Full Length Dramatic Feature Film “Favorite Son” Screening in Garden State Film Festival

April 3, 2009 - PRLog -- “Favorite Son” a full length dramatic feature film shot in New Jersey will be screening in the Garden State Film Festival in Asbury Park, at the Berkeley Hotel, on Sunday April 5th, at 12:30pm.

Later this month “Favorite Son” will be screening in the highly regarded Houston WorldFest, the festival that discovered Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ang Lee, John Lee Hancock, Randall Kleiser, Ridley Scott, Robert Rodriguez, Robert Townsend, The Coen Brothers, Brian de Palma, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and David Lynch with their very first awards.

Directed by Howard Libov, an Associate Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Madison Campus, the film is the story of loner David Paxton, 30, who returns to his hometown and becomes obsessed with childhood friend Joan and her troubled teenage son Ross, seeing them as a last chance for a "perfect" life.  David is rejected by Joan, but breaks through Ross's volatile, destructive nature and forms an unlikely friendship with the boy, making himself the object of suspicion and condemnation by the town.  Driven over the edge, David begins a dangerous descent, targeting town patriarch Bill Huston, the man who stands between he and Ross, and heading toward a final violent confrontation that will explode in the realization and revelation that David may be a most unlikely, and worthy hero.

Pablo Schreiber as DAVID  Pablo will be opening soon in Desire Under the Elms on Broadway with Brian Dennehy.  He has also appeared in Reasons to be Pretty (Neil Labute, Currently in New York); Awake and Sing (TONY Nominee), Dying City/Lincoln Center Theater, The Wire (HBO), The Manchurian Candidate (Directed by Jonathan Demme), Woody Allen’s Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and Lords of Dogtown with Heath Ledger.

Connor Paolo as ROSS  Connor is currently appearing in Gossip Girls (WB,) and has appeared in World Trade Center (Directed by Oliver Stone,)  Alexander (Directed by Oliver Stone,) Mystic River (Directed by Clint Eastwood), and Gangs of New York (Directed by Martin Scorsese.)


Kellie Overbey as JOAN  The Coast of Utopia/Lincoln Center Theater (T.Stoppard),
Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen)
   
Richard Bekins as HUSTON United 93 (P. Greengrass)
             

Howard Libov, Director

Howard Libov, a native of Baltimore, MD, graduated with a BFA in Film & Television from New York University and also garnered a Certificate in Directing from The American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies.  Favorite Son, Howard’s second feature film, is based on the award-winning short film Little Man, also directed by Howard Libov.  Little Man, co-starring Frankie Muniz of Malcolm in the Middle, played at more than twenty five film festivals, won the Best Dramatic Short Award at the World Festival of SportFilm, and the Silver Illumination Award at The Crested Butte Reelfest. Little Man is in national distribution with The Cinema Guild.

Howard Libov directed and co-wrote the feature film Midnight Edition, which won the Best First Feature Award at the Festival of Fantastic Film, played at the London, Dublin, and Hamptons Film Festivals, and was broadcast on HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime.  Midnight Edition was released on home-video by MCA/Universal.  Libov also directed the comedic short film, Men Will Be Boys, which starred members of Chicago’s Second City Theater and was syndicated nationally on PBS stations as a modern day companion piece to Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar Winning, Marty.  Libov’s documentary Fourteen Stations, profiled Madison, New Jersey artist and resident Arie Galles, and his ten-year quest to complete a series of drawings he started out thinking would take him only a year to finish.  Fourteen Stations is also in distribution with The Cinema Guild.    


Benjamin Wolf, Director of Photography

Ben Wolf’s first film, the short Gold Mountain, won a student Academy Award.  His most recent features include: James Ryan's The Young Girl and the Monsoon, now on Showtime, starring Terry Kinney and Diane Venora; David Sporn's The Road from Erebus, currently playing on HBO; and Art Jones' Going Nomad, starring Damian Young and Victor Argo. That last collaboration led to 2003's Lustre, the feature by Art Jones starring Victor Argo -- featuring Ben's keen eye for dramatic setting and the beauty of the New York cityscape. Ben photographed Deborah Kampmeier's Virgin, featuring Robin Wright Penn, Elizabeth Moss, and Daphne Rubin-Vega, which has been nominated for two 2004 Independent Spirit Awards. Ben takes his trade to the far reaches for documentaries - from Oaxaca, Mexico to Lijiang, China. His cinematography has been praised in a series of American Cinematographer articles, notably for Jones' Going Nomad and Charles Weinstein's Under the Bridge.  Ben's photography helped bring Bernard Malamud's short story, The First Seven Years, to life on PBS.  It guided Howard Libov's Little Man and Under the Radar to festival acclaim, and lifted Shoja Azari's K, which screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2002.  May 2003 marked a second career milestone for Ben, who managed to photograph three films at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival - and in three distinct categories: short (The Last Word by the internationally renowned Shirin Neshat), documentary (Witnessing by Aileen Ghee), and feature (Jones' Lustre).
   
Murray Attaway, Composer

Murray Attaway was a founding member of Guadalcanal Diary, noted for a sound that was at once melodic and rhythmically aggressive, with a decidedly literary and spiritual bent to the group's lyrics. Guadalcanal Diary was formed in 1981 by guitarist and singer Murray and lead guitarist Jeff Walls, who'd first met in 1977 when they both joined a punk band called Strictly American. Attaway chose the name Guadalcanal Diary from a book by Richard Tregaski about the U.S. campaign against Japan during World War II, enamored of the name's surface ambiguities and undertones of patriotism and warfare.  Murray went on to record as a solo artist for Geffen Records, with the release of
In Thrall.

--courtesy Pandora.com


Mike Mills, Composer

R.E.M. formed at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, in January 1980. Discovering they had similar tastes, vocalist Michael Stipe and guitarist Peter Buck began working together, eventually meeting bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry.  In April 1980, the band formed under the name Twisted Kites, playing psychedelic bubblegum, and punk covers in a converted Episcopalian church. By the summer, the band had settled on the name R.E.M. after flipping randomly through the dictionary.

--courtesy wikipedia.com


Brian Gonsar, Producer

Curently a producer at international advertising agency BBDO, Brian has had an expansive career producing commercials for clients such as GE, Bank of America, Domino’s, Jet Blue, Ford, and many others.  Brian is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University's film program.  His producer/director role while at the university led him to direct an indie music video for NY band Radio Mundial which played in seven different countries and rose to the top of the several music video program's playlists while his video for the NJ band Copperpot went on to win Best Music Video at the CU2 Video & Film Festival in New York City.  He has shot footage for Arista recording artist, Dido, the United States Golf Association, and the NY Redbulls soccer team.

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