Students, alums gather for Hollywood-in-Princeton film viewing

Macauley Peterson '01 brought Hollywood to Princeton Friday night in an informal gathering known as "Hollywood in Princeton, Take 2."

The event provided an opportunity for various people, including University students and alumni, to network with each other while discussing film, music, visual arts and theater.

This was the second gathering at Peterson's Nassau Street apartment. The first happened in May. His intention is to "get them all in the same room together in order to foster a film-making community on and around campus."

The focus of the evening was a screening of five short films.

The longest screening of the evening was a trailer for a feature length film titled "The Instrument." Written, directed and produced by Adam Nemett '03, the film, which is meant to mock reality entertainment, is about seven kids who live together for a month performing ritual worship based on music.

Nemett's roommate, Dave Hittson '03, is the musical director and composer of the movie, and also plays one of the seven kids. The film is a joint thesis project for Nemett and Hittson, who are religion and music majors, respectively.

The film attempts to answer two questions, Hittson said: "What is identity?" and "Are people all schizophrenics?"

The character who is the driving force of the movie's action is Arthur, who is actually dead for the majority of the film. Arthur "built the space, wrote the rituals and arranged for seven people to live in his workshop, in an art institute, for one month," Hittson said.

The movie was filmed in June in Baltimore and Philadelphia, with a few scenes shot at Terrace Club earlier this year. Rob Tape, a New York editor, did the final cuts for the movie.

Preliminary screenings of "The Instrument" will be shown around campus this spring and it is scheduled to appear in various festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival.

Another screening was a parody of HBO's sitcom "Sex and the City." This piece, titled "Sexless and the City," was a comedy about female University graduate students looking in vain for available male bachelors on campus.

The piece was produced and directed by Peterson, who shoots and produces videos for OIT. It included several inside jokes involving members of the Class of 2001 as well as a scene shot outside Zorba's Grill on Nassau Street.

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A third screening was a tribute to the Twin Towers by Ben Lehrer '02. Lehrer's film included footage from before Sept. 11 and footage of their destruction.

"For someone whose main loss was aesthetic, this may sound selfish," Lehrer says in the film, "but I sure want my friends rebuilt."

The opening piece of the evening was "S.L.A. Confidential," which was also produced by Peterson. S.L.A. is short for service-level agreement, which defines the service terms between companies or corporations.

The five-minute video originally aired at a national conference of academic help desks, as part of the University's presentation on the topic.

Another piece was a screening of Rositza Alexandrova '03's untitled film about "the urban versus the village experience."

Peterson's evening of networking meant to achieve an ongoing, three-part goal for which he will continue to strive.

First, he aims to "involve students in any aspect of professional video production that they would like and pay them for their work." This includes writing, acting, directing, editing and lighting for the Help Desk Video Series.

Second, Peterson wishes to build a strong community of film and video production on campus by encouraging collaboration among the Princeton Film Foundation, TigerVision and the University Film Organization.

"I would love to see students' short films screened on campus, and for us to get serious about hosting the Ivy Film Festival and do it," he said.

Finally, Peterson has a short film in the works for this spring — a supernatural thriller called "The Stacks" which he has been working on for the past two years.