Interview with the Director of "Chess Movie"

Jennifer Shahade has posted an excellent Interview with the Director of Chess Movie (working title), the documentary project I've mentioned before and urged you to support (see "Chess Movie Preview" and "Support 'Chess Movie'").  As an admirer of the successful chess program at I.S. 318 and someone who has been involved in making videos myself (I am currently editing a 30-minute documentary based on about 100 hours of footage following five students through our freshman writing course at Rutgers), I know the sort of challenges that Katie Dellamaggiore has faced and the daunting task of editing that lies ahead.  I wish her the best of luck and look forward to seeing the final product.

Support "Chess Movie"

I.S. 318 at NY State Championships

Katie Dellamaggiore, an independent documentary filmmaker from Brooklyn, is raising money for her Chess Movie, about the award-winning I.S. 318 team.  Visit her "Kickstarter" page to learn more about the project and to pledge your support.  Though they have already met their minimum goal of raising $4,000, they definitely need a lot more than that to finish this important documentary, which I think could do for scholastic chess what Mad Hot Ballroom did for kids' ballroom dancing.  Here is Katie's appeal:

Over the last 2 years I have been producing and directing a documentary about scholastic chess with my company Rescued Media.  Chess Movie (working title) goes inside one of the best junior high chess program in the nation, Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn, New York. Many students at 318 come from difficult circumstances and 60% are from low-income families, but being part of a winning chess team gives them a unique opportunity to experience success at a young age. Justus, Patrick, Alexis, Pobo & Rochelle are 5 of 50 team members that are learning on the chessboard the skills they need to face challenges of adolescence and their working class circumstances.

In April 2009 we embarked on our first trip with the team to Nashville, Tennessee, to the USCF Super Nationals. Once we witnessed how big the scholastic chess world was, we were hooked. Over the next year we embedded ourselves with the team-- at home, at school and away at tournaments -- and slowly, the kids' individual stories began to take shape.  Please view our five minute teaser for an idea of where the film is now headed. It’s our ultimate goal to secure a national television broadcast for Chess Movie and maybe even a small theatrical release. We also plan to build a strong community outreach campaign in the hopes the film will build support for scholastic chess programs in under served communities as we have witnessed firsthand the profound effect the I.S. 318 chess program has had on its students.

Right now we have a fundraising campaign underway at Kickstarter.com. Kickstarter is an online funding platform for artists to engage with their audiences and build support for their projects. Our Kickstarter campaign has been pretty successful so far, reaching our initial goal of $4,000 in just a few short weeks. But we still have 50 days to go and we need more than 4k to finish this film. When you log onto Kickstarter you will see that we are offering some really cool rewards and incentives for backers. For example a $10 donation gets you exclusive access to video updates and deleted scenes and a $55 donation secures you a "Special Thanks" credit in our film. We also offer chess-centric rewards like free memberships to WORLD CHESS LIVE and CHESS.COM but at the end of the day I hope you are most inspired to give because you love chess and are moved by the kids and their stories. We believe this film has the potential to breakdown false stereotypes about chess and present a new and fresh perspective to one of the world's oldest and most beloved games.

CHESS MOVIE (working title) from Rescued Media on Vimeo.

Tobey Maguire Considers Bobby Fischer Role

A passing reference in a Deadline Hollywood article notes that Steven Knight recently completed work for Columbia Pictures "on Pawn Sacrifice, a drama about Bobby Fischer's unlikely victory over Russian chess champ Boris Spassky. Tobey Maguire is producing and eyeing the Fischer role."  This may be the same project mentioned here last May (see Bobby Fischer on Film) based on Bobby Fischer Goes to War which had been optioned by Universal Pictures but later dropped.

A Game for Two

A Game for Two (english subs, full movie) from Stelios Koukouvitakis on Vimeo.

Ah, the trouble a chess player will go through for a woman who has read Art of Attack....

Chess Rhapsodies Redux

Back in May 2009, I directed readers to the "chess rhapsodies" of Lucio Etruscus, which set clips of cinematic chessplaying to music.  Today ChessVibes offers up a complete rhapsody filmography in "Chess in cinema -- the ultimate collection" for anyone who wants to track down the films referenced in these videos.

Chess appears with incredible frequency on film because it provides an instant and visually attractive marker of distinction, intelligence, or cunning in the characters with which it is associated. To get a good sense of the sheer number of films in which chess appears, check out the website Citazioni  scacchistiche  nei  media; the blog Echecs, cinéma, TV...léger; Bill Wall's list of Movies with Chess Scenes; and the website Chess in Cinema.  For the truly obsessed, I recommend Bob Basalla's excellent Chess in the Movies.

The Seventh Seal

Criterion's re-release of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, with its stark black and white compositions and famous chess game between Death and a returned crusader (played by Max von Sydow), will likely cause many to reconsider this classic film. Dennis Lim's review ("A Second Look: 'the Seventh Seal'") suggests that it still has power despite its many parodies and campily serious tone:

A heavily symbolic allegory of faith and doubt set in plague-ridden medieval Sweden, this seminal movie was the height of midcentury existentialist chic and ground zero for the cinephile golden age. It gave the cultural intelligentsia permission to take film seriously.

"The Seventh Seal" has since fallen victim to changing tastes and to its own popularity. (If anything, it is now more middlebrow emblem than highbrow badge of honor.) And it is precisely its unabashed seriousness, once so seductive, that has contributed to its somewhat diminished reputation.

Many of the film's images have passed into cinematic immortality, none more so than the recurring motif of a brooding knight locked in a mortal chess game with Death, assuming the form of a cowled, white-faced ghoul, and the final hilltop danse macabre, led by the scythe-wielding Grim Reaper. But the hooded figure of Death also has proved spoofable, popping up in such places as Bergman mega-fan Woody Allen's "Love and Death," Monty Python skits and "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey."

It might not be possible to liberate "The Seventh Seal," reissued in a new two-disc edition this week by the Criterion Collection in both standard definition and Blu-ray, from the historical baggage that surrounds it. But first-time viewers, and those revisiting it after many years, might be surprised to find a movie that feels at once dated and timeless: Its deadly earnest sensibility harks back to another era, but its stark iconographic power is undimmed, stubbornly resistant to parody. Read the rest online>

Bobby Fischer on Film



ChessBase points us to two trailers on YouTube for new films about the late Bobby Fischer: Me and Bobby Fischer (see above) and Bobby Fischer Live (embedding disabled). The first is a disturbing but very interesting documentary focused on Fischer's life after his arrest in Japan and extradition to Iceland. The second is an even more disturbing -- for chessplayers anyway -- docudrama about Fischer's life that focuses on the roots of his dementia in childhood. Each tries to extend the story of the 1972 World Championship match in different directions, forward and back in time, to the endgame and the opening. My impression is that the documentary "Me and Bobby Fischer" holds some promise of adding new dimensions to the Fischer saga by depicting his time in Iceland, which is not captured by previous documentaries that I know. But I think that the morbidly melodramatic "Bobby Fischer Live" will simply drive chessplayers bonkers with inaccuracies and chessic blunders. Any chess player will see several problems in the trailer alone, beginning with the scene showing a teenage Fischer (already a rising master cum IM) reading Tarrasch's The Game of Chess -- while having to use a board no less!

Ultimately, I don't think the rather chaotic and incomprehensible story of Fischer's opening days and sad endgame can ever be as interesting as the perfectly structured real-life story of Fischer's middlegame full of miraculous triumph and mystery -- his rise to 1972 stardom and Garbo-like disappearance -- a story that is beautifully, mythicaly, and touchingly narrated in young Josh's voice in the black and white archival vignettes of Searching for Bobby Fischer (much of which is on YouTube), so that one wishes someone would just string those moments together as a stand-alone video. That's why I had been excited to hear that the book Bobby Fischer Goes to War, which offers a very well dramatized and well researched account of the events surrounding the 1972 match, was optioned by Universal Pictures, and that they had hired director Kevin MacDonald (Last King of Scotland) to film it. But the latest reports suggest that the project has been shelved due to the economic crisis.

Among the best Fischer films I have seen are "The Mad Genius of Bobby Fischer" (portions of which can be viewed on YouTube) and the excellent British documentary "Fischer vs. Spassky" (all of which appears to be available on YouTube). Both do a fairly good job of telling the story of the 1972 match through archival footage and interviews with figures of the time, including the very likable Boris Spassky. But it would be nice to see Fischer's story get the full Hollywood treatment.

There is some hope that Madman Genius: Bobby Fischer Found, to be directed by Liz Garbus for HBO, will offer something along these lines. According to the website:

Madman Genius will chronicle the bizarre and tragic life of an American hero turned outlaw, chess champion Bobby Fischer. Fischer's rise and fall echoed the demise of the Cold War World Order; without the black and white of the chessboard reflected in the 'real' world, Fischer, arguably the greatest chess player of all time, went insane. Novelistic in its story-telling, the film will chronicle the spectacular rise and fall of an American icon.

Fischer's story continues to fascinate us and I am sure that there will be a string of future films about him. However, it appears we will still have to wait for this incredible true story to receive the cinematic rendering that it deserves.

Chess in Film, Set to Music

The YouTube "chess in film" compilation videos of Lucio Etruscas, which have received prominent notice from ChessBase and The New York Times, are definitely worth a look. If nothing else they present a high speed trivia challenge to the chess in film enthusiast -- though it would be nice to have a filmography for each, and ChessBase will probably succeed in compiling that. Perhaps Bob Basala, author of Chess in the Movies, could help (see my reviews and discussion here, here and here).