James Moody

Midnight In The Garden Of Good & Evil starring Irma P. Hall, Alison Eastwood, Jack Thompson, John Cusack, Kevin Spacey

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -- A visiting city reporter's assignment suddenly revolves around the murder trial of a local millionaire, whom he befriends.

Rick Moody's scathingly witty novel of the Seventies, The Ice Storm, was published in April of 1994. Reminders were not long in coming that the era it portrayed was now part of history: the month of May began with the death of Richard Nixon, who is virtually a character in the book, and ended with the death of Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of another president whose name is never mentioned, although the events the book recounts take place on November 23, 1973 -- the day after the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Moody's first book, Garden State: A Novel, about dazed and confused New Jersey teens, had won the prestigious Puschcart Press Editors' Book Award. The Ice Storm, which was set in the author's home town at the time he was growing up, portrayed parents and children alike floundering in the backwash of the Sexual Revolution. It also received an enthusiastic critical reception. The Ice Storm was brought to the attention of producer James Schamus by his wife, literary scout Nancy Krikorian, who knew Rick Moody from Columbia University's MFA program. 'It's an astonishingly cinematic book,' says Schamus. 'But, because of its truly literary qualities, people may have missed its extraordinary cinematic possibilities.' Schamus showed the book to Ang Lee with whom he and partner Ted Hope had already made four films. Despite the obvious appeal of Moody's comedy of familial errors for the creator of 'The Wedding Banquet,' Lee says what attracted him to the book was its climax: the scene where Ben Hood makes a shocking discovery in the ice, followed by the emotional reunion of the Hood family on the morning after the storm. 'The book moved me at those two points,' says Lee. 'I knew there was a movie there.' Lee signed on to make the film and it fell to Schamus, while he and Lee were in England making 'Sense and Sensibility,' to turn Moody's very li

The trailer for 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris, a feature documentary about a great but unheralded jazz singer that explores the very nature of what it is to live the life of an artist--any artist. Filmmaker Raymond De Felitta examines the life of cult favorite jazz singer Jackie Paris, but at the same time he might well be exploring the life of any artist in any discipline, too many of whom share the same fate that Paris did: the explosive debut followed by the years of ups and downs; the constant hope that success, though out of reach, is around the corner; the private tragedies that grow out of artistic frustration; and the final, self-inflicted wounds which all too often cause the once promising to descend into bitterness and chaos, a prelude to vanishing completely. Working with rare found footage and new interviews with jazz legends such as Billy Taylor, George Wein, Mark Murphy and Ruth Price, as well as the final concert footage and last interviews Jackie Paris ever gave -- De Felitta constructs an emotional mystery story which asks the question: who or what is to blame when a great talent goes from sensation to footnote during their life span?