Source:
THN Date: 27th April, 2006 Posted by:
Paul Heath
As
you may know, the Tribeca film festival is in full swing over in New York at the
moment, and today we received a review from one of our readers, Jonathan, who
managed to catch AMERICAN CANNIBAL, which the IMDB
says documents the train-wreck production and sudden shutdown of American Cannibal,
the reality TV show produced by the promoter behind the Paris Hilton sex tape.
There is an official website for this movie here.
This is a positve review of the movie and contains minor spoilers. Thanks to Jonathan.
American
Cannibal premiered yesterday at the 5th annual Tribeca Film Festival. Tribeca
has easily become one of the top festivals in North America. The highlight of
the festival yesterday was the documentary "American Cannibal: The Road to
Reality". Over the last 6 weeks there has been a public fight between the
American Cannibal filmmakers Michael Nigro and Perry Grebin and Porn Promoter
Kevin Blatt who is featured in the documentary. After reading about the film from
a link off of DrudgeReport.com I had to buy a ticket to see what the fuss was
about.
Kevin
Blatt is featured in the documentary along with two writers Gil Ripley and Dave
Roberts. The film follows Gil and Dave while they go on a quest to get their TV
Show ideas turned into a reality. The TV show they pitch Blatt is called Virgin
Territories, "When you win it, You Lose It", they explain its like Big
Brother but more sexy. Blatt decides he wants to go main stream and decides to
have the guys do a TV show called "American Cannibal". They put in one-hundred-thousand
dollars into the production of a television pilot they hope to sell to a network.
This is Blatt's first attempt to go main stream and it fails miserably.
The
documentary process follows every process of making a Reality TV show from the
pitching to the casting all the way to the production. Game Show host George Gray
is the host for American Cannibal, but he ends up having a problem from SAG and
has to leave the show 3 days into production. Once they decide to speed up production
one of the big breasted blonde contestant falls over and gets a laceration across
her chest. It turns out she fell into coma but is supposedly fine now.
On
the controversial side, Kevin Blatt talks about Paris Hilton and the porn tape
in depth in a couple of scenes. He also said that the DVD "One Night in Paris"
had the wholesale price of 22 dollars which is unheard of for any type of film.
I sat in the far back row and about 30 seconds before the film began Kevin
Blatt came into the screening and sat down with a hat and a porn star on his arm.
I could not tell if he was happy with how he is portrayed but he got up and left
before the end of the credits. For the Q&A, Dave Roberts said that he thought
he was fairly portrayed, but his writing partner Gil Ripley also left before the
Q&A.
The
filmmakers said that making this film was a two year process and it turned out
much differently than it began.
Overall
I thought this was an excellent documentary and I know the filmmakers will go
far with this film. While watching the film all I could think was that this was
like Lost In La Mancha. Instead of a feature film falling apart this was like
watching the behind the scenes of TV show tear apart at its seams. Hopefully one
day, the footage that was shot of the TV show "American Cannibal" will
be released so we can see how bad it really was.
