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News Release
Office of News and Information
212 Whitehead Hall / 3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-2692
Phone: (410) 516-7160 / Fax (410) 516-5251
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August 8, 1996
CONTACT: Leslie Rice
lnr@resource.ca.jhu.edu
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Premiere of Hopkins Student Film "The Spot" at the
Senator Theatre
It's a story that may ring familiarly among many American
singles: Boy meets Girl, Boy gives Girl his phone number, Girl
misplaces Boy's number and Boy and Girl never meet again.
Josh Siegel's film, "The Spot," follows such an encounter and all
the what ifs? that play over and over again in the minds of this
pair of Boy and Girl. The 1996 Hopkins Writing Seminars graduate
will be premiering his 45-minute comedy-drama at The Senator
Theatre at 5904 York Road in Baltimore, Sept. 4, at 6:30 p.m. and
again at 9:30 p.m. for the general public and as a Hopkins alumni
event.
The film marks the end of a frustrating, grueling, exciting,
wonderful two years for Siegel since he first began this project.
In that time, he raised a shoestring budget through grants, the
largest from Hopkins' Young Alumni Fund, rewrote his script six
or seven times, arranged for locations like the interior of
Camden Yards, the Baltimore Brewing Company, Penn Station and
Towson Town Center and found a handful of actors willing to play
their parts for free.
But despite all his meticulous preparations for its filming, "The
Spot" still gave Siegel plenty of unexpected nail-biting, ulcer-
causing crises, he said.
"The cameraman fell ill a month before shooting, forcing me
to spend my whole spring break on the phone searching for a new
one, the male lead got a $10,000 job for a commercial in Spain
one week before filming, the sound tapes and equipment got stolen
out of the sound recordist's car in the middle of filming," he
said. "It was all pretty endless."
Even so, Siegel said when it was all over he realized that film-
making is exactly what he wants to do with his life.
Not since horror film director Wes Craven was a Hopkins student
in the
1960s has the Homewood campus seen such an explosion of
student-
made films. Also being shown in the Sept. 4 Senator Theatre event
will be the 30-minute film "Mardi Gras, Baltimore," a comedy
written, produced and directed last year by then-seniors Gil
Jawetz and Matt Gross. Another film by senior Chris Boone, this
one a docu-drama about rape, is in the works, as is a TV pilot
show based on the "Saturday Night Live" format by two seniors
that will be finished in September.
Much of this new interest is due to the ground broken by the
students who created "Mardi Gras, Baltimore," and by Jerry
Christensen, chair of both the English Department and the Film
and Media Studies Program, which will offer a major for the first
time this year. Christensen has worked closely with these
students, counseling and encouraging them through much of the
process of making a film.
Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the
World Wide Web at
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/
Information on automatic e-mail delivery
of science and medical news releases is available at the
same address.
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