Please join us for an evening of Fogcutting with Director/Actor CARL FRANKLIN (One False Move, Out of Time) and his neo-noir classic DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS starring Academy Award winner Denzel Washington as Walter Mosley’s iconic gumshoe Easy Rawlins, Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda, Crash) in his break out performance as his sociopath sidekick Mouse, character actor-extraordinaire Tom Sizemore (243 imdb acting credits), and the radiant Jennifer Beals (Flashdance)!
The show begins with host Robert Mailer Anderson aka DJ GrampaPhone spinning 78rpm shellacs on his 1908 gramophone, and guiding us through a concert of songs from 1948 (the film’s setting) and some of the music and musicians featured in the soundtrack, including Duke Ellington, T-Bone Walker, and Memphis Slim.
Based on Walter Mosley’s first novel (and the first of 16 Easy Rawlins hardboiled mysteries) Devil In A Blue Dress is set in 1948 Los Angeles, where WW II vet Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington) needs to pay his mortgage and for the money takes on his first deadly case to find a missing femme fatale (Jennifer Beals). Hired by duplicitous goons (Tom Sizemore), he follows disturbing clues that lead him through a landscape of sex, politics, race, class, and identity, and as intrigue and violence crescendos, Easy calls in his murderous pal Mouse (Don Cheadle) for back up. Though set largely in Watts, the conclusion calls to mind another classic noir Chinatown.
Fogcutter Film Series hosted by Robert Mailer Anderson
6:00 PM gramophone concert by DJ GrampaPhone
7:00 PM Devil in a Blue Dress
Q&A with Director Carl Franklin to follow the film
Free wine and Fogcutter rye while supplies last!
Carl Franklin: Nominated for 2 Emmys (Monsters, House of Cards) for directing among over 30 television credits (including The Leftovers, Homeland, Rome), Franklin has directed 9 films, including the neo-noir classics One False Move (Billy BobThornton, Bill Paxton) and Devil In A Blue Dress, also directing Denzel Washington in Out Of Time, co-starring Eva Mendes. He has also directed Oscar winners William Hurt, Morgan Freeman, Renée Zellweger, Kevin Spacey, among others, including Meryl Streep in her best actress Oscar-nominated role in One True Thing. But for the first two decades of his career, Richmond California native and graduate of UC Berkeley (with a MFA from AFI), Franklin was an actor who starred opposite Stacey Keach in the Quinn Martin detective series Caribe (1975) and whose long list of credits include some the biggest TV series in the ’70s and ’80s – Good Times, The Rockford Files, MacGyver, Hill Street Blues – and the recurring role of Captain Crane in 17 episodes of The A-Team.
Robert Mailer Anderson: A native San Franciscan and 9th generation Californian, writer, producer, filmmaker, and activist, nominated for 3 Grammys as a music producer, Anderson's most recent work is the graphic novel "My Fairy Godfather” - dedicated to The Castro Theater. He is also known as "DJ GrampaPhone” - spinning 78 records on his 110 year old gramophone.