let me know.
Thanks you for your patience, especially all those who have donated so generously. May God, St. Francis and St. Elizabeth bless you.
Here’s another new trailer - for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!
I haven’t had much time to analyze this, but it seems to be a trailer for the whole of the film version, even though it’s going to be shown in two parts in theaters, Part I this November, and Part II next summer. And yes, it does look exciting and brings back all sorts of memories of a book which I read all of three years ago now!
So — analyze away for yourselves, and let me know what you think.
The trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has finally appeared. I’ve been waiting for a long time to see what the adaption of my favorite of the Narnia books would be like. It looks exciting but one big mystery: Where are Eustace and the dragon?
If you read the book (and I’ll try to avoid spoiling it if you haven’t), the character of Eustace and his adventures with a monstrous dragon form one of the story’s major (almost) explicit Christian threads. But Eustace barely appears in the trailer. He has a line or two at the beginning, and — I think — a voice-over line later on, but more important there is no CGI dragon in sight. So are the book’s Christian themes once again being censored or dumbed-down for secular audiences? I think Prince Caspian was hurt by this, especially by its muddling the theme of following Aslan even when you can’t see him.
Of course, the trailer might not mean much; after all the movie is six months or so away, and this is the teaser; the advertising is bound to focus on the familiar characters; and the CGI dragon work might not be completed yet.
Also, there are some teasing dragon-hints right at the trailer’s very close. I was tipped off to this by an observant viewer who commented on the American Papist blog (second comment down as of this posting).
Well, maybe it wasn’t quite a world premiere, since it isn’t even finished, but the screening of the rough cut of my film A Woman for Our Time: St. Elizabeth of Hungary last Tuesday night was a great success, with some 80 people in attendance and enormous applause afterward.
I haven’t been able to put up anything about it until now, since I’ve had to do some 60 hours of work this past week — and I’m not yet done — to make up for time lost last week. Not to mention the fact that our little early heat wave this past week in New York has really been dragging me down. (Happily it got cooler last night and is now quite comfortable). I do plan to keep everyone updated on possible future screenings this summer, as the film is readied for DVD.
Don’t forget, if you would like to receive further updates on the film via e-mail, please write to me at editor@taucrossbooks.com, and you will be put on the list. You can also donate to completion of the film here:
Here it is - it’s taken a lot of work. This one was based largely on the interviews done in our last round of celebrations in Hungary, but covers a bit of every place we shot in. This time, the interviews were almost all in English, so I made this an English-language only trailer.
This is really a rough, unfinished version; there are still a lot of problems. One of the biggest is due to the fact that Michael was unable to use his light package in Hungary — his high-powered lights blew out the fuses in the place where we were staying. So we couldn’t move around for interviews, and had to gather as many of the lamps and other lights the Manreza Center could find for us all in one place — Michael’s room. So every interview was shot in the same spot, and from almost the same angle. It can be very tiring to look at. I hope there will eventually be some way to fix all this in editing, or at least not to have so many of the interviews with the same background one after another.
On the other hand, this one uses a greater variety of images, and is faster-moving and more visually exciting than the first trailer.
There will be more edited footage as time goes on. So keep checking back.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history."
Pope Benedict XVI to the German Parliament, Sept 22, 2011.
