NEWSY BITS
Stories for those who like 'em short
No Dodos here
How come everybody gets to see Flock of Dodos except us? The documentary about the Kansas school board evolution debate has already been screened at 30 sites around the country.
“We're showing it in every major city in the country except San Diego,” the writer and director, Randy Olson, told CityBeat.
The central character of the film is Olson's 83-year-old mother, Muffie Moose. Coincidentally, her house sits next to that of John Calvert, the primary litigator who in 2001 sued the Kansas City Board of Education for teaching evolution.
The film debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in May, but no major distributor picked it up.
“The companies think that if you don't take an extreme view one way or the other, no one will come see it,” Olson said.
Without a distributor, Olson has shown his film in museums and at universities to standing-room-only crowds. Since no foundation or grant financed the film, he typically asks for $5,000 from venues. The price tag prevented the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center from showing it, but Olson said he received enthusiastic interest from the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Well, that was until the day he got a terse e-mail, declining, without providing a reason, to show the film. Was the problem the controversial topic? San Diego is notoriously conservative. And the county hosts the nation's largest museum dedicated to Creationism, the Institute for Creation Research in Santee.
“No, we're a natural-history museum,” said Jim Stone, the museum's director of public events. “As far as we're concerned, evolution is not a controversial topic.” Stone didn't offer a clear reason why the museum declined. “There are a number of factors that determine whether we show a film or not,” he said.
Olson speculated that part of the problem is in the way museums now schedule their events years in advance, with plenty of time to market them. In San Diego, the upcoming Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit is one prominent example.
But fear not, San Diego. Flock of Dodos will be on Showtime this summer, and a DVD release is expected in August.
- Eric Wolff
Motivational man
On Monday, Rudy Giuliani filed papers that indicate he will be running for president of the United States. On Wednesday, Feb. 14, Giuliani will be at Cox Arena, delivering a motivational talk.
The company organizing the event, Get Motivated Seminars, confirmed that he would be there as scheduled, “live and in person.” Yes, the man who became “America's mayor” after 9/11 and wants to become America's president in 2008, will settle, at least for now, with being America's cheerleader.
While Giuliani is currently getting engaged in the traditional politics of running for president, notably in his recent visits to New Hampshire and Iowa, he has been avoiding the whole subject for the last few years. Instead, since at least 2005, he has used his speeches for Get Motivated as a means to reach thousands of hopeful entrepreneurs directly.
Still, Giuliani will be sharing the stage with San Diego Charger LaDanian Tomlinson, Steve Belluzzo (a former Microsoft exec and the former CEO of Silicon Graphics, which has since filed for bankruptcy) and Zig Ziglar (a full-time motivational speaker). That's quite a crew for an aspiring president to hang with backstage. What do you suppose they discuss in the greenroom?
- Eric Wolff
