Looking for Palladin

Pine Hill Productions
and
Tousi Productions

in association with
Maya Cine Digital, S.A.
Full Moon Angel Cine Independiente

present

Ben Gazzara

Vincent Pastore

LOOKING FOR PALLADIN

Written and directed by
Andrzej Krakowski

Produced by
Mahyad Tousi

Executive Producer
Majka Elczewska

Co-Producers
Andrzej Krakowski
Mendel Samayoa
Jerry Carlson
Babak Rassi

Line Producer
Ely Fenner

Cinematography by
Giovanni Fabietti
&
Alberto “Chak” Chaktoura

Edited by
Babak Rassi

Production Design by
Jorge Rossi
Rene Bustamante

Costume Designer
Jennifer Mielke

Original Music by
Joel Dancyger
Jim Skinger
Alan Kushan

A twist from comedy to drama rarely seen on screen.

“The American-made, discovery/redemption tale, which features an international cast, is the first full-length feature film made and set in Guatemala since the 1938 release Tarzan and the Green Goddess.” *- China Confidential*

Arrogant Hollywood talent agent, Josh Ross (David Moscow, is sent to Guatemala to find two-time Oscar winner actor Jack Palladin (Ben Gazzara). Although they’d never met, the search is emotionally complicated as the long-time retired star was once married to Josh’s late mother. The young agent’s contempt for the ‘old’ actor mirrors his comedic distaste for the local community, whose help he desperately needs to find him. What Josh hopes will be a quick and lucrative deal turns into a soul-searching journey. The retired star and his estranged stepson must confront the past they had forsaken

BEN GAZZARA (Jake Palladin)
Few actors can boast that they have acted in films by Otto Preminger ( Anatomy of a Murder ), John Cassavetes ( five films ), Joel and Ethan Coen ( The Big Lebowski ), Spike Lee ( Summer of Sam ) and Lars von Trier ( Dogville ), among many others. In addition to an illustrious career in films, Ben Gazzara has enjoyed remarkable success in theater and television as well, winning an Emmy, and being nominated for three Golden Globes and three Tony Awards. A New York-born Italian-American actor and product of the famed Actors Studio, Mr. Gazzara recently starred in the French production, Paris, je t’aime, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. He was Brick in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and appeared in acclaimed revivals of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and, most recently, Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! Television viewers have seen him on Arrest and Trial, Run for Your Life, The Name of the Game, two Columbo television films, An Early Frost and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

DAVID MOSCOW (Josh Ross)
New York native David Moscow began his career in 1986 on the TV series Kate & Allie, rising to prominence as Young Josh, Tom Hanks’ character before his transformation, in Big. The same year he appeared in The Wizard of Loneliness with Lukas Haas, and TV’s short-lived series Live-In and Living Dolls. He was one of the featured actors in Disney’s musicals, Newsies, and after a hiatus, appeared in Hurricane Streets, River Red, and Restaurant with Adrien Brody. He returned to television in Zoe, Duncan, Jack & Jane. Other film credits include Riding in Cars with Boys, Just Married, Nearing Grace, and David & Layla. David has worked opposite such stars as Drew Barrymore, Adrian Brody, Penny Marshall, Steve Zahn, Lorraine Bracco, Simon Baker, Christian Bale, Rosie Perez, Jessica Alba, and now Ben Gazzara, Talia Shire, and Vincent Pastore.

TALIA SHIRE (Rosario) is the youngest member of the famed Coppola family. She briefly attended the Yale School of Drama, but left New Haven for Hollywood, where she appeared in a series of Roger Corman films. In 1970, she married composer David Shire. After asking her brother Francis for a screen test for his upcoming film, The Godfather, she was cast as Connie, the young sister of the Corleone family. Her portrayal earned her an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress, and the same part in the movie’s two sequels.

In 1975, she began to work on her best known and most beloved role, Adrian Balboa, in Rocky, for which she was Oscar-nominated as 1977’s Best Actress, taking home
the New York Film Critics Award, National Board of Review Award, and a Golden Globe nomination. Sylvester Stallone tapped her again in 1979 for Rocky II, and she followed that with Prophecy, directed by John Frankenheimer, and Old Boyfriends.

Divorced from David Shire, she married businessman/producer Jack Schwartzman in 1980. In 1983, Adrian Balboa appeared again in Rocky III, and in Rocky IV in November 1985. With Rocky V and The Godfather: Part III, 1990 marked a year in which she returned to both of her most celebrated pictures. The sixth Rocky installment, Rocky Balboa, premiered to much success in 2006. Talia Shire has continued to produce and appear in TV movies and feature films, and has watched proudly as her two sons, Robert and Jason Schwartzman, carve out their own acclaimed careers in the entertainment industry.

VINCENT PASTORE (Arnie) is most recognizable to television audiences as “Big Pussy” on HBO’s The Sopranos. Other TV credits include: NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice, The Practice, Everybody Hates Chris, HBO’s Gotti, Witness to the Mob, Dellaventura, Ed, Less Than Perfect, Law and Order, One Life to Live, Howard Stern’s Son of the Beach, Grounded for Life, and Repo Man for TLC. Films include: The Hurricane, Shark Tale, This Thing of Ours, Deuces Wild, Walking and Talking, True Love, Mickey Blue Eyes, Jerky Boys, Mafia, Serving Sara, Two Family House, Made, Riding in Cars with Boys, Guy Ritchie’s Revolver, Pizza with Bullets, PJ, Dough Boy and Code Blue. Theatre credits include On the Waterfront, Golden Boy, Painting X’s on the Moon and Pulp. Vincent recently made his Broadway Debut as “Amos Hart” in the Tony Award winning Chicago.

PEDRO ARMANDARIZ JR. (Chief of Police) is the son of the famed Mexican actor Pedro Armandariz. He has become a renowned and celebrated actor in his own right, having appeared in over 200 films and television productions in a career that began in the late Sixties. Early films included Westerns with many American stars. A considerable number of films followed in Mexico, where he was a leading man, and in Europe. He can be seen in such English-language films as License to Kill, The Old Gringo, Before Night Falls, The Mexican, Original Sin, The Crime of Padre Amaro, John Sayles’s Casa de los Babys, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, among others. He has even played himself in ten Spanish-language productions, has produced a number of television series, and received much recognition in Mexico for his roles in La Ley de Herodes and Su Alteza Serenisma.

ANGÉLICA ARAGÓN (Helen Rose) is a Mexican actress of telenovelas and such films as Dune, A Walk in the Clouds, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights and the blockbuster Spanish-language film Sexo, Pudor y Lágrimas. The daughter of composer Ángel Espinosa “Ferrusquilla,” Angélica was raised in family of intellectuals. She attended The Modern American College, The Sierra Nevada School and The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) for almost seven years. She also lived in India where she studied at The National Dance Academy and the Kerala Kelandam Dance School.

Back in Mexico, she joined the ranks of Televisa and made several telenovelas in the 1980s and 1990s while she acted in films such as Toy Soldiers with Tim Robbins, The Evil That Men Do with Charles Bronson, and Dune. At the age of 44, she obtained a role on the second telenovela of new station TV Azteca titled Mirada de mujer (“A Woman’s Glance”) portraying a woman who is neglected by her husband and finds love in the arms of a younger man. The telenovela was a big success, and she appeared in its sequel Mirada de mujer: El regreso. Angélica appeared in Bella, which won the People’s Choice Award at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. She has recently worked as a theater director in Mexico City.

MICHELLE MANTEROLA (Mercedes) is a relative newcomer to international cinema. Michelle is the sister of Mexico’s singing star Paty Manterola. She was a guest star in the Univision series Al Filo de la Lay (“At the Edge of the Law”).

THE MORALES BROTHERS (Sammy and Jimmy) are the most popular comic duo in Guatemala. They write, direct, produce their own films and television shows. Some of their characters, such as Nito y Neto, have become part of Guatemalan folklore. Their films Nito Y Neto En La Misteriosa Herencia, Nito Y Neto Detectives Por Herror and Manzana Guena en Noche Guena have outgrossed many Hollywood pictures in their native country.

ROBERTO DIAZ GOMAR (Ed) is one of Guatemala’s most successful film and theater actors and has a multi-talented artist who originally studied legal and social sciences. In the 1960s and 70s, he founded and worked with activist and experimental theatre groups that were in conflict with Guatemala’s prevailing political leadership. An assassination attempt on his life (he survived because the assassins confused him with his twin brother) led him to leave the country and live in Spain, where he appeared in numerous European films and plays. He is also a writer, animator, teacher, and director. He returned to Guatemala in 1998, and is part of the growing film business there.

ANDRZEJ KRAKOWSKI (Writer, Director, and Co-Producer), was born in Warsaw in 1946. One of the youngest, if not the youngest, students to the famed Polish National Film School in Lodz, Andrzej studied – alongside his childhood friend Krzysztof Kieslowski – under several prominent film directors and worked as an intern assistant to Andrzej Wajda during the making of “Ashes”.

Attacked in the press after the March ’68 student demonstrations, Krakowski was unexpectedly offered a scholarship in Hollywood. Shortly after his arrival in the U.S., he was stripped of his Polish citizenship and forbidden to return.

While Krakowski began learning English, his father’s old friend and protégé Roman Polanski began introducing him to the ways and names of Hollywood. In 1970, alongside David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader and Jeremy Kagan, he became a producing, first auditor, and then fellow at the American Film Institute. During this period he line-produced several short films and two features for his associate AFI fellows: Terrence Malick’s “Lanton Mills”, Richard Patterson’s “The Open Window”, Jeremy Kagan’s “Love Song by Charles Faberman” and Oscar Williams’ “The Final Comedown”, launching careers of such actors as Ron Rifkin and Billy Dee Williams. Some of those films eventually attained a cult status and are being taught at American colleges as part of film curriculum.

Krakowski then joined YASNY Productions, Inc. as head of production, where among other films he had green-lighted and supervised production of the 1976 Oscar nominated feature documentary “California Reich”.

He continued producing films with his own Filmtel, Inc, including “Portrait of a Hitman”, starring Rod Steiger and Jack Palance, and “White Dragon” with Christopher Lloyd and Dee Wallace Stone. The latter was the first co-production between CBS network and a Polish government owned studio “Perspektywa”, a successor to the studio led by Krakowski’s father, “Kamera”. As – in a few short years – Filmtel grew from a small production company into an international production and distribution conglomerate, Krakowski burst onto television scene with such successful TV shows as “The Richard Simmons Show” (for 4 years #1 daily-strip show) and Showtime’s “XIV International Championship of Magic”, hosted by the legendary Tony Randall.

With time Krakowski has returned to his first love and today his screenwriting credits include: “Triumph of the Spirit”, starring Willem Dafoe and Edward James Olmos, “Eminent Domain”, with Donald Sutherland and Anne Archer, “Tides of War”, a vehicle for Ernest Borgnine and David Soul, “Genghis Khan”, the most expensive Italian production to date, followed by “Ogniem i Mieczem” (_“With Fire and Sword”_), the highest-grossing film in Poland, and “Managua”, with Louis Gossett, Jr. and Assumpta Serna in the lead.

Facing the loss of his wife to breast cancer, Krakowski wrote, produced and directed a feature-length documentary “The Politics of Cancer”, which received theatrical distribution in the U.S., and were shown at the Cannes, Palm Springs and Santa Barbara Film Festivals.

Since then Krakowski has produced and directed several commercials featuring Geoffrey Holder, a feature film based on a popular comic book “Campfire Stories”, which has been sold to over 30 countries, a hit stage musical in Tokyo titled, “Felix The Cat’s Musical Journey” and a feature-length docudrama “Farewell To My Country”, chronicling the expulsion of the last Polish Jews from their homeland in 1968.

Krakowski’s latest feature film is titled “Looking for Palladin” and was shot in Antigua, Guatemala. The cast includes such veteran American actors as: Ben Gazzara, Talia Shire, David Moscow and Vincent Pastore, as well as Latin Americans stars like Anjelica Aragon, Pedro Armendariz, Roberto Diaz Gomar and the Morales Brothers.

Krakowski, as Executive Producer and Showrunner has currently completed the production of a 10 episode dramatic TV series titled “We Are New York”, which was funded by the Mayor’s Office of New York and is scheduled for broadcast in September ‘09

MAHYAD TOUSI (Producer) is an Iranian-American filmmaker living in Brooklyn, NY. Born in the US, he grew up in Iran amidst the revolution and the ensuing war with Iraq. He has worked in 24 countries spanning five continents as a producer, director, and cinematographer. Somewhat of an Indie maverick, Tousi has moved freely in multiple forms of motion pictures and his work has been seen theatrically, on television, and in museums. Prior to Palladin, his first last feature currently in distribution – “Marvelous” is a dark comedy starring the Oscar Nominated actress Amy Ryan, plus an impressive ensemble of Gen-X thespians that include: Ewen Bemner, Michael Shannon, Martha Plimpton, and Annabela Sciora.

Additionally, Tousi has worked on a number of award winning theatrical and broadcast documentaries, most notably Some Assembly Required as part of the First Amendment Project for the Sundance Channel and Court TV, Farewell To My Country – a feature doc also written and directed by Andrzej Krakowski, and _Blindsight_—winner at over twenty international film festivals including AFI and the Berlin International Film Festival. Blindsight, which was also short-listed for the Academy Awards, has been distributed internationally and is currently in the theaters in the United States. Additionally his collaboration with Video Artist Mika Rotenberg, entitled Cheese, is currently on display at the Whitney museum, as part of the Biennial.

Tousi is the cofounder and executive director of BoomGen Studios, which develops, streamlines, and champions content of significant artistic merit from the Greater Middle East and its Diaspora—a hub for the motion picture, television, and new media industries. BoomGen Studios aims to become the gateway to the Western world for talent from, and creative material about the Greater Middle East’s Boom Generation, which make up 75% of this region’s population.

Tousi studied filmmaking at NYU. He is a regular guest lecturer for the MFA program at CCNY, New York University’s SCPS, and has appeared numerous times as a speaker and panelist on social innovation through media. He is also currently in development on his debut project as a writer/director—the narrative feature SILK, about the Heroin trade on the famed Silk Road.

JERRY CARLSON (Co-Producer and actor as “Jerry” in film)
A specialist in narrative theory, global independent film, and the cinemas of the Americas, Professor Carlson is Coordinator of Critical Studies in the Film & Video Program at The City College and a member of the doctoral faculties of French and Film Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has lectured at Stanford, Columbia, Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (Cuba), the University of Paris, and the University of Sao Paulo, among others. His current research is focused on how slavery and its legacy in the New World have been represented in cinema. In addition, he is an active producer, director, and writer. An Emmy nominated Senior Producer for City University Television (CUNY-TV), he created and produces the series City Cinematheque about film history, Canape about French-American cultural relations, and Nueva York (in Spanish) about the Latino cultures of New York City. As an independent producer, his recent work includes the Showtime Networks production Dirt, directed by Nancy Savoca, and Looking for Palladin. In 1998 he was inducted by France as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques. He was educated at Williams College (B.A.) and the University of Chicago (M.A. & Ph.D.).