[…] A first time event taking place at the Festival this year is The Black List Live! A Staged Reading. The Festival is teaming up with The Black List to program a staged reading of an unproduced Black List script. Join us for this one night only reading of Stephany Folsom’s 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon about a White House public affairs assistant who convinces Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing, just in case something …read more […]

Contrary to popular belief, Stanley Kubrick is not dead. He just lost his groove. His filmmaking mojo. His celluloid swagger. Feeling pigeonholed by his own genius and critical response to his early films, Stanley suffered a nervous breakdown and a bout of paralyzing anxiety on the set of Eyes Wide Shut. Fearing that he was no longer free to pursue the mainstream genre faire that attracted him to film as a youth, Stanley turned over his last project to fellow director Steven Spielberg in order to rediscover his original passion before it forever escaped his grasp. It was at this same time that writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, fresh off The Sixth Sense, was battling his own paralyzing fear at the thought of ever repeating this success. In the unlikeliest of circumstances, both directors met in a chance encounter at a special screening of Freaky Friday at the New Beverly and hatched a plan that would alter the course of history in a way the film community would see but never accept. Shyamalan agreed to allow Kubrick to be his "ghist-director" in order to allow him the chance to experiment and become a beginner again- in essence, he gifted him the luxury to fail until he got his groove back. And fail he did. Signs. The Village. Lady In The Water. The Last Airbender. All Films Kubrick used under his new pseudonym to stretch his legs and find his voice again, until Kubrick finally felt that he had regained a piece of what was once lost: monkey creatures attacking each other. Kubrick is now ready to return "from the dead" and begin filmmaking under his own name again. But how? Does a Kubrick audience even exist anymore? Enter the largest conspiracy of them all (a conspiracy within a conspiracy!): the live Blacklist reading. Is it all a ploy to gather the most die-hard Kubrick fans in one room and announce the truth to the world? It seems so. After all, it is a Kubrick event so Kubrick-y that even aspiring Kubricks would share their most insane conspiracy beliefs in order to gain access through those doors. It's like a Kubrick blue light, and we're all Kubrick-sucking skeeters. Then again, If we had looked closely, we'd have seen that it's been right in front of us this whole time. We've just had our eyes wide shut.

***"ghost-director"