Alison Elliott in Lawrence Bridges’ 12 "A dizzying, unforgettable adventure" Variety Magazine.
Films
Director: Lawrence Bridges
Screenwriter: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Dramatic Feature
A half-sister and brother, illegitimate offsprings of Zeus, are stranded on a Channel Island ranch and face eviction by the US Government. They must find a play fated by Zeus and perform it flawlessly for the gods' amusement. If they do not act well, they will die. Shot over a period of 10 years "12" is 1 part L.A. love story, "The Importance of Being Earnest", a pagan spoof, personal diary of LA disasters of the 90's, and an unforgettable adventure about characters in search of themselves.
Director: Lawrence Bridges
Screenwriter: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Documentary
This was Lawrence Bridges’ first major documentary film, made in 2003 for the National Endowment for the Arts. Actors Tom Hanks, Martin Sheen, William Shatner, Christina Applegate, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael York, Julie Taymor, and Bill Pullman along with school children and lovers of Shakespeare give testimony to the power and importance of Shakespeare. Why Shakespeare? makes a compelling case for the study and performance of his plays and sonnets at all levels, and the transformative effect it can have in the lives of inner city youth.
Director: Lawrence Bridges
Screenwriters: US Troops
Genre: Documentary
Based on the book "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience."
Through interviews and readings by US troops, their families, and distinguished contemporary American writers, Muse of Fire is an exploration of the human, historical and literary value of "Operation Homecoming," a project created by the NEA to help troops and their families write about their wartime experiences. It features men and women of the United States Armed Forces along with actors Kevin Costner, Stephen Lang and author Ray Bradbury.
Director: Lawrence Bridges
Screenwriters: US Troops
Genre: Documentary
An interview with Ray Bradbury, author of titles such as titles such as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man.
Books
Author: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Romance
Gina Valenzuela has never known what it’s like to go without. Her father, Baron Sr., is the richest man in Los Angeles. The life of private jets, haute couture and a monolithic house in Brentwood filled with priceless art has insulated her from the severe draught that has befallen the city. While people in LA wait anxiously every day for their two hours of water service, the Valenzuelas drink and bathe in Perrier that comes from a gigantic cistern in the kitchen.
Even the family portraits taken by Annie Liebowitz can’t hide the Valenzuela dysfunction. Gina knows she has to get out. A reality TV deal is looming, and her father has strange, possibly incestuous designs for her future. Her forbidden, unspoken crush on her half brother is unraveling, and the malicious ambition of her newly political sister, Claire, thrusts her out into the crazed revelry of LA. Something in the water has driven citizens of Los Angeles into a passionate rebellion against conventional life. They speak in rhymes, assemble in parks for poetry slams, and have turned the city into a permanent Burning Man. As she disappears into a community of illegal immigrants and starts a new life, she follows the spectacular demise of her family on their reality show that has gripped the nation. She reinvents herself in Little Guatemala, content with her new life. The Valenzuelas find a way back into her life, and not in the way Gina could ever dream of.
Author: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Science Fiction
Martin has an easy life in the utopia that is post-apocalyptic Paris. The hedonistic society, devoted to leisure and sex, leaves little room to complain. The Server, an artificial intelligence that governs the city, has walled off Paris from the barbaric outside world that reverted to the Bronze Age after a series of calamities. At the Apple Store, Martin is introduced to the hottest new release, Best Friend. The device, a translucent laurel wreath, is worn like a crown and can create a vivid three dimensional experience with any person, in any place, living or dead. With Best Friend engaged, Martin spots a beautiful young woman on the other side of the tracks in the Metro. He doesn’t have to imagine her touch, her lips, her smell. Best Friend has taken care of that, and the woman doesn’t even know it.
Across the tracks, Martine is having her own fun. Through a glitch, Martin and Martine are united in their experience. Their erotic union takes the form of a true relationship in the physical world. There has never been a better time to be alive. This is not 1984 or Brave New World, but not everyone is happy. Calex, a rogue academic and Martin’s child hood friend, theorizes that The Server is slowly culling the human herd to reach a critically ideal number. There are unexplained breaches in the wall, but do the blissfully unaware citizens of Paris care enough to take notice?
Poetry
Author: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Poetry
When Jackson Pollock said, “Painting is a state of being,” perhaps he spoke to the future of art and to the poetry of Lawrence Bridges. Read Horses on Drums and you’ll soon agree, “This month’s been like no other culture.” Time haunts its own distance inside a world full of episodic discord and upended images, compelled and compelled to find, indeed, “the syntax is circular.” Aphoristic, strange, funny, indissoluble, this stunning first book offers a taste of Simic, of Holub, something savoring Tarkovsky’s lyrical hero “To blaze, word-like” inside our mouths. This is a poetry, vivid with entropy, that turns in on itself, as if action is elucidation-backwards, and reveals, from the deep pockets of the poet, an unspent currency of fresh verve and revelation, of sadness and awakened consciousness. The answer is a present-tense yes: “Don’t you know time will meet the same dog over and over?” —Elena Karina Byrne
$17.95
Author: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Poetry
Using Hollywood screenplay structure to illustrate a life in three acts, eighteen scenes, each with two poems as mirrors to action, filmmaker/poet Lawrence Bridges sequences through tragicomic plot twists and subplots to create a character-driven, novel-like book of lyric poems. An unnamed protagonist is torn from a lover, torn from himself, in perpetual transition while starting a new family, surrounded by a lively array of colleagues and friends as his career implodes, asserting his autonomy only to become part of life's "conspiracies." Strangers shift around him in a murky world beyond his control, a world with signs of indeterminacy and happenstance: Restaurant patrons smile innocently while thieves quietly rob, a death pact is used to escape a lover, disguised signals from space aliens announce that our enemies are now their allies. How do you tie up loose ends when characters we like are actually the bad guys? Bridges prods us to answer the main question: Can a man love as his world spells farewell? A unique, delightful read—an invitation to explore something new in what may be a new genre fusing some of the elements of screenplay with poetry. Today is already yesterday to tomorrow, in Flip Days.
Cynthia Ozick on Lawrence Bridges and the school of Dissociative Poets:
Dissociative Poet! Dis-sociative?! - when the ruling motif is precisely the opposite, when what we are struck by, again and again and again is the intuitive wizardry of lightening associations, association, junctions, segues, startling linkages that make you see as you've never seen before and think as you've never thought before! As feel as you've never felt before. And very often jump out of you skin! "Our profiles are what make us look strange." There is pure lyricism, the beautiful "Winter Object: Oath of Silence," wherein the images are Yeatslike. Elsewhere, this lovely phrase" "All the cells want to be flowers." All the cells want to be flowers. Oh, to have written that!” -Cynthia Ozick
$17.95
Author: Lawrence Bridges
Genre: Poetry
SAMPLE FROM BROWNWOOD
UNDERTOW
This hand's shadow plays over the page. I drag my left hand against
it in the dark--- this hand moves down music, the memory of sex, darker
flowers, over riverbed of green, over things unsaid concealed in song,
allowing no reply like a light left on all week. A bird lands on the fountain.
I build it a wing. I make something simple, then rest in the winging-it
heart, I confess, in the only language I know, building new wing version
on the way down. The music I distrust stirs my inner fool.
$11.14
Brownwood, like Berryman's Henry, is a triad (I, He, You), an "other" character, constructed within a real-life geography in an arsenal of time and place. Lawrence Bridges offers Polaroid graphics of his protagonist's identity in the thick of our culture, amid the changing rules of fate and folly. As Elena Karina Byrne observes in her Foreword, "Brownwood is full of angst, wry humor, and sarcasm; he's a lost twin, doppelganger, living in a melancholy place [and] this book's poetic plot . . . arrives with cinematographic aplomb." Bridges's third volume of poems is like an autobiography of one stuck inside the vessel of who he is: "Feared as a monster, tame as a clown."
Trailers
Where to start about this one? Bridges' film can truly be called an epic without fear of overhype. This amazing film is the result of fifteen years worth of production work by writer/director Bridges, and you can feel the love and care that has gone into each of its smudged, ripped, spliced-up frames. With a visual look that resembles watching a beat-upediting work-print, this grandly-scaled, literary comedy has been a fixture of the L.A. scene for years now, having been exhibited piece by piece, year by year, by Bridges at makeshift drive-in theaters all around the city. So already, many in Hollywood have experienced this near-masterpiece. It's set in modern L.A., where the Greek gods--Zeus, Hermes,Pan, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, Hades, Aphrodite, and so on--have gathered to bring to a close a myth that was set into motion eons ago when Zeus condemned two mortals (Allison Elliott and Tony Griffin) to a loveless eternity thatwould only end in love and mortality for them if they discovered the then-yet-to-be-written book that would closelyparallel their lives. Now the couple have a clue as to what book they are to play out, and it's time to reveal their discovery or stay solitary but immortal. Complicating things are mortal love interests, including an unlikely leadingman, a commercial actor and deadbeat named Allen Allen (Allen Lulu). An immensely complex movie, Bridges hasacted as a one-man production team for years, then, by 2001, has a crew that's grown to hundreds (check out those mind-boggling closing credits). All this work has paid off: Bridges' photography and editing is incredible, his cast (especially the portly Lulu and Spitfire Grill and Wings of the Dove star, the mesmerizing Allison Elliott, from Birth with Nicole Kidman) is incredible, his story is incredible, his vision is incredible, and that damn soundtrack--Mozart, Hayden, Beethover, Bach, Vivaldi, Dvorak, Prokofiev, Ravel, Berilioz, Tchikovsky, Brian Eno, Lisa Germano,Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet---yes--incredible. Can you tell we like it yet? We do--it's a really great movie, a movie for the ages.
Chiwetel Ejiofor from Why Shakespeare by Lawrence Bridges
Michael York recites William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 "Shall I compare tee to a summer's day?" from the film by Lawrence Bridges, Why Shakespeare?
A scene from Lawrence Bridges' cult film from the 90's: 12
Trailer for Muse of Fire, a documentary exploring creativity in the writings of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq by Lawrence Bridges
A clip from my documentary Muse of Fire where Stephen Lang performs a piece about Vietnam.
Trailer for Muse of Fire
Richard Bausch on writing and a monologue by Stephen Lang from Muse of Fire
Trailer for Muse of Fire
Trailer for Muse of Fire
News
University of Southern California - May 2012
Director and Editor Lawrence Bridges has worked on music videos (Michael Jackson - "Beat It", "Dirty Diana", "The Way You Make Me Feel") and television commercials including campaigns for Nike (Wieden+Kennedy), Coca-Cola (CAA), and has worked with directors like Joe Pytka, Bob Giraldi and Steve Horn.
His documentaries Why Shakespeare? and his profiles of authors such as Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451) and Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club) have established him as one of the foremost literary documentarians in America.
By ROBERT KOEHLER
Equal parts L.A. love story, "The Importance of Being Earnest," spoof on Greek gods and personal diary of actual events from 1988 to 1998 (when the pic was being lensed), Lawrence Bridges' half-cracked, half-inspired "12" is a dizzying, slightly amateurish but unforgettable adventure about characters in search of themselves. Pic is being presented in as unorthodox a manner as its making: Unspooling of completed work in workprint form happens in parking lots at various L.A. locales (revealed only at pic's Web site), with viewers driving in and tuning their car's FM dial to a station temporarily pirated by presenters. Effect is of a new drive-in experience for only the most adventurous cinephiles. With trimming, traditional fest appearances and vid shelf life in the art film racks are a good though not sure bet.
Pic belongs to American tradition of art made by dogged outsiders, from Simon Rodia to Harry Partch. First half is especially nonlinear, owing more to Jean-Luc Godard's "Helas Pour Moi" (also depicting the gods in contempo human form) than anything on the indie scene, which was just coming into its own when Bridges, a well-known TV ad helmer, began project.
Immortals Marie-Noel (Alison Elliott) and half-bro Filmore West (Tony Griffin) are Zeus' illegitimate progeny, ordered to find a play and act it well as the means of becoming fully mortal.
Bro and sis have come upon Oscar Wilde's "Earnest" as the play that will free them, with Filmore as Jack and Marie-Noel as his niece, Cecily. Role of Algernon is taken on by a rotund mortal named Allen (Allen Lulu), a struggling L.A. thesp.
Like his literary doppelganger, Filmore is known as "Tony" in the city and by his real name in the country, an estate on one of the remote Channel Islands being invaded by the feds, where Marie-Noel lives in boredom with her tutor-assistant (Lisa Stark).
Despite (or perhaps because of) a decade's shooting and more time in post, pic refuses to fix on a tone, shifting capriciously between the near-profound and the pointlessly silly. Former is best captured in grand vistas of human figures in island landscapes (Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and Catalina islands are beautifully chosen locales) which recall another Godard epic, "Le Mepris," plus an extraordinary if rather ostentatious soundtrack of music ranging from Arvo Part to Bach to Mozart.
Latter is typified by Filmore's and Marie-Noel's pesky family of gods, including Zeus, Athena, Artemis, Hera, Aphrodite and Pan, who often look and act like they've walked out of a bad soap.
The "Earnest" plot takes over in the second half, with some scenes closely tracking Wilde's text, but not for too long. The Gwendolen to Filmore's Jack is Earth-bound Julienne (Julienne Greer), dominated by her overbearing Aunt Debbie (Golde Starger), who is Lady Bracknell turned into an obnoxiously loud New York-accented mama.
Amidst the arch comedy and cleverness are genuinely touching encounters between mortals and immortals, finishing with wild finale as Filmore returns to L.A. amidst riots (captured, as is the Northridge quake, with originally shot, non-stock footage).
Griffin and Elliott provide a good grounding for the viewer's attention as the deconstructed stream of images and story roll by, but much of the fascination here is not in the highly uneven perfs, but in pic's raw enthusiasm for the film medium, montage, the juxtaposition of image and sound and the reimagining of Greek classicism in a SoCal setting.
Characteristically, print (screened via projected video) is extremely rough, but with its own charming texture that grows on the eye, and FM stereo sound is a genuine drive-in novelty.
Camera (color), Bridges; music, various; art director, Nesdom Booth; costume designer, Dina Boykiw; sound, KC Clayton; special effects coordinator, Lee Ranch; makeup, Samantha Weaver; line producer, Jay Kelman; assistant director, Phil Spilker; casting, Bridges. Reviewed in parking lot, Culver City, May 24, 2002. Running time: 140 MIN.
The crew of 12, hoping to get the attention of Academy members who often find themselves on LA freeways, handed out T-shirts, partly out of generosity and sympathy for the homeless and partly with the hope that they would wear them as they asked for assistance at freeway on ramps. They never thought it would result in this inadvertent coverage by the LA Times.
TV
As a TV commercial director, Lawrence Bridges started more than one trend. He added letters to the alphabet of film vocabulary in this ground breaking edit of the Honda Scooters commercial featureing Lou Reed, helped establish the zeitgeist of the 1980's mania for musica videos with his edit of Michael Jackson's Beat it, realized the full potential of the advertising media's power of propaganda, this time on the Capitalists' side with his edit of David Bailey footage for Reebok, created a new syntax that now contemporary film, feature to YouTube, as been able to escape since in Joe Pytkas Laundramatte commercial, as gave Brad Pitt his first gig in front of the camera when he directed Pringles Beach.
Music video by Michael Jackson performing Beat It
Reebok - Chiat\Day
Director David Bailey
Editor Lawrence Bridges
Wieden + Kennedy - Honda Feat. Lou Reed
Director Steve Horn
Editor Lawrence Bridges
Brad Pitt - PRINGLES
Directed and Edited by Lawrence Bridges
Robert Downey Jr. and Sarah Jessica Parker for Rock the Vote 1992
Directed by Larry Bridges
Lee Jeans Agency Fallon Worldwide
Director Joe Pytka
Editor Lawrence Bridges
