E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cool on the Cape Game 6 and Following Sean at P-Town BY GERALD PEARY
	Related Links Following Sean's official Web site

Back last summer in New York, when Michael Hoffman (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) was shooting Game 6, which climaxes with the most hideous moment in Red Sox history, that ball skidding between Bill Buckner’s legs, everybody was certain that the Sox would be, as always, October losers. "We didn’t know that the Red Sox would do what they did," producer Amy Robinson explained after the film’s screening at the Provincetown International Film Festival. So was what the Sox did good or bad for the picture? "I now feel that it’s good," she answered. "It sets the film as a period piece, long before Johnny Damon and cowboying up."

Starring Michael Keaton and Robert Downey Jr. and set to open this fall, Game 6 is based on an original screenplay (an often self-conscious one) by novelist Don DeLillo. Hoffman resides in Idaho, and one day he discovered that Buckner was a neighbor. The two became friends. "I can’t say the Buckners were overjoyed" when they realized that Game 6 would re-create the infamous fielding boo-boo, Robinson admitted. Yet at the end of the movie there’s a surprise moment where the three main characters, all Sox fans, find room to say, "I love Bill Buckner."

I asked, "Is that DeLillo’s line?" Robinson: "I think I’ll plead the Fifth on that one!" I wondered how many at P-Town realized that this white-haired lady under the big hat had been the romantic lead, Harvey Keitel’s girlfriend, in the 1973 Martin Scorsese classic Mean Streets!

Nothing gives credence to a film festival like the discovery of a translucent new movie. I’d never heard of Ralph Arlyck’s feature documentary Following Sean — thank you, P-Town. This is the finest film I’ve seen in 2005. And so far, it has no distributor!

In 1969, when Arlyck attended San Francisco State, he made a 16mm short about his upstairs neighbor in the Haight: Sean, a free-spirited four-year-old charmer who talked casually of having smoked pot. "Sean" quickly became famous, a decadent shocker to conservatives, a little gem of portraiture for admiring cinephiles, among them François Truffaut. Thirty years later, Arlyck, then a New York suburbanite, returned to San Francisco without flowers in his hair. He brought a video camera hoping to find Sean and Sean’s once-hippie family and — this is a reflective personal documentary — to understand his own travels through the decades.

Following Sean explores the question of "How To Live One’s Life on Earth," but it’s also the story of America since the ’60s, with the heat and the challenge of the ’60s still there, softly pulsating. Sean? He’s not what you might expect, neither a mindless druggy vegetable nor, rehabbed, a suit-wearing Bushie. Hard-working, dealing the best he can with the bills, a shaky marriage, and a child, Sean is a 2005 Everyman. His humble, quietly disappointed, slow-burn adulthood is as affecting as one of Chekhov’s sobering tales.

Locals at P-Town?

Two Cantabrigians, producer Paula Dowd and director/writer Coren Block, combined on the tender, touching short "Everything Good." It’s about a sexually unhappy American lesbian who on a visit to Amsterdam makes a game try at a night of erotic ecstasy in her hotel room by ordering a red-headed hooker.

Another Cantabrigian, Laura Teodosio, produced the tantalizing dramatic short "Who’s the Top." Directed by Paris Is Burning filmmaker Jennie Livingston, it’s about a young woman who’s bored in bed with her unadventurous femme girlfriend, so she travels to San Francisco and becomes embroiled with a butch "top." Their sex scene is steamy, and a lavish musical number is amazing, cooler than anything in The Phantom of the Opera or Chicago. Busby Berkeley, 1933!

Gerald Peary | gpeary@geraldpeary.com