Filmmaker Magazine, Spring 2002
IN FOCUS: Mary Glucksman profiles six new feature films in production.
By MARY GLUCKSMAN
THE PINK HOUSE
"Woody Allen does Animal House" is how co-directors Tessa Blake and Ian Williams describe The Pink House, their pungent comedy about five left-leaning college housemates and the conservative sorority next door. Containing a '20s-set prologue and 10 animated sequences, the film, says co-director and writer Williams, "is as intense, philosophical, independent and weird as the people I lived with in the house the film is based on."
Blake and Williams met as undergraduates at UNC's Chapel Hill campus. By the time they reconnected several years after graduation she had launched a film career with her documentary Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me, and he had parlayed his cultural studies screed, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail, into Hollywood interest. Williams also worked as a trailer editor, cutting clips for films like Sleepy Hollow. "It was incredible preparation for directing," he says. "You distill a movie to its absolute vertebrae."
The live-action portion of The Pink House was shot in Chapel Hill last summer on 16mm (the prologue) and DV with the Sony DSR 500. With a rough cut nearly ready by February 2002, the directors focused on the animated sequences and a final chunk of financing. Pink House stars Heather Matarazzo as the evil sorority queen and Zack Ward (Titus), Matt Dawson (Climax), Omar Scroogins (Law and Order), model Natane Boudreau and Spanish ingenue Pilar Punzano as the housemates.
