Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride notes this Reel Chicago piece reporting that Chicago-based avant-gardist James Fotopoulos is about to embark on his first “commercial production,” a $2 million adaptation of Jay Bonansinga’s police novel The Sleep Police. Ray links to his own profile of Fotopolous, but two can play at that game — here’s Travis Crawford’s interview with Fotopolous appearing in Filmmaker.

Paul Cullum has a great, out-of-nowhere piece in the New York Times on the unexpected collaboration between avant-garde publishing elder statesman Barney Rosset and Chicago-based filmmaker James Fotopoulos. Rosset ran for years Grove Press, publishing works by such authors as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and William Burroughs, and then successfully defending these works from U.S. obscenity charges. When I was a teenager I picked up the Evergreen Review Reader, an anthology of works culled from his literary magazine, and it opened the door for me to a whole world of radical literature and theater. Cullum’s piece is one of those […]