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FLY AWAY opens THIS FRIDAY, 4/15, in select cities: NY, LA and DC

AN EXCITING MOMENT WE HAVE BEEN WORKING TOWARDS FOR YEARS IS NOW HERE!

On THIS FRIDAY, FLY AWAY will open for commercialtheatrical run in select cities.

As of 4/15, it will open in:

LOS ANGELES (at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills + AMC Covina 3 in Covina)

NEW YORK CITY (at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan)

WASHINGTON, DC (at the West End Cinema)

As of 4/22, it will open in:

NEW HAVEN (at the BowTie Cinema)

Please contact each theater provide details. Including which days I will be there for a Q+A after the screening.

Hope you can come and PLEASE spread the word!
Janet

Los Angeles Theatrical Run: Details! PLEASE COME!!

Opening in Los Angeles on Friday, April 15, 2011

Laemmle Music Hall 3
9036 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
www.laemmle.com

AMC Covina 30
1414 North Azusa Ave
Covina, CA 91722
www.amcentertainment.com


Come meet filmmaker Janet Grillo as she partakes in Q&A sessions at
the Laemmle Music Hall 3:

Friday, April 15th following the 9:45 pm screening
Saturday, April 16th following the 7:20 pm screening


“Warm, wise and wonderful.
A movie that touches the deepest recesses of your heart.
One of the most touching and endearing films of the year.”
Avi Offer – nycmovieguru.com


“Exceptional performances by two femme leads
and sensitive but unsentimental storytelling
throughout”
Joe Leydon – Variety

VARIETY Review; from the "Paper of Record" of the Entertainment Industry.

SXSW
Fly Away
By JOE LEYDON
A Cricket Films production. Produced by Janet Grillo, Pavlina Hatoupis. Executive
producers, Catherine Hardwicke, Lee Adhemar G. Feldshon, David F.
Schwartz. Directed, written by Janet Grillo.
With: Beth Broderick, Ashley Rickards, Greg Germann, J.R. Bourne,
Reno.

Anyone offering a plot synopsis of "Fly Away" runs the risk of making writer-director Janet
Grillo's debut feature sound like dozens of similarly themed made-for-TV tearjerkers. So it will
behoove any venturesome distrib that picks up this indie drama to find a way of playing up
the pic's distinguishing strengths: exceptional performances by two femme leads and
sensitive but unsentimental storytelling throughout. Even that may not be enough to
completely dispel been-there-seen-that resistance by potential ticketbuyers, but favorable
reviews and word of mouth could eventually boost viewership in ancillary streams.
With minimal reliance on cliches and contrivances, Grillo focuses on a turning point in the evolving
relationship between Jeanne (Beth Broderick), a loving but stressed single mother, and Mandy
(Ashley Rickards), her autistic teenage daughter.

Jeanne has devoted years to attentively caring for Mandy more or less on her own. Indeed, the pic
strongly hints that her marriage to Peter (J.R. Bourne), Mandy's father, may have broken up years
earlier because of her refusal to have the girl institutionalized.
At 15, however, Mandy is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Although she attends a public
school with a program for mainstreaming special-needs children, she faces expulsion because of her
sporadic fits and violent outbursts. Jeanne, who works out of her home as a freelance financial
consultant, desperately tries to balance her roles as mother and breadwinner. But her work is
suffering and her nerves are fraying.

"Fly Away" benefits greatly from Grillo's low-key, matter-of-fact depiction of day-to-day details in her
characters' lives. Whether Jeanne is cheerfully preparing Mandy for school, or calming her daughter
as the girl screams and screeches her way through yet another anxiety attack, many scenes have a
documentary-like flavor.

Pic has an understated, lived-in quality that makes each sudden disruption all the more powerful. At
one point, Jeanne skeptically rebuffs the romantic overtures of a well-intentioned neighbor
(engagingly played by Greg Germann). Her brutally blunt-spoken rejection of what she interprets as
his pity is unexpectedly unsettling -- suggesting that, for all her genuine selflessness, Jeanne can
barely suppress a furious rage at her lot in life.

Here and elsewhere, Broderick subtly expresses diverse and sometimes contradictory emotions,
effectively playing Jeanne as a loving parent who's beginning to buckle under the weight of a near-
impossible burden. As Mandy, Rickards is so compellingly persuasive in her unpredictability, some
auds may wonder if she actually is autistic. (For the record: She isn't.) Both individually and in
tandem, the actresses consistently impress with their precise acting choices.

Sandra Valde-Hansen's fluid lensing suitably enhances the sense of intimacy Grillo and her players
achieve.

Camera (color, HD), Sandra Valde-Hansen; editor, Danny Daneau; music, Luke Rothschild, String Theory; production
designer, Katie Byron; costume designer, Trayce Gigi Field; sound, Matthew Sanchez; associate producers, John
Yonover, Matthew L. Henderson, Katie Byron; assistant director, Henderson; casting, Erin Toner. Reviewed at SXSW
Film Festival (competing), March 17, 2011. Running time: 80 MIN.
Contact the variety newsroom at news@variety.com

We'll be at the Palm Beach Film Festival this Fri + Mon!

We're at the PALM BEACH FF in West Palm Beach/DelRay area this Friday, 3/25 at 7 p.m, and Monday, 3/28 at 12 noon.
I'm flying in for the Friday screening and will do a Q+A after. Come if you're in the area. If you know other people who live there, spread the word!

To get tickets, go to:

http://www.pbiff.com

USA NEWS: great interview with Beth Broderick!

Beth Broderick goes to extremes with indie films ‘Fly Away,’ ‘(818)’

March 16th, 2011Brian Truitt

You can’t get much more different than the two indie movies with which actress Beth Broderick is barnstorming the film-festival circuit. In the dark comedy (818), which was just at the Miami Film Festival and is heading to Cleveland, Broderick plays an aging, has-been thespian whose career gets a boost when she’s pegged for killing her appliance-peddling husband. And premiering at South By Southwest this week — before moving on to the Palm Beach Film Festival — is the drama Fly Away, which stars Broderick as a single mom struggling to care for her severely autistic daughter (played by Ashley Rickards). Fortunately, SXSW allows her to hang out in her second home in Austin, Texas. “I love getting to Austin and throwing off the big-city LA vibe and putting on my flip-flops and trying to get people to vote. It’s making me really happy,” Broderick, 52, says with a laugh. She balances her acting career with many efforts outside Hollywood, including voter engagement, animal-rights and environmental causes (such as her work with The Thirst Project), and the anti-AIDS movement (she helped found The Momentum Project in 1984). I talked with the former Sabrina the Teenage Witch star — who was Aunt Zelda to Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina — about her performances in her two films, so read below for our conversation and check out this trailer for Fly Away.

Photos by Catherine McNamara and Meg Madison


Fly Away Trailer from Fly Away on Vimeo.


These are two very, very different roles. It’s interesting watching them back-to-back.
They couldn’t be more different, could they? [Laughs] It’s very freaky. I’m so different from both characters in real life, and with (818), I’m the least actressy actress in the history of the world. Everyone will tell you that. So I really had to become this actressy actress and I wasn’t sure I could, really. I’ve never been the fingernails and the hair and all that — that’s just so not me. When we finally pulled her together physically, I was like, “OK, this hair and makeup girl’s a genius because I don’t look like that.” And for Fly Away, I had strip away any semblance of actress or presentation, and really live in this raw nerve center that is Jeanne’s life. They were both challenges in different ways.

First, let’s talk Fly Away. Did you talk with mothers of autistic children for research?
Not really. My sister Laura is one of the leading specialists in the country in working with adults with severe autism and disabilities. She’s been doing that all of her life, and I’ve been around it with her years and years and years. She was actually a consultant on the film and really helped us with a lot of those behaviors. We have all these parents out there who really are struggling, and when the kids turn to their teenage years, that’s when changes really happen and a lot of families can no longer cope. None of us are trained or prepared for our teenagers in the first place, but if they’re severely impacted? What the hell!

The shoot was 14 days long. That must have been a pretty exhausting two weeks.
It was bone-crushing exhaustion by the time I was done. Actually, the last few days of the film, I could no longer drive to the set. I was too tired and the producer picked me up because I was afraid I would run over somebody or crash my car. I was like, “Just let me sit here with ice on my face and I’ll get there!” [Laughs] You know when you take on a job like that and you look at the schedule, you know what it’s going to be. You know going in they’re going to try to kill me. And of course they do – they have no choice!

What other role that you’ve had come close to that emotional journey?
The character I played on Lost [as mother to Evangeline Lily’s Kate] was a pretty rough, emotional journey, but most of my career, I’ve been a light comedienne, which has its own set of complications — comedy’s hard. This was definitely the most sustained, dramatic role I’ve taken on in a long time.

Ashley really inhabits her role well, too.
It was very transformative. For a young actress like that — and believe me, I play the mom all the time, so I have a lot of movie and television children — she just came with no emotional complications. She was dedicated to doing it right and getting it right. She was such a little trouper and I really bonded with her almost from day one. I’m kind of an unfussy, very dedicated actor and so was she, and it really paved the way for us to have this amazing relationship on film.

Do you keep up with all of your movie and TV children?
Yeah, they always keep up with me, too. I mentored a group for a long time called the Young Progressive Majority, so there are about 2,000 people who call me mama out there in the world. [Laughs]

If you aren’t the “actressy actress” type, did you go a little over the top as Alyssa in (818)?
You kinda have to. You have to try to look almost fake, and I’m so not fake. I didn’t really know if I could be fake! [Laughs] And she’s such a shark. It doesn’t matter how dark it gets, she will find her way through, she will kill, she will do whatever she has to do to get where she needs to be. That’s an uncomfortable characteristic for me to inhabit, although I think the movie is really a lot of fun.

Do you feel more at home naturally in something like (818) than a gritty drama?
I would say probably, yeah – more at home in that it’sa more familiar state of being. Comedy is such an intellectual thing in a way because you really have to think on so many different levels, and I really enjoy that. It’s some place I like to live, whereas in a really gritty drama, you’ve really got to tear yourself apart to do it.

With the many actors and actresses you’ve met over the years, while they might not have been as shark-like as Alyssa, do you often see that kind of extreme ambition in either younger or older performers?
Both. There are actresses out there who will do anything they can to mess you up during an audition. They’ve got the extensions and the nails and the fake tan. It’s very hard for those people to get older – really hard. There’s a certain kind of desperation that kicks in because there’s a power that comes with that glamour. As women age, that power is taken away from them. And some of them really can’t give it up and makes them crazy, I’m sure you can think of a lot of tabloid examples of that in recent years with people who really had lived in that place all of their lives. Alyssa doesn’t fall apart — she just plays to win so hard that she sacrifices almost everything to get there. A lot of people just fall the hell apart when they hit their 50s, and it’s because of that ambition, that heat-seeking missile quality, they don’t develop any ego identity outside of our business. My ego identity is just as strong with being a mentor to young political aspirants and writing for the Huffington Post and being a good cook. My identity is equally distributed among those things. They always tell you, “Whatever you do, don’t get older,” and I just went and did it anyway. I’m prepared for the consequences of that. I’m very lucky in that I always work and I never pay much attention to anything but the work.

Do you feel like staying busy outside of acting keeps you balanced so you’re more laidback to work?
I think it’s been really important for me. If I were just an actor, I would have lost my mind long ago. I’m serious. I need the intellectual stimulation of trying to solve problems in the world at large and I need the emotional ballast that effort gives me. I’m a very sensitive person, and I don’t think I could read the paper and survive if I wasn’t trying to make it better. I wasn’t thinking along the lines of making my acting career sustainable and livable. I just follow my passions. I remember walking into my agent’s office in 2003 or 2004 and saying, “I hope you care about my career because I’ve got to go get Bush out of office. So I won’t be calling. I’m just going to hope you guys keep it together because I need to make a living but there’s work to do out here and I’m going to focus.” God bless them, they kept me working.

And here it is: the review not just the link!

FROM PAJIBA:



Fly Away Review: An Emotionally Affecting, But Never Manipulative Look At Parenthood
By TK | Posted Under Film Reviews |

At the risk of sounding callous, there are few types of film that are more emotionally manipulative than those that involve children. Viewers hate to see a child suffer, they hate to see a parent suffer, yet they pack the theaters like a clown car to see these films. Frequently the films are either painfully maudlin or cloyingly sappy. Film makers prey on the gooey center of viewers (and critics, for that matter) and twist their sympathies in the cheapest of fashions.
Fly Away is not one of those films, nor is Janet Grillo one of those directors. The film has its share of sadness and woe, but it doesn’t resort to weak heartstring tactics to deliver its message. Fly Away centers on Jeanne (Beth Roderick, perhaps best known as Zelda on “Sabrina The Teenage Witch”), the harried divorced mother of Mandy, her 16 year-old daughter who has severe autism. Jeanne has, in many ways, essentially given up most of her life to take care of Mandy, waking in the middle of the night every night to calm her from her night terrors, losing consulting job opportunities because she misses deadlines, and slowly forgetting to take care of herself. Her love for Mandy is clearly immense, but it becomes apparent early on that she straddles a curious line between maternal devotion and pathological obsession. Mandy attends a school or disabled kids, but her sudden and violent outbursts are getting more intense and frequent, thereby endangering her continued placement. The school principal Liz Howell (Reno) is pressing Jeanne to consider placing Mandy in a full-time care facility/school, an idea that Jeanne vociferously and aggressively opposes. The problem is compounded by those same pressures from her ex-husband Pete (JR Bourne), who obviously loves his daughter, but is incapable of handling her complicated idiosyncrasies even in small doses.
The dynamics begin to shift when Jeanne meets Tom (Greg Germann), a sweet-natured new guy in the area who takes a genuine interest in Jeanne, irrespective her problems — problems that she feels are more troublesome than he does. That blurry, complex line that Jeanne straddles between devotion and obsession becomes the crux of the film, affecting her and all of her relationships, and its fascinating to watch it unfold. The film isn’t about a disabled child, or a single mother or any of those simplistic themes. Instead its an intense, arresting look at the honest sacrifices that parents like Jeanne make. There aren’t those moon-eyed moments where her heart swells with love at her special, special child. The love is obvious and assumed, and instead the struggles and sacrifices that result from it are what’s brought to the forefront.
Jeanne can’t see a future beyond getting through the current day, as if that’s all her heart and mind has the time or energy for. She’s giving everything she has to Mandy, and the pain, frustration, fear and anxiousness are all slowly eroding away her sense of self. That’s not a criticism of Jeanne or similarly situated parents, it’s a simple fact that the film exposes. But it’s genius also comes from her slowly learning that she can live a fuller life with Mandy — it’s never going to be perfect and worry-free, but it can be more than it is. Some of that comes from her budding, tentative relationship with Tom, who she tries her best to drive away without even really thinking about it. Some of her slow evolution comes from the compassionate, but stern principal. But eventually, it starts to come from Jeanne herself, and watching that emotional development is, while frequently heartrending and difficult, incredible to watch.
Roderick gives a great performance as Jeanne, capturing the frantic desperation mixed with hard-edged devotion so perfectly. She has moments when you can tell she wants to scream at Mandy until her throat is raw, and that urge as well as the suppression of it plays out tragically and perfectly. Better yet are the quiet moments when she looks at her exhausted, slowly-lining face in the mirror at the end of a day, sighing at her lank hair and tired eyes. Most impressive, however, is Ashley Rickards as Mandy. Rickards, most well known for her role in “One Tree Hill,” is completely transformative in her depiction of Mandy. It’s not a sentimental role, nor is it one of those “special people who we learn important lessons from” roles. It’s instead an honest, painful portrayal of a child whose needs are far more intricate and complicated than the average person could ever hope to grasp, a difficulty that’s so much more affecting when we see how it impacts those around her. The film’s ending is a bit too pat-feeling, and perhaps oversimplifies the solutions, but it’s still moving and endearing.
I hate saying that there’s a “special child” genre, but if there is one, then Fly Away is one of the better entries. With that said, Fly Away is simply one of the better films I saw at SXSW, full stop. It’s emotionally affecting but not manipulative, eye-opening and demonstrative without being exploitative, funny at times without relying on quirk, sweet but not cloying. Roderick and Rickards, two unlikely indie drama stars, carry the film evenly and honestly, and Grillo’s relaxed, unpretentious direction anchors it and makes it feel real. It’s a lovely, occasionally devastating film that reveals some of the harsh, yet strangely lovely truths about parents and children.





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