Mark Edwards and Mary Michaud, the team behind OptiPop design studio and the glaze-coated Belmont documentary, Still Life with Donuts, met the broad, imposing figure of Leo Arico at Joan Schatzman‘s annual garden party in 2003, the same year that Donuts was released. Edwards had a drive for a feature film kicking around his brain-space for some time, including an idea he first penned as a short story involving a man he once saw while jogging in San Francisco, parked in an ’88 Delta, dangling a cigarette. A man that could eat him, Edwards felt. That didn’t seem human. For better or for worse, when Edwards met Arico, he saw that Arico could be the face of this man.
 Anger management: Live Arts alum Leo Arico says, "No more Mister Nice Guy" for his role in the Belmont-based film, Mister Angerhead. |
Edwards cranked out a screenplay about this character, dubbed Mister Angerhead, in a few weeks and composed a cast of his Belmont neighbors—ramblin’ Hogwaller Jamie Dyer as "Cowboy," husband to Heather Lebowski‘s "Connie," Live Arts regular Dan Stern (catch him next month in A Little Night Music) as a detective—and began shooting in June 2004 with Arico as the Jekyll-and-Hyde lead. Now, film completed and soundtrack recorded (featuring tracks from Paul and Susan Rosen and Darling Dot Collier), Edwards is ready to let Frankenstein’s monster roam.
That same imposing face of Arico’s—ridged brow, mincemeat nose, deep-set eyes—struck Curtain Calls from a poster placed along the Downtown Mall, and led him to OptiPop’s home base in Belmont, a two-story house that Edwards and Michaud have called their own for the past nine years. Edwards leads Curt to the second floor of his home, where the offices of OptiPop and the newly formed Pop Jones (a film production company created for the release of Angerhead) sit surrounded by orderly bookshelves packed so tight that the books’ bindings might burst at any second. And that might be enough to set off Angerhead himself, Leo Arico, who sits at the head of the table.
Yet Arico is more of a hearty man in build and humor, an employee of the Rivanna Water and Sewage Authority who has split time at Live Arts as performer (in The Robber Bridegroom in 2000) and as part of the tech crew (he was on-hand at Live Arts doing set design work during CC’s trek to Night Music rehearsals). And, despite a presence that seems as if it could rattle a few walls, Arico plays Angerhead with the most subtle of manipulations and achieves an intimidating balance in doing so.
"Someone said to Henry Fonda that, in film, you can fall as far as you want to, be as small as you want to," says Arico, leaning in slightly towards CC, "because the camera will always find you."
Trying desperately to shake the mental image of Edwards’ poster boy for madness talking to him about being followed, CC scoots over to join Edwards behind a monitor for an exclusive peak at the film’s opening credits and first scene.
The world premiere of Mister Angerhead is scheduled for Friday, November 30 at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center. Tickets for the 8pm screening and concert, featuring local old-time bands from the soundtrack, are available for $14-16 at misterangerhead.com or at the box office starting at 4:30pm on Friday. Mature audiences only.
Capetown sounds
It isn’t too hard to find John Mason, a professor of history and photography at UVA. All you need to do to hunt the man down is to find a map of that boundless country called Everything, and look for a city named Middle Of.
Curt had no sooner learned the name of Mason when he began to see him everywhere: In the UVA Bookstore while CC was getting caffeinated, taking photos for the UVA music department of the Free Bridge Quintet‘s Thelonious Monk tribute gig (Official Curtain Calls Props to Pete Spaar for his solo bass version of "Ruby My Dear"), across the cultural creases of the city’s map. No surprise, then, to find that Mason was adding a few artistic wrinkles of his own to the city.
 Laurel and Hardy? Not quite. John Mason’s immersion photographs of the annual Carnival in Capetown, South Africa, catch paraders at their Bozo best. |
Mason has travelled regularly to Capetown, South Africa, during the past 20 years or better, often to attend the annual Carnival festival that coincides with Capetown’s New Year celebration. During his last visit, and at the invitation of a friend, Mason immersed himself amidst the hundreds of gleaming red and yellow suits and face paint of the Pennsylvania Crooning Minstrels, a troupe that competes in each year’s festival (which features days of competitions in addition to the January 2 parade). Each band features a typical brass line-up of trumpets and trombones as well as some instruments Mason calls "unexpected": accordions, banjos, more.
"The banjos are an influence from American minstrel troupes that came over at the end of the 19th century," says Mason inside the 214 Community Arts Center, where a friend invited him to hang photos from his trip. "These minstrel troupes were hugely popular with all segments of South African society and the banjo is one of the relics. As are names like the Pennsylvania Crooning Minstrels."
So, what, no Pennsylvania in South Africa?
"There’s a minstrel troupe in Capetown called The Beach Boys," says Mason. "It has nothing to do with the minstrelsy. It’s an American name, they like it." Mason’s crew, champions of the 2007 Carnival (and of the previous 10 years), reaches roughly 1,000 members at its largest incarnation.
Mason shoots with an eye for the generational divide in Carnival: His photos capture shots of young men painting the faces of younger boys in glitter, a line of women marching together wearing suits to match the men, an older gent with his face painted in a Bozo grin, mouth wide open to expand the clownish paint.
"A lot of these photographs are mixing the seriousness and the revelry," Mason says, then leads Curt onwards to a photo of the Victorian-style city hall of Capetown, its base swarming with the minstrels of the Pennsylvania crooners.
Photos from John Mason’s trip to Capetown’s annual Carnival are on display indefinitely at the 214 Community Arts Center.