This So-Called Disaster

I just wanted to say that if you want to see work that is raw simple and pure the this film will give you the truth about how these actors work...all different...but you will see the growth and the Ensemble world of acting...on a professional level...and Mr. Shepard is a very fine director with his cast...of stars...just doing their work...enjoy...it's clean and full of honesty...keep in mind it's a play not a film...and so the beauty is you will see actors you are familiar with in FILM doing the age old art of theater...the roots of their work and the opportunity to be live with an audience...it's what makes this such a great film to see ...it's not on the set of a movie...and that makes this a RARE opportunity for Would be and Could be actors to watch the PROCESS not only the performance...it's as I said about the work..

Sincerely Michael Savage

Anyone interested in theater will love this. Most others will too. An excellent documentary of the theater. You see the play being made, the resolution of director's vision and actors as they struggle to find their characters. The interviews with Shepard are sometimes excellent. That's the first movie. Then you get enough of the actual play to get the gist, and it is a very engaging play. Movie number three is the back-story about Sam Shepard's father. Plus you get to see Penn and Nolte lounging around like real actors. So there's that little fillip of celebrity watching. These three experiences make the whole that much richer.

This So-Called Disaster basically documents the pre-production of Sam Shepard's 2000 play, `The Late Henry Moss', from about the third week of rehearsals to opening night. The movie is overall very engaging in its presentation of the featured actors involved, and because the visual style makes the viewer feel as though they were in the audience during the play's preparations.

Because `Henry Moss' is partially autobiographical, this movie provides some scenes of Shepard providing anecdotes about growing up with his father. I liked these scenes very much, because Sam Shepard's relationship with his father did was not typical of some relationships that alcoholic fathers had with their sons. There is a sense that Shepard accepted the way in which his father acted while drunk, and did not seem to have too much of a problem maintaining a relationship with him.

But the parts of Disaster that I particularly liked were everything involving the rehearsals of the play. It is very interesting to see the contrasting styles of preparation seen in the different actors, such as Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Cheech Marin, Woody Harrelson, and John Gammon. It was amazing to see that these actors were able to nail their performances every time they rehearsed their lines.

Along with their preparations, I was able to see these people in a much different light than I ever had before. In this movie, I wasn't seeing Sean Penn, bad boy actor, or Nick Nolte the oddball (though he does have his moments). The actors in the play are presented in this movie as people who are actors, not Hollywood movie stars.

Michael Almereyda does the viewer a favor by keeping the camera pretty much stationary throughout the picture. Early on, I thought I had to prepare myself for some sort of home video visual style, which is very amateurish in that it shakes all over the place and never settles down. But thankfully, the camera allows the audience to see this movie as though they were in the theater, watching people like Penn, Nolte, and others get ready for their performances.

The documentary "This So-Called Disaster" is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Sam Sheppard's semi-autobiographical play "The Late Henry Moss," which debuted in San Francisco in 2000. Being himself the son of an alcoholic father, Sheppard drew upon his own personal experience for this cathartic tale of two brothers' coming to terms with the death of their own alcoholic father. The actors in this production include Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Cheech Marin and Woody Harrelson. As Penn says at one point, Sheppard's plays often deal with the theme of men trying to forge their identities in a world with no clear-cut definition of what a man is supposed to be. This theme filters through in both the snippets of the play we see being worked on in the rehearsals and in the on-camera interviews with Sheppard and many of the principal performers in the production.

It's a tribute to both the power of Sheppard's writing and the talent of the actors playing the roles that we find ourselves wanting to see this play merely from the glimpses we get of it in rough-cut form. Anyone interested in playwriting and fine acting will be mesmerized by the nuts-and-bolts aspects of this film, as it shows us just how a theatrical work, involving some of the greatest talents in modern drama, ultimately comes to fruition.

It's no "Looking for Richard," but "This So-Called Disaster" has much to offer the serious theaterphile.

Documentary about Sam Shepard and the star studded production of Shepard's play the Late Henry Moss.

This was one of the choices on IFC in Theaters cable service and since I'm a huge theater fan as well as a fan of most of the people involved I figured I would give the film a shot. While its great to see how play is rehearsed and put together I found it all very disjointed and ultimately a mess. I know part of my problem going in was that I was completely unfamiliar with the play. Now having seen this film I feel I'm considerably less so. I'm sure that had I had some clue as to what the play was about the scenes we see being worked on might have had some resonance, instead of just seeming to be random.Many people have compared this to Looking For Richard, Al Pacino's film about Richard the Third, while that film had what seemed like random scenes, the play is part of our cultural heritage and so the plot is known by most people. Also that earlier film deals with Shakepeare and interpreting the Bard, things are put into a context. Thats not the case here. Here we have a good many talking heads talking about the production, Shepard, and Shepard's plays, and the autobiographical nature of what Shepard writes (and biographical stories). Its a jumbled mess that never really seemed to come together. Half an hour in I started to fast forward. It just never grabbed me or made me know what I was watching.

A miss.