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Alexandre Rockwell | |
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 Rockwell at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018 | |
| Born | August 18, 1956 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Screenwriter, producer, film director, professor |
| Years active | 1983–present |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 2 |
Charles Alexandre Rockwell is an American film director, producer, screenwriter and professor.
Alexandre Rockwell is best known for his independent films made in NYC with a small group of actors he met on the lower east side in the late 80s. His first films helped launch the careers of well known actors like Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage, Stanley Tucci, as well as many other notable indie stars of the time. His filming style is described as purely independent in spirit and poetic in style. He mixes a blend of comedy and drama to create a portrait of outsiders. His influences are wide-ranging, he has been quoted as saying his style is "as much the Three Stooges as it is Tarkovsky".
Rockwell was born into a family of artists and is the grandson of the Russian animator Alexandre Alexeieff, who invented the pinscreen, and of Alexandra Grinevsky, also an artist and illustrator of rare books. His father Paul Rockwell met his mother Svetlana Ludmillia Alexeieff as an American GI in Paris and they married and relocated to Boston, Massachusetts. Growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rockwell struggled in school and often skipped class, spending his days playing pinball and sleeping in arthouse movie theaters. He avoided college and instead moved to Paris where he would sneak into the French Cinematheque to watch up to three films a day when he was not assisting his grandfather in his studio. He then relocated to New York City in his early 20s where he drove a taxi and delivered seltzer water. It was when he hocked his saxophone and bought a 16mm Bolex camera that he began making his own films.
In 1986 he met and within two weeks married actress Jennifer Beals. Beals introduced Sam Rockwell to Alexandre, who has subsequently cast Rockwell in four of his films. [1] They are not related to each other.
Rockwell has made a number of New York indie films, most notably In the Soup , which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1992, a seminal year for independent American film that presented the first feature-length films of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Allison Anders. Together the four directors made Four Rooms , which opened to mixed reviews and audience response. Rockwell followed up with Somebody to Love , starring Rosie Perez, Steve Buscemi, and Harvey Keitel. Rockwell struggled in Los Angeles while making Louis and Frank and Pete Smalls Is Dead . Both films were met with mixed reviews and he did not make a film for a period of six years. He left the west coast for New York City where he began teaching at NYU and met his present wife Karyn Parsons-Rockwell.
Most recently Rockwell has turned to smaller and more independent micro-budget films made with his family, students, and friends to much critical and festival success. His film Sweet Thing (2020) starred his daughter Lana Rockwell and son Nico Rockwell, and won the Crystal Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, and has been widely released to both audience and critical acclaim.
Since February 8, 2003, Rockwell has been married to actress Karyn Parsons (of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fame), with whom he has two children.
Rockwell currently is head of the directing program at NYU's graduate film school. [2] and resides in Brooklyn, New York. His wife, Karyn, has her own production company, Sweet Blackberry. [3]
Steven Vincent Buscemi is an American actor. Buscemi is known for his work as an acclaimed character actor. His early credits consist of major roles in independent film productions such as the AIDS drama Parting Glances (1986), Mystery Train (1989), In the Soup (1992), and his breakout role as Mr. Pink in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992).
Edith Falco is an American actress. Known for her roles on stage and screen she has received numerous accolades including four Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards as well as nomination for a Tony Award.
Jennifer Beals is an American actress. She made her film debut in My Bodyguard (1980), before receiving critical acclaim for her performance as Alexandra Owens in Flashdance (1983), for which she won NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture and was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress –
Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff was a Russian Empire-born artist, filmmaker and illustrator who lived and worked mainly in Paris. He and his second wife Claire Parker (1906–1981) are credited with inventing the pinscreen as well as the animation technique totalization. In all Alexeieff produced 6 films on the pinscreen, 41 advertising films and illustrated 41 books.
Four Rooms is a 1995 American anthology farce black comedy film co-written and co-directed by Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino. The story is set in the fictional Hotel Mon Signor in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve. Tim Roth plays Ted, the bellhop and main character in the frame story, whose first night on the job consists of four very different encounters with various hotel guests.
King of New York is a 1990 neo-noir crime film directed by Abel Ferrara and written by Nicholas St. John. It stars Christopher Walken, Laurence Fishburne, David Caruso, Victor Argo and Wesley Snipes, with supporting roles played by Giancarlo Esposito, Steve Buscemi, Paul Calderón, Janet Julian and Theresa Randle. Walken portrays Frank White, a New York City drug kingpin rebuilding his criminal empire after his release from prison, while also attempting to go legitimate.
Pete Droge is an American alternative/folk rock musician from Vashon Island in Washington State's Puget Sound.
Eric Zimmerman is an American game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company based in Manhattan. GameLab is known for the game Diner Dash. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference. He is also the co-author of four books including Rules of Play with Katie Salen, which was published in November 2004. Eric Zimmerman has written at least 24 essays and whitepapers since 1996, mostly pertaining to game development from an academic standpoint. He's currently a founding faculty at the NYU Game Center.
Sam Rockwell is an American actor. He is known for playing distressed police officer Jason Dixon in Martin McDonagh’s crime drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was nominated for the same category the following year for portraying George W. Bush in Adam McKay's political satire Vice (2018). In 2019, he portrayed Bob Fosse in the FX biographical miniseries Fosse/Verdon, earning a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award, and in 2022, he received a Tony Award nomination for his performance in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo.
Karyn Kiyoko Kusama is an American filmmaker. She made her feature directorial debut with the sports drama film Girlfight (2000), for which she won Best Director and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature.
Karyn Parsons Rockwell is an American actress, author and comedian. She is best known for her role as Hilary Banks on the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from 1990 to 1996. Parsons also starred in the 1995 film Major Payne opposite Damon Wayans, and in The Job (2001–2002) as Toni.
13 Moons is a 2002 comedy-drama film directed by Alexandre Rockwell. The title is a reference to the saying of a minor character's mother, who suggested that if nights of the full moon are strange, then "this must be the night of thirteen moons."
Osao Chosei Funahara is a musician and film director and producer. Born in Hyōgo Prefecture of Japan, Chosei Funahara was educated in both the United States and Japan. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Nihon University College of Art's Cinema Department in Tokyo. While pursuing New York University's NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science, he performed as bassist and founding member of the cult punk rock group the Plasmatics.
The Independent Film Festival Boston is a not for profit film festival in Boston, Massachusetts.
The Search for One-eye Jimmy is a 1994 comedy film written and directed by Sam Henry Kass.
In the Soup is a 1992 independent comedy directed by Alexandre Rockwell, and written by Rockwell and Sollace Mitchell. It stars Steve Buscemi as Aldolfo Rollo, a self-conscious screenwriter who has written an unfilmable 500-page screenplay and who is looking for a producer.
The 2011 Slamdance Film Festival was a film festival held in Park City, Utah from January 20 to January 27, 2011. It was the 17th iteration of the Slamdance Film Festival, an alternative to the more mainstream Sundance Film Festival.
Braxton Pope is an independent American film and television producer and writer. He is a partner in Sodium Fox Productions, which he co-founded with novelist Bret Easton Ellis.
The King of Staten Island is a 2020 American comedy-drama film directed by Judd Apatow, from a screenplay by Apatow, Pete Davidson, and Dave Sirus. It stars Davidson, Marisa Tomei, Bill Burr, Bel Powley, Maude Apatow, and Steve Buscemi, and follows a young man who must get his life together after his mother starts dating a new man who, like his deceased father, is a firefighter.
Richard Gregory Christie is an American author and illustrator of picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, and album covers best known for his Coretta Scott King Award-winning books No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller, Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U. S. Marshal, and Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Only Passing Through, and the NAACP Image Award-winning Our Children Can Soar: A Celebration of Rosa, Barack, and the Pioneers of Change.
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