Fame High this Friday

"FAME HIGH" QUAD CINEMA 34 WEST 13TH STREET October 12 - 18

Outside of my gallery life, I am a passionate film lover and I recently became a co-executive producer of the documentary FAME HIGH.

The film opens tomorrow at the Quad Cinema in New York for one week in order to qualify for the Academy Awards and has already received a rave review from the L.A. Times.

FAME HIGH, captures the in-class and at-home drama, competition, heartbreak, and triumph during one school year at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), also known as "Fame High", a place where talented teenagers reach for their dreams of becoming actors, singers, dancers, and musicians.

In FAME HIGH we follow a group of novice freshman and seasoned seniors struggling to find their voice - not only in their art but in life - with the help of, and sometimes in spite of, their passionate and opinionated families. Each student has sacrificed countless hours to become artistically good...but will they become excellent and be satisfied both personally and professionally?

"Are our dreams worth the sacrifice?" This questions is as relevant to these young artists as it is to their parents. In a time when performance-based entertainment is commonplace, it is safe to call FAME HIGH, "the facts behind the fiction." Overnight success is a myth, and FAME HIGH shows that the reality is nothing trumps endless hours of hard work.

Producer/Director Scott Hamilton Kennedy and cast members will be present for brief Q & A's in the LOBBY following the Fri. 10/12 6:15 show.

You can buy tickets for the screening here.

I hope many of you can make it.

One Year ...

It's hard to believe it's been a year since Steve Jobs died. With his ubiquitous presence in our lives and the omnipresence of his image and products and the continued growth of Apple he seems to hover above us like The Wizard of Oz.

To those of us in the visual world life simply wouldn't exist in the way it does without Apple. I would guess most of us spend more time on some kind of Apple device than we do with most humans and that our interactions with these devices are more productive than most other hours of the day. This is not an endorsement of withdrawing from human interaction! My one (and only) beef with my wife is how much time she spends checking e-mail on her iPhone, but again I'm not a Conde Nast editor-in-chief!

But Steve Jobs was not only a visionary and a business man - he was as great a friend to photography as the medium has ever had. Today, on the one year anniversary of his death, Apple put up this moving tribute on their landing page with nothing else to distract the viewer. In case you're not going to apple.com today I'm sharing the video.