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	A group of teenagers find their lives intersecting and their futures taking shape as they prepare for the most pivotal event of their high school careers. At first Nova Prescott is infuriated at a classmate who nearly destroys her plans for prom. But the closer the big day gets, the more she realizes that he may be the perfect date. Meanwhile, secretive seniors Tyler and Mei wrestle with the consciences over how to make the most of their big night as the rest of their classmates attempt to reconcile their explosive anticipation with their growing uncertainty over how the dance will ultimately pan out.... (more)
Genres :	Comedy
Running Time :	1 hr. 43 min.... (more)

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Actor Freeman foots prom bill in Sundance doc
PARK CITY, Utah – Morgan Freeman was disappointed to learn that his local high school in Charleston, Miss., still held separate proms, one for black students, one for white. So he offered to pay for a single prom that bot
h could attend.

That was 1997. It took 11 years for the school to take Freeman up on his offer.

Director Paul Saltzman's "Prom Night in Mississippi," premiering Saturday as part of the world documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the growing pains Charleston went through last year as the community prepared for its first racially integrated senior prom.

The move came 54 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education case that struck down school segregation and more than 30 years after black students began attending Charleston High School, which previously had been all-white.

Freeman learned about the separate proms while talking with the senior class in 1997. Students were willing when Freeman said he would pay for an integrated prom, but the school board and parents ignored his offer.

"It's kind of disheartening," Freeman said. "In the little town we live in — this is a really small town — I don't know how you can live in such a small place and try to be separate."

Toronto filmmaker Saltzman met Freeman in 2006 on a return visit to Mississippi, where he had worked for a couple of months doing voter registration during the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. Saltzman later interviewed Freeman for another documentary he's working on about his journey back to the South.

Once he learned of Freeman's offer to desegregate Charleston's proms, Saltzman felt there was another film to be told.

"I said to him without thinking, `Is the offer still good?' And he was a little taken aback, and he went, `Oh, OK,'" Saltzman said. "I thought, if you're willing to put the offer back on the table and we follow that, it's a story about young people and racial attitudes that hopefully would make other young people walk out of a darkened theater and think about their own attitudes and their own beliefs."

With permission from school officials, Saltzman filmed Freeman as he made the initial pitch to the administration and met with the senior class, which greeted the proposal enthusiastically.

Saltzman and his wife, producer Patricia Aquino, spent about four months filming in Charleston during the buildup to the prom, interviewing students, sitting in on planning meetings and chatting up the handful of parents willing to talk.

Many adults refused to be interviewed, and the filmmakers soon learned that amid preparations for the integrated prom, a separate, white-only prom had been organized.

The heart of the film is candid interviews with black and white Charleston students, who speak passionately about the racism that lingers in their town. The filmmakers follow a core of students, among them a black boy and white girl who date despite her father's objections, a white couple whose friendship with a black youth causes them grief, and a black girl who suspects racism cost her the class valedictorian honor.

Saltzman was not allowed to film the white prom, which he estimates a couple of dozen students attended. The integrated prom was far larger and stands as a hopeful climax to the film as black and white students mingle exuberantly.

Freeman said the prom cost him about $17,000, which he said was "money very well spent" that hopefully will lead to integrated proms from now on.

"The kids are not going to want to go backwards," Freeman said. "They've got their toe in the water, and the water's warm."

___

On the Net:
http://festival.sundance.org/2009
...(more) - 01 17 2009 1:11PM
Tale of betrayal lures actress Snow
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - "Prom Night" actress Brittany Snow is in negotiations to star in the thriller "Breaking the Girl."
The sexually charged film follows Sara Ryan, a betrayed co-ed who befriends
a fellow student with a nemesis of her own. The pair plot to kill each other's enemies, but Ryan discovers that all is not what it seems.
Mark Distefano and Guinevere Turner wrote the screenplay, and Jamie Babbit ("But I'm a Cheerleader") will direct the project for Myriad Pictures.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
...(more) - 09 6 2008 11:36AM
Regional Hit Musical 'Marvelous Wonderettes' Will Bring Prom Dreams to Off-Broadway
A casting notice indicates that the Bean-directed production will play the Westside Arts Theatre (longtime home of I Love You, You're Perfect), previewing in late August toward a mid-September opening.
Here's how
the recent casting notice bills the show: "Cotton-candy-colored, nonstop pop musical. Takes the audience to the 1958 Springfield High School prom, where we meet the 'Wonderettes' - four girls with hopes and dreams as big as their crinoline skirts, and voices to match. We learn about their lives and loves, accompanied by the girls performing classic '50s and '60s pop songs. Act II takes place 10 years later."
Director-creator Roger Bean penned the show and wrote vocal arrangements with musical supervisor Brian Baker. Musical director is Michael Borth. Casting is by Binder Casting.
This production builds on the success of a hit Los Angeles staging of the show that features Kirsten Chandler, Kim Huber, Julie Dixon Jackson and Bets Malone.
Bean has turned old into gold by fusing famous songs onto new theatrical frameworks. His work has been seen at many regional theatres, including his regular artistic home - Milwaukee Repertory Theater. The Marvelous Wonderettes premiered at the Rep's intimate Stackner Cabaret in 1998-99 and graduated to the Rep's Stiemke Theater in 2000-01. A sequel, Winter Wonderettes, played the Stackner in 2003-04.
Among the Bean titles seen at The Rep are Don't Touch That Dial and a sequel; The Andrews Bros.; Route 66; Why Do Fools Fall in Love?; Life Could Be a Dream; Beach Blanket Bash!, That's Amore and more.
The Winter Wonderettes include Cindy Lou (the prettiest girl at Springfield High, makes the biggest change between Acts I and II, having learned the lessons); Missy (the over-achiever of the group); Betty Jean (the slightly put-upon class clown, a tomboy); Suzy (the happy-go-lucky one).
The score includes period hits "Allegheny Moon," "Son of a Preacher Man," "Maybe," "Secret Love," "You Don't Own Me," "Wedding Bell Blues," "Lipstick on Your Collar," "I Only Want To Be With You," "It's My Party," "Stupid Cupid," "Hold Me, Thrill Me," "Rescue Me" and more.
Bean has worked with the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Delaware Theatre Company, Utah Musical Theatre, Oregon Cabaret Theatre, Florida Studio Theatre, Madison Repertory Theatre, Skylight Opera Theatre and the Utah Shakespearean Festival, among many others. He is the executive director of Steele Spring Productions, a theatrical licensing company, and a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and The Dramatists Guild.
Producer Elzer made his official Los Angeles producing debut with the The Marvelous Wonderettes. He was also a producer on Jewtopia Off-Broadway and was marketing consultant and an investor in Sister Act: The Musical. He runs Demand PR in L.A.
Producer Schneider is a theatre producer and director attached to Sister Act: The Musical, among other shows. His Broadway producing credits include the Tony Awarding winning The Lion King and Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida. As president of animation and chairman of the studio for the Walt Disney Company for 17 years, he was responsible for creating and distributing over 50 movies including "Beauty and the Beast," "Little Mermaid," "Toy Story," "The Lion King," "Roger Rabbit," "Remember the Titians" and "Princess Diaries."
For more information, visit www.marvelouswonderettes.com.
...(more) - 06 27 2008 9:29AM
Film shows students battle racism for mixed prom
NEW YORK (Reuters) – As Barack Obama campaigned to become the first black U.S. president, teenagers in the small Mississippi hometown of Hollywood star Morgan Freeman battled racism to hold their high school's first i
ntegrated prom.

A new documentary, "Prom Night in Mississippi," shows the students confronting racist attitudes in Charleston after school administrators let them decide if they wanted to accept Freeman's offer to pay for an integrated prom -- an annual dance for graduating students. Freeman's first such offer a decade earlier had been ignored.

While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, proms could still be held separately for black and white Charleston High School students because they were organized by parents, not the school.

"I think this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of that in this time ... you children are being brought up this way. It hurts me deeply," the film shows Freeman, the Oscar-winning African-American actor, telling senior students when he made his offer for the 2008 prom.

The documentary, which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, will be broadcast on the HBO network on Monday.

Canadian director Paul Saltzman, who volunteered as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1965, told Reuters in an interview that the prom organized each year for white students was always completely off limits to black students.

"But the black proms were never segregated. Whites could always go but almost never did because of social pressures in the town," he said. "The power structure of the town was quite happy with separate proms and the school board, in a sense, didn't do anything proactive."

About 400 students attend Charleston High -- about 70 percent of whom are black and 30 percent white -- in the town of about 2,200 people in the Southern state of Mississippi.

'RABID PREJUDICE'

Freeman paid about $17,000 for the 2008 Charleston High mixed prom and contributed again to a second integrated prom this year.

But just months after Obama became president, a separate white prom for Charleston High was still held.

"That kind of rabid prejudice really is a mind-set that's extremely hard to change," Saltzman said.

"'Don't bother me with the facts, blacks are inferior, God made blacks inferior,' you hear all that kind of stuff," he said. "It's up to the younger generations to become more enlightened and to leave those patterns behind."

Former students Jessica Shivers, 20, and Chasidy Buckley, 18, graduated in 2008 and are featured in the documentary. Both say the town's racism stems from parents and that some white students were frightened of what their families might do if they were friends with black students.

"It's really stupid," said Shivers, who is white. "It's like the kids are the adults and the adults have no common sense ... the younger generations realize how stupid it is."

"I blame the parents for it," added Buckley, who is black. "But still, the school district could have done something."

Saltzman said segregated proms in the United States seemed to be a rare occurrence.

"The motivation for making 'Prom Night in Mississippi' is really to have young people especially see the film and even if only for a moment to check in with their own beliefs, their own attitudes, their own prejudices," said Saltzman.
"Nothing changes until you do," he said. "But now you have little people growing up and seeing a black president. It's a bit harder for their parents to tell them that blacks are inferior."
(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Peter Cooney)
...(more) - 07 20 2009 7:49AM
Chris Brown: Still King of the Prom?
Los Angeles (E! Online) – Chris Brown has been banned by radio stations, suspended by Wrigley gum and not exactly asked back for a second frosty glass by the "Got Milk?" campaign.

But even as the R&
B star's career crumbles under the weight of an ongoing police investigation into his alleged attack on girlfriend Rihanna, Brown can take a measure of comfort in the calendar: Prom season is coming.

DJs and a prom-planning expert say Brown's music is still spinning at school dances this winter, and likely will be in rotation come the spring's tuxedo-and-gown affairs.

"The kids are still putting it in the list, I'm disappointed to say," says Lu Ann Haslam, a Southern California high school teacher who advises prom organizers worldwide as Patty the Prom Pro.

According to at least one survey, Brown's "With You" was the No. 1 prom song of 2008. "No Air," Brown's duet with Jordin Sparks, was another favorite of sweaty-palmed slow dancers.

Neither song is a Top 10 request at Haslam's own school this spring (unlike Rihanna's "Anything"). Still, in general, Haslam expects the tunes and other Brown hits to get played because the numbers are neither lyrically X-rated, nor viewed as promoting violence—the two big no-nos with schools, she says.

Brown, 19, was arrested Grammy night on suspicion of making terrorist threats. And while he has issued a nonspecific apology, he has not been convicted of a crime, much less arraigned.

"I don't think it's reached the point where principals and administrators are going to object," Haslam says. "Now that may change [if] he goes to trial."

Matt Cohen, the Sacramento-based deejay known as DJ MC, says he hasn't had any client, school or no, nix Brown's music—and for that, he sounds grateful.

"Sixty percent of the music you can't play already [at school dances], and now they want to ban more music?" Cohen says. "Brown's music is relatively clean on a scale of cleanness."

Jimmy Harris, a Memphis-based DJ, said in an email that he, too, continues to play Brown music as frequently as ever: "I haven't limited my playlist in any way."

In New York City, however, at least one deejay has. The DJ KL says, by personal choice, he won't play Brown at the school dance he's scheduled to work next week—"not unless something dramatic happens."

"I would say initially it was kind of up in the air," the DJ says of his initial reaction to the Brown news. "I didn't want to jump on the bandwagon."

But DJ KL says he changed his mind after he saw the police photo of a battered Rihanna. "It looked like the dude really tried to hurt her, and that's not cool," he says.

The DJ says he thinks the allegations have become a situation for both Brown and Rihanna, with Rihanna's music threatening to take audiences out of the moment as much as Brown's. (He still plays Rihanna, though.)

"Any good DJ will tell you the crowd dictates what works, and when you play something and the crowd turns to you," DJ KL says. "We'll see how it all works out."

Cohen, who, post-Grammy night, received a request from a 30-year-old birthday girl to play Brown and Rihanna songs back-to-back, sounds most confident that, barring a conviction, things will work out for Brown and prom night.

"It's like when Michael Jackson was accused of child molestation," Cohen says, "people didn't stop playing Michael Jackson."
··· THEY SAID WHAT? Get today's most commented stories now at www.eonline.com
...(more) - 03 4 2009 3:37AM

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