Word: cowans
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Nguyen Anh Tuan, Robin Sproul, Geoffrey Cowan ’64, and Tom Fiedler are the newest recipients of the Shorenstein fellowship, a program dedicated to exploring the influence of the press on politics and public policy that began in 1986 with just one fellow, Clark Hoyt, now the public editor at The New York Times...
...phenomenon. But no international festival had set up a midnight menu of genre films until Handling unleashed his staff on the project in 1988. Among the premier offerings were Frank Henenlotter's horror film Brain Damaged and the rock doc Decline of Western Civilization Part Two: The Metal Years. Cowan took over as sole selector in 1990, when the films were shown in the rattily atmospheric Bloor Cinema. Cowan cites Tarantino as helping the section when, showing Reservoir Dogs in another part of the festival in 1992, "he brought his actors out to most of our films that year...
...with the gothic cross. In 1992 he published a Hong Kong fanzine called Asian Eye, concentrating on action movies by the likes of Jackie Chan and John Woo, which were still found mainly in specialty video stores. That brought him to the festival's attention, though Cowan already knew him as a knowledgeable amateur. "Colin was always more than a fan," Cowan says. "Talking to him in line year after year I realized that he had something special to offer...
...assumed the Midnight Madness mantle in 1998, has midwifed the program to further éclat. "The films in earlier days were probably more transgressive," he says, "but now this part of the fest is an acquisition hotbed." Being the hot kid on the block brings its own pressures. As Cowan notes, "Colin is contending with a more difficult situation than I ever did: dealing with major Hollywood studios, major European companies. The richest people in Asia are producing big genre movies and he's got to bat them off with a stick. He probably gets more calls from studio heads...
...eagerly anticipate the visceral effect of a movie on its viewers that he'd want to have a record of them watching it? It all comes back to a show-business credo that festivals often forget: please the customers. "We try to align our programs with our audiences," Cowan says. "They want films with crazy bloody stuff going on and people flying on high wires and some great rock 'n' roll, all filtered through the director's artistic vision and the programmer's curatorial mind. We give them that...