Alabama // Current

TIRING OF SEQUELS & REMAKES, LOW-BUDGET FILMMAKERS SET OUT TO PRODUCE AN ORIGINAL FEATURE

Mobile, Alabama based independent filmmaking group Fighting Owl Films is set to produce an independent feature in the city utilizing local talent. The feature, titled “The Night Shift”, is based on Fighting Owl Films' short film of the same name which proved an online hit, was positively reviewed in "Fangoria" magazine's online edition earlier in 2009 and has screened in several festivals across the United States.

A supernatural adventure-comedy, “The Night Shift” centers on Rue Morgan, the undead night watchman at Pinewood Oaks Cemetery. Rue, along with his buddy Herb, a limbless corpse, spends his nights trying to keep the cemetery’s cantankerous residents in, and his days dreaming of a date with hard-nosed day-shifter, Claire. It’s an okay afterlife until a scourge of supernatural occurrences leave Rue not only watching the cemetery, but also watching his back!

The short film’s positive reception coupled with the disillusionment with Hollywood’s current output of remakes and reboots encouraged the filmmakers to pursue their dream of turning the original “The Night Shift” into a feature length adventure film. Thomas Smith, the film’s writer/director and co-producer, is hoping to recapture some of the cinematic magic of the 80s Amblin films he grew up with that had a lasting influence.

“Growing up as a child of the 80s, the world depicted on film had a completely different atmosphere,” Smith says. “The films possessed a graininess and lived-in look that added an extra dimension of realism. There also seemed to be a greater emphasis on character and storytelling and less of the headache-inducing flash and sensory overload that’s become so commonplace today. It was the era of ‘Gremlins’, ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Indiana Jones’, films everyone could enjoy, not just children or adult audiences. That’s what we’re hoping to recapture with ‘The Night Shift’.”

The independent feature has secured its cast. Returning from the short to reprise their roles of Rue Morgan, Claire Rennfield and Herbie West are Khristian Fulmer, Erin Lilley and Soren Odom, respectively. New additions to the cast include Andrew Crider as Adramalech, the villainous vengence demon with an affinity for western wear, Jordan Woodall as Curly and Jonathan Pruitt as the mysterious Captain Roderick Blake. The film, currently in pre-production, is expected to begin shooting in May 2010.

For more information on Fighting Owl Films and “The Night Shift”, visit them online at www.fightingowlfilms.com and www.thenightshiftmovie.com.

###Mobile, Alabama based independent filmmaking group Fighting Owl Films is set to... more

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Clash in Alabama over Tennessee coal ash

Almost every day, a train pulls into a rail yard in rural Alabama, hauling 8,500 tons of a disaster that occurred 350 miles away to a final resting place, the Arrowhead Landfill here in Perry County, which is very poor and almost 70 percent black.

To county leaders, the train’s loads, which will total three million cubic yards of coal ash from a massive spill at a power plant in east Tennessee last December, are a tremendous financial windfall. A per-ton “host fee” that the landfill operators pay the county will add more than $3 million to the county’s budget of about $4.5 million.

The ash has created more than 30 jobs for local residents in a county where the unemployment rate is 17 percent and a third of all households are below the poverty line. A sign on the door of the landfill’s scale house says job applications are no longer being accepted — 1,000 were more than enough.

But some residents worry that their leaders are taking a short-term view, and that their community has been too easily persuaded to take on a wealthier, whiter community’s problem. “Money ain’t worth everything,” said Mary Gibson Holley, 74, a black retired teacher in Uniontown. “In the long run, they ain’t looking about what this could do to the community if something goes wrong.”

County leaders, who are mostly black, bristle at accusations of environmental injustice, saying that the ash is perfectly safe and that criticism has been fostered by outsiders, or even competitors who wanted the ash disposal contract for themselves.

“That’s the means to their end, that they can keep it out of black communities on the charge of environmental racism,” said Albert Turner Jr., a black county commissioner, inviting a visitor to sniff a sample of the heavy, mudlike ash in a souvenir glass jar. “They would benefit on the backs of the stupidity of African-Americans who let this trail of money get away.”

Bob Deacy, vice president of clean strategies and project development for the Tennessee Valley Authority, whose Kingston Fossil Plant was the site of the ash spill that covered almost 300 acres of land and waterways, said Arrowhead was chosen because it was reachable by train instead of truck, because it underbid other sites and because, unlike closer landfills, it had the capacity to handle all the ash.
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Again, greed trumps logic.Almost every day, a train pulls into a rail yard in rural Alabama, hauling 8,500 tons... more