Well, the time has come; I made the announcement to our regional chapter of the SFO yesterday, and plans are underway.
The “world premiere” — well, actually more like a “sneak preview” — of my documentary, A Woman for Our Time: St. Elizabeth of Hungary, will be held at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church in Melville (Long Island) New York, on Tuesday June 1, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. The screening is free and all are welcome. The film will still be in a rough state, with temporary narration and music track. There will hopefully be time for questions and answers afterward.
Many thanks to the pastor, Fr. Frank Schneider, and Pauline and Ralph DiCicco for making this happen.
How to get there:
The address is 175 Wolf Hill Road Melville, NY 11747
From Points West
- Northern State Parkway East to exit 41 (Wolf Hill Rd.)
- Make a left turn onto Wolf Hill Rd.
- Go straight through 2 traffic lights.
- Parish grounds are immediately after St. Anthony’s High School on the right. Park in large rear lot.
- The screening will be held in the Hospitality Room.
Now that tax time is (whew!) over for another year, I want to catch up on a few things.
My two stories on the Pope’s (non)-scandal have gained a tremendous amount of interest for this blog, but because of all the time I had to spend on them a few other things suffered.
Here’s a roundup:
Documentary
One project that suffered was actually beyond my control. The work on the St. Elizabeth documentary, which I had hoped would soon be far enough along for me to show a fairly good amount of completed footage with a temporary narration and music track, has been stalled for almost a month. It started with the computer crash on March 20 that I’ve already mentioned. It was a week before the store would condescend to back up the files from disk, though I in fact had most of them backed up already. In the meantime, I was able to use my spare laptop, but it was useless to think of working on video there, because the hard drive was so small.
Well, the hard drive was defective, so the store allowed me to trade in my computer. Then when I got my new laptop (and 500GB hard drive!) home, and all the files had been painstakingly copied back to the right directories — the documentary project file would either refuse to open or would indicate it couldn’t find any of my files. Another frustrating couple of weeks. I first tried to do this on Holy Saturday, at the same time I was helping Jimmy with the famous article.
Right after Easter, I was online with the tech geeks at Adobe, but it was some time before I got the problem solved. And unfortunately, the solution was to re-link all the video in the edited project to the original files, one at a time. That took a lot of time, but fortunately, all my original editing decisions had been saved, and I didn’t have re-do any of that. All the same, a good amount of time has been lost. I feel that I really owe an explanation to everyone who has been waiting patiently for the documentary to be done.
I do expect to have more news soon, including the date(s) I will be showing the footage in the New York area, and some more interesting news I hope as well.
Find out more about the film and donate to its completion HERE
As a consolation, here are a couple of more stills, from the famous scene of the roses:
Book News
In other news, the original print run of The Greatest of These is Love, my biography of St. Elizabeth, has just officially sold out (except for maybe 3-4 copies on Amazon). Get the last ones while you can! I do hope, when I have time, to put out an updated digital edition for Kindle, E-Pub and the like.
Our Patron
And, in all my attention to scandals and taxes, I missed the feast day (in the old Church calendar at least) of the patron saint of this blog, St. Justin Martyr, on April 14. I’ve got to find a picture of him and put it up, but in the meantime here is my imaginary letter to him that serves as the blog’s mission statement:
Update: Here’s something even better — a video on him!
Here are the first pictures from the production in LA. This is only a small part of the wonderful scenes we managed to shoot. More to follow.
Update, November 18:
Because I was flying back home all day yesterday, I wasn’t able to actually add anything to my post to describe the shoot. Here’s a little bit now.
On our the first day (Sat Nov 14), we filmed exterior shots in Waterman Canyon in the San Gabriel mountains just north of LA. It was a lovely spot, just perfect for replicating Thuringia in St. Elizabeth’s time. The leaves in CA evidently don’t turn in November, so it seemed almost like summer, which was when St. Elizabeth’s farewell with her husband actually took place. This in particular was the scene I had always dreamed about filming, and it turned out beautifully. The student actors from Azusa Pacific University did a splendid job, we had a great cinematographer (Michael), and the most beautiful location possible. Only the costumes were a little problematic, due to lack of budget and time. We had to make do with costumes borrowed from the Theater Department at APU, and some we rented from a local costume shop. We had to take what we could get, whether ideal or not.
We didn’t have to pay anything for this location, as it was a state park — at least no one showed up to object :). It was a bit different on Sunday. Michael and I had spent all day long Friday looking for an interior location without success (and he had spent a week previously looking). They all wanted insurance, which was too expensive for us, plus mucho $$$ for filming. Finally, on Saturday night, Hollywood Presbyterian Church (the founding church of Act One) agreed to let us do it for $500.00 plus insurance. We still had no insurance. But Michael got a cinematographer friend of his, Brad, who is quite experienced and has insurance, to come and be second cameraman on the shoot; we presented the church with his insurance certificate and paid him as well (still less expensive than purchasing insurance, which we might not have been able to get at the last minute anyway). Whew!
This second day went great too, but they only allowed us to have the place for 3 hours, which meant we couldn’t shot some things we had planned. But the lighting job Michael and Brad did was stupendous, and the second camera was helpful in moving things along faster. My brother Pat (with whom I was staying in Hermosa Beach) and his girlfriend Vera, had roles. Members of Michael’s family came along and filled in as extras in the church scene where Elizabeth lays down her crown. This was a grueling day, but well worth it.
More later.
Update: November 26, Thanksgiving Day, I’ve had quite a week catching up with work. Only now am I able to put up some more images and correct the ones I had already done.
The time is here at last! After months of frustration, everything has come together. I will be filming the final interview and the historical re-creation shots for the St. Elizabeth documentary A Woman for Our Time. I will be leaving November 12 for LA, and will stay until November 17 (St. Elizabeth’s feast day!). The recreations and interview will be filmed by my cameraman from Hungary, Michael Eaton. He is one of the up-and coming Hollywood cameraman with an expertise in digital video and has worked on a number of Hollywood productions, so it was difficult to coordinate with his schedule.
Please pray for this work. I could also use financial support. This trip is likely to drain all my funds, and when it’s done, I will will still have a lot of expensive post-production work to do.
You can donate online through credit card or Paypal here.
Please note that PayPal always adds $3.75 to your donation, because for some reason it always treats a donation in the same way as the price for a book, to which postage is to be added. I have no idea how to stop them from doing that. I don’t think it necessary to charge postage for a donation for a DVD. So if you want to donate only a certain amount, just enter $3.75 less than you want to give into the online box, and you’ll be all right.
Or send a check to Lori Pieper, Tau Cross Books and Media, 30 W. 190th St., Apt. 6N, Bronx, NY 10458-2553. Make the check out to Tau Cross Books and Media. Be sure to include your name and mailing address. Everyone who donates $10 or more will receive a free copy of the video. The actual price when released will be much higher. This is sure to be a very high-quality documentary and an excellent investment. Include your e-mail address for continuing updates on the video.
Here is the (more or less) final version of the trailer for A Woman for Our Time: St. Elizabeth of Hungary. With many thanks to Fr. Amando Trujillo-Cano for the use of his great song “Santa Isabel, Ensenanos a Amar.” (St. Elizabeth, Teach us to Love.”
Stay tuned for more news on the film as it takes shape.
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.
