By SANDRA GARCIA
Bicoastal production house The A+R Group has launched Monkeyshine, a graphic design company headquartered in Los Angeles. Co-executive producers Gower Frost and Roberto Cecchini, who is also president/executive producer of both The A+R Group and bicoastal/international The Artists Company, will head up the venture with creative director/designer Diane Van Ussel. Although Monkeyshine is backed by The A+R Group, it will operate as a separate entity.
What has made this company so great is Gowers experience as an executive producer fused with Dianes creativity, said Cecchini. It is the marriage of imagination with very reliable, thorough and caring project management. He pointed out that Frost will closely manage all projects. What we did not want to do is have a very creative resource with a lot of unreliability, added Cecchini.
The graphic design company has been taking on projects for a year now under the A+R banner, but after contracting to design the titles for the forthcoming MGM feature film Stigmata, directed by Rupert Wainwright, Monkeyshines principals decided it was time to establish an identity for the group and launch it as a separate company. (Wainwright helms commercials via Pavlov Productions, Culver City.)
Frost, Cecchini and Van Ussel are far from strangers. Frost came to The Artists Company as an executive producer in the early 90s after dissolving his own production company, Jennie & Co. Right from the outset, Roberto and I had planned to start some sort of venture together, and Monkeyshine is what it ended up being, said Frost. Van Ussel started as a graphic designer represented by The A+R Group after graduating from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 1996.
In the past year, the trio has racked up an impressive list of jobs and clients. Their reel is replete with big names like Country Time Lemonade, United Way, UNICEF and Amnesty International. They have designed jobs for Foote, Cone & Belding, New York and Chicago, and Ogilvy & Mather, New York.
The reel speaks for itself, said Cecchini. Weve been competing with top graphic design houses and we have been winning assignment after assignment, so the concept is really working, and people have been very pleased by the results. Were just happy now to have put a name to this venture and gotten it out there.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More