On Friday Oct. 1st at 2:00 p.m. at The Muhammad Ali Center, The Louisville Film Festival presents a timely new film, My Tale of Two Cities, a funny and hopeful comeback tale about coming home again and people and cities reinventing themselves for a new age.
When St. Elmo’s Fire screenwriter and Saved By The Bell producer Carl Kurlander left Los Angeles for what he thought would be a one year Hollywood sabbatical to teach at the University of Pittsburgh, little did he think the journey would land him as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show on a program about people who had changed their lives, much less inspire a feature documentary. But shortly after Kurlander told Oprah how happy he and his wife were raising their daughter in Pittsburgh– the real-life “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” where Mister Rogers had produced his TV show for 40 years, Pittsburgh and America’s favorite neighbor Fred Rogers passed away and the City of Pittsburgh went bankrupt. With both himself and his hometown in a mid-life crisis, Kurlander set out on a Don Quixote quest to make a film to help the city he had grown up in.
Armed with a cranky cameraman, funded by his dermatologist, and often battling his wife, who longs to return to the sunny West Coast, Carl asks his neighbors from the famous (Steeler Franco Harris, Teresa Heinz Kerry) to the not-so-famous (his old gym teacher, the girl who inspired St. Elmo’s Fire) how this once great industrial giant, which built America with its steel, conquered polio, and invented everything from aluminum to the Big Mac, can reinvent itself for a new age.
Kurlander goes cheese shopping with Teresa Heinz Kerry where they discuss her late husband John Heinz’s belief that sometimes your worst problems can become your best opportunities; tosses a football with legendary Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris; visits with Andy Warhol’s nephew at a local scrapyard, and goes fishing in Pittsburgh’s once polluted rivers with his brother actor Tom Kurlander and, after eating a catfish, consults with famed coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht to find out if they will live. Along the way, the film documents one of the most inspiring urban comebacks in recent history as, during the course of filming, Pittsburgh went from the brink of bankruptcy to being named in 2010 “America’s Most Livable City.”
As comedian Louie Anderson jokes in the film, My Tale of Two Cities is not a Roger & Me, but a “Mister Rogers & Me.”– a feel-good movie which explores whether you can go home again and how all of us can make a difference in the communities where we live. But in the end, this quirky, personal, and often funny, film may be most about what Oprah said to Kurlander when he was on her show– the search for a more “authentic life.”
Part of the proceeds from the screenings go to the non-profit Steeltown Entertainment Project’s Youth and Media Program which works with at risk youth helping them tell their own stories and discover career possibilities in the entertainment industry. See http://www.steeltown.org.
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