(updated 8/11/22) An Ian performance from 1996 – promo for ‘Pulse’

HIC's in there,Miscellaneous,Pulse 4 October 2010 | 0 Comments

Ian shot this 9-minute opening for a movie that was set in Scotland called ‘Pulse.’

This promo was made to drum up investors, which it did.  Unfortunately the financing fell thru, and the film in its original form was never made.
It has recently been released as Rez Bomb, and takes place on a Native American Indian Reservation, instead of in Scotland.

Megathanks to Julie for sending this my way!

**Caution – language

‘Pulse’ preliminary footage

The HeraldScotland did a wee article on the film, and discusses how Ian was involved in the original concept.

How an Edinburgh romance ended up in an Indian reservation

heraldscotland staff

24 Jan 2009

More than a decade in the making, Steven Lewis Simpson’s powerful tale is finally reaching UK cinema screens

By Brian Pendreigh

It is 13 years since film-maker Steven Lewis Simpson wrote a script for a romantic thriller set on a housing scheme in Edinburgh. He finally got the film made last year, with one fairly major change – the story now takes place on an Indian reservation in South Dakota.

Simpson, 38, a former stockbroker from Aberdeen, planned to make Pulse his second feature film after the low-budget drama Ties in 1993. Pulse was the story of a middle-class young man and his girlfriend, who is from an Edinburgh housing scheme.

Simpson even shot preliminary footage with actor Henry Ian Cusick at the tower blocks at Muirhouse, near Granton. On two occasions Simpson seemed all set to make the film, only for the financing to fall through at the last moment.

Since then, the tower blocks have been demolished, Cusick went on to star in US TV drama series Lost and Simpson switched his attention to other projects.

These included a documentary about the return of an Indian “Ghost Shirt” from Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Galley and Museum to the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota.

During this time Simpson met Russell Means, who led the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, the site of an infamous massacre by US troops in 1890. The more recent confrontation made headlines around the world and prompted Marlon Brando to send an Indian girl to accept his Oscar for The Godfather. “What Brando and I have in common is that we’ve both helped bail Russell out of jail,” said Simpson.

Simpson’s documentary expanded into a long-term project about Pine Ridge, which includes Wounded Knee, and his experiences also led him to think again about Pulse. “It suddenly dawned on me that the story worked as well, if not better there,” he said.

The well-off Scottish youth became a rich American boy (although he is called Scott, in recognition of the character’s origins) and his girlfriend from the tower blocks evolved into a young Sioux woman.

The film, now renamed Rez Bomb, had its world premiere at the Montreal Film Festival last year and has its British premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival next month. It stars the young American actors Tamara Feldman, from the TV series Dirty Sexy Money, Trent Ford, whose film credits include Gosford Park, and Means himself.

After the occupation at Wounded Knee, Means went on to combine political activism with an acting career, co-starring with Daniel Day-Lewis as Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and playing Sitting Bull in the mini-series Buffalo Girls (1995).

In Rez Bomb, Ford’s character comes out of prison to find his life threatened by a loan shark. He has a stash of drugs hidden in his guitar, but his girlfriend has pawned the guitar and disappeared. Means plays a gambler with whom they team up.

Means said: “It’s just regular people, on a reservation. That’s what I’m after in Hollywood. We’re human beings with all the same problems as everyone else. Hollywood doesn’t do those kind of films for us.

“I’ve done 21 movies since 1991, and if you’re an American Indian actor the only time you can act is if you dress up in leather in the summer or, if it’s going to be contemporary, you have to be a drunk.”

Means was born at Pine Ridge and still lives there, but Rez Bomb was the first film he had made on the reservation. He did it for a nominal fee because it meant so much to him.

Although it might be set anywhere, Rez Bomb does highlight the continuing plight of Indians on the reservation. It has a population of around 25,000, living in a barren area larger than some American states. In the early 1970s, when international attention briefly focused on Wounded Knee, the murder rate was 17 times the national average. Means said conditions have deteriorated since then. Unemployment is now around 80 per cent.

Simpson said: “There might be 17 people in a two-room trailer house. Everyone is patting themselves on the back in America about diversity finding its day. But in that whole debate nobody is ever bringing in the most depressed people in the country.”

Rez Bomb screens at the Glasgow Film Theatre on February 19

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SVU Season 12 Premiere inspirations! Neal sez…

HIC's in there,Law & Order: SVU 29 September 2010 | 0 Comments

TV Guide’s Robyn Ross interviews L&O:SVU’s writer/producer, Neal Baer, about the season premiere.

SVU‘s Neal Baer Says Premiere Was Inspired by Vertigo

Robyn Ross
Sep 28, 2010 06:41 AM ET
by Robyn Ross

Joan Cusack, Peter Strauss

“Ripped from the headlines” is the Law & Order franchise’s catch phrase, but often times just one nugget of a real-life story is enough to inspire an episode.

This season’s premiere slightly borrowed from the story of Jaycee Dugard (who was kidnapped and found to be living with her captor years later), added an element of the Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novack film Vertigo about remaking someone you love, and combined it with the idea of installing RFID chips in your kids to trace their every move.

SVU executive producer Neal Baer recently spoke with TVGuide.com about what interests him and how he translates that into entertainment. Plus: How did star Mariska Hargitay‘s Joyful Heart Foundation inspire this week’s upcoming episode?

TVGuide.com: Why did you decide to cast Joan Cusack in the season premiere?
Neal Baer: We love to bring on actors who are known for their comic work like Robin Williams, Carol Burnett, Martin Short. If you’re a really great comedian, you’re a really great actor, because it’s really hard to be a comedian. We’ve never been wrong about that, so that’s why we wanted Joan.

TVGuide.com: Was the Jaycee Dugard story your inspiration for the episode?
Baer: We certainly know about that story, but the genesis for that show wasn’t so much that story, but what a parent goes through when a child is taken away and you never find out what’s happened. To us, that was one of worst, most unimaginable things that could happen to a parent and we wanted to explore that.  We understood Joan’s character really well and we understood why she’d want to remake this little girl to be like her daughter who was lost. The character was wacky, but for a reason. So it gave us a clear arc for her and yet it also made her really suspicious because why would you be changing this little girl. It really came down to my own interest in thinking about the psychological consequences [of not having] any finality to that horrible story and the twist is that, well, the daughter is still alive.

Exclusive: 90210 Alum Heads to Law & Order: SVU

TVGuide.com: Did you always want Henry Ian Cusick to be a part of both the premiere and the episode that followed?
Baer: We pitched this to him as a two-arc show. He’s suspicious at first so everybody goes, “Oh, he’s the one,” then we take the suspicion off of him. We had it planned all along who his character was, what he was going to do, how he might cozy up to Benson to get information and get them off his trail. It was always two episodes.

TVGuide.com:  Where do you get the idea for the second episode, “Bullseye”?
Baer: The first movie I ever wrote was an adaptation of a story from Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and the man whose mind is erasing himself. I’m very taken with neurological disorders so I had told Dan [the writer] there’s a really cool neurological disorder called Capgras where someone you love or are very close to is an imposter because the emotional link between your vision and your emotion has been damaged. So in the episode she sees her daughter, but doesn’t recognize her as her daughter, but when she hears her voice that’s a different route of wiring from your brain.

Exclusive: A first look at the new SVU Headquarters

TVGuide.com:  What else inspires the stories?
Baer: I’m very influenced by the movieVertigo. I love the notion of remaking someone in somebody that you’re in love with. So in this episode the Vertigo element was Joan Cusack remaking her daughter into the image of the kidnapped daughter. The influence of Vertigo is Jimmy Stewark making Kim Novack to the woman he lost. Kim Novack is Mikka Von [Paula Patton‘s character name] spelled backward. Our newest character played by Melissa Sagemiller is Gillian Hardwicke. [Her first name] Gillian is from Bell, Book and Candle, [the surname] Hardwicke is from The Notorious Landlady.

TVGuide.com:  Next week’s episode features Jennifer Love Hewitt and is about the issue of rape-kit backlogs. This is an issue Mariska has been very involved with.
Baer: I was at an event last year for Mariska’s Joyful Heart Foundation and I heard about a woman who was literally stuck in her apartment was afraid to leave because this horrible guy kept after her. It struck me and I said to Mariska, I know how to do the rape-kit episode now. How do you tell victims to go through this arduous process when we have tens of thousands of kits unopened? That’s an issue I think we can all agree is a bad thing and something needs to be done. So I said to myself I know how to unravel this.

TVGuide.com:  What can you say about Jennifer Love Hewitt‘s performance?
Baer: She said she fell in love with acting again.

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You Say “Constant,” Some Say “Stalker”

Law & Order: SVU,Lost,Miscellaneous 27 September 2010 | 0 Comments

This is sorta cute…sorta.

Somehow the words “cute” and “SVU” don’t go together very well.

Lost Plots Law & Order: SVU Should Steal

by Angel Cohn July 7, 2010 3:45 PM

Lost Plots Law & Order: SVU Should Steal

Law & Order: SVU has tapped Henry Ian Cusick to play a love interest for Mariska Hargitay’s Benson. Cusick, who played Lost‘s dreamy Desmond, will appear on two or more episodes as a graphic designer named Eric Weber. It might be enough to get me to tune into this cop show. What would really get me interested in it, though, is if they not only took Cusick, but also borrowed some plots from Lost and changed things up so it wouldn’t be an ordinary procedural. Below are our ideas for how these plots could be implemented.

Sex Trafficking Hatches
There have been reports of secret hatches that are deep below New York City, and each one has a different sex crime being committed inside. The team has to find each hatch and put a stop to the horrors using only various vague logos that keep popping up as clues.

Time Travel to ’70s
Due to a time anomaly, Benson and Stabler get sent back several decades to the ’70s while Fin and the rest of the division are stuck in the present. It’s like Lost meets Life on Mars as Benson’s subjected to sexist remarks everywhere she goes.

Trapped on an Island
While digging the long-promised Second Avenue subway line, a crew bumps an underground frozen donkey wheel causing the entire island of Manhattan to move. With the ensuing chaos and rioting from angry city dwellers, crime is running rampant and it is the detectives job to hunt down the worst criminals and find someplace to put them.

Plane Crash
A plane crashes in Manhattan and the detectives are tasked with tracking down a cult who took all of the children who survived the crash before the police got to the scene. No reason will ever be given for the kidnappings.

Smoke Monster
A strange smokey creation is coming up out of the sewer grates and causing sex-addicts around town to be killed in some torturous ways. While Stabler appreciates that his job is being taken care of, he feels obligated to put a stop to this vigilante sort of justice.

You Say “Constant,” Some Say “Stalker”
Benson thinks that Weber is flirty and fun, but she’s sort of disturbed by the fact that he keeps dropping by to see her at work, claiming that he needs to talk to her on a regular basis or he’ll get nosebleeds that could cause his head to explode.

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