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Man Bites Dog Films is currently in New York City with celebrity choreographer Paul Becker filming a documentary about Ben Vereen’s life as well as a commercial for South African choreographer Warren Adam’s new website: home4dance.com. Adams won the Linbury/Mandela scholarship to study at the Rampert Ballet in London where he was the winner of the Rudolf Nureyev Award. On Monday, January 26th, we filmed some extremely talented Broadway dancers at the Harlem School for Theater and Dance. They danced the salsa, the tango, tap, hip-hop and more.

Additionally, Paul Becker and MBD Films have been shooting Ben Vereen’s documentary tentatively titled “From Brooklyn to Broadway”.  In Los Angeles we interviewed legendary choreographer Jamie Rogers who choreographed for Elvis Presley and produced a number of Ben’s shows in the early years. On the east coast we visited the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation where Vereen did his physical therapy after the devastating car accident in 1992 where he was struck walking along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu by producer David Foster, a 15 Grammy Award winner. In NYC, we interviewed Ben Vereen’s manager Pamela Cooper of The Cooper Company at her Times Square office. Pamela has been Ben’s manager for over thirty years. Pamela’s father Frank discovered Frank Sinatra and Dinah Cooper and developed the feature film “Dirty Harry”. Not too shabby, Frank!

 

In other news, Wade Smith and I are hard at work in pre-production developing a script for Sally Denton’s nonfiction book “The Bluegrass Conspiracy” which the Wall Street Journal called a “larger than life thriller”. Finally, Man Bites Dog Films has almost wrapped post-production on the eco-documentary “Toxic Soup”. Although it is currently being submitted to film festivals across the world, we still need to color correct the final cut and make an HD master copy. Last week we were able to get filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”, “30 Days”) a copy of the documentary and are hoping that he will endorse “Toxic Soup” as it would greatly benefit our marketing campaign.

Oh, did I mention that Paul and I got our rental car towed in Brooklyn and in Manhattan? Hopefully, we can get towed in Queens, Bronx and Staten Island to complete our 5 borough tow yard tour before heading back to Cali… Yes, we are idiots.