The FUNd raiser has began!!

We have started our fundraiser for the film!! Help us make this movie and I will love you!

click on the pic below, fool

This is a Love Story

The new Poster for my New Movie

THIS IS A LOVE STORY is a movie about Blake and Molly Hathaway who have both found themselves in extra marital affairs; only to have their infidelity bring them back together… sort of.
a Ryan Harper Gray film
Cast as of today is great. More updates to come!!
Cast: Introducing Tiffany Lonsdale-Hands, Amelia Turner (Earthling), Frank Mosley (Hold, The Other Side of Paradise), and more to come. Keep checking in! http://www.facebook.com/thisisalovestory check it out and click “Like”

Hopper, it was a good ride. Thanks

I have to say that Dennis Hopper was quite a source of youthful

inspiration for me; even though by the time I saw Easy Rider Hopper
had raged through his own youth and I was just slipping through mine.
He is by no means the reason I got into this racket (filmmaking) but

he is indeed, in spirit, something of a hero to me.

So here is a little moment from a life well…lived.

Dennis, if there is a heaven, and I seriously doubt there is, save a drink for me and I’ll see you soon enough.

Update on JON JOST’S PARABLE

The new trailer for Jon Jost’s Parable. The third film of the “Bush Trilogy” we made.

If you are at Cinequest don’t miss it. I promise it will be a one-of-a-kind experience.

Ryan Harper Gray

Cinequest screening on its way!

This post has been long overdue. I would like to lead your attention to my latest screening at CINEQUEST. The film is Jon Jost’s PARABLE.  This is a strange experimental narrative feature film. If you are at the film fest, you should make a point to catch this movie.

“Jon Jost

PARABLE

USA, 2009, 72 min

PARABLE

A parable of the Bush era; swiftly jumping genres, a cowboy surrogate/Bush is thrown out of his house, is picked up by a man who needs a driver, buddy-bonds with him, they sing a Christian camp song, commit a robbery and killing, and then cowboy rapes and shoots his new buddy. We arrive in a bucolic farm where a woman is kept on a rope, a man attempts to untie a knotted rope, and after a long and weird interlude, (including some heavy breathing), the cowboy arrives, seduces and screws the woman, and is killed and dumped with other bodies from Abu Ghraib.

PARABLE is a tone-poem of “The Time of Bush”: a quantum warp in Americana, steeped in the tonal reality of the era but harking back to earlier times, with painterly references to Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and Wyeth, and embracing cinematic touch points from neo-realism to cartoons to documentary to magic realism.  If you let it, this film will mess your head.  Just like the last 8 years.”

Jon and I have made three films together, HOMECOMING, OVERHERE, and PARABLE.  All three of these films have been a kind of trilogy of poetic proportion. They have all been politically based narratives that deal with our time as Americans under the era of BUSH. They have all been shape critics of the Bush administration’s time in office and the direction we went as a country. They have also all been one-of-a-kind explorations of narrative that has made them unique figures of independent cinema. I am very proud of the work I did on these films and of the work by the most underrated independent American director in the history of cinema, JON JOST.

If you do not know who Jon Jost is, you do not know independent film as well as you think. He was been a maverick filmmaker from the beginning of his career and still is to this day. I am proud to have made these three films with him and to be considered one of his friends. They have been one…I mean three…of the great achievements of my life and I hope we will be able to make many more movies together.

“JON JOST

Born in Chicago on May 16, 1943, of a military family, Jon Jost grew up in Georgia, Kansas, Japan, Italy, Germany and Virginia. Expelled from college in 1962, he began making 16mm films in January, 1963. He is self-taught. He has made some 20 shorts and 14 feature length films (celluloid, 16 and 35mm), all of which he has conceived, written, photographed, directed and edited; most of these he also produced.  Since 1996 he has worked primarily in Digital Video (DV), completing 15 full-length works and many shorts, as well as one large-scale 7 screen installation work, TRINITY, presented at the ZKM, Karlsruhe Germany, in this medium as of 2007.

After 10 years of making short works, Jost made his first feature-length film in 1974, and has since devoted himself to the making of a wide-ranging series of films, largely focused on specifically American topics, in forms ranging from essays (Speaking Directly, Stagefright, and fictions.   His work has shown widely in museums, film archives, and festivals since 1975. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a complete retrospective of Jost’s work in January 1991. This show subsequently traveled to the J.F.Kennedy Center, Washington DC, the Harvard Film Archive, the UCLA Film Archive, The Film Arts Foundation of San Francisco, as well as to the Bergamo Film Meeting 1993, the Viennale festival 1993, the Bologna and Torino Film Archives in Italy (1995). Most recently his films were accorded full retrospectives at the Cinemateca Portuguese (1996) and the Filmoteca Español (1997), and in 2006 the Buenos Aires Independent Festival accorded his work a partial retrospective.

Mr. Jost presently is living in Seoul, Korea, teaching as full-professor at Yonsei University, and working on numerous projects with his wife Marcella.”

CINEQUEST SCREENING TIMES ARE

3/1/2010 6:45 PM Camera 12

3/3/2010 4:30 PM Camera 12

All in good ol’ San Jose, California

CLICK HERE for a review of PARABLE, written by the fantastic film critic DENNIS GRUNES.

CLICK HERE TO BE TAKEN TO ONE OF JON JOST BLOGS

Thanks for reading and more later. Leave a comment I would love to hear from you.

Ryan Harper Gray

NY2010

New years came and went like a lighting bolt. I saw my family, which as we get older seems to be a complicated arrangement. They all came to my home for Christmas and my wonderful niece was there. Sandy is her name and playing is her game. This was my first Christmas with her Because I missed last years, which was her first.

Next up we headed down, down  and a little west to La Ventana, Mexico for a little RNR and windsurfing. Which in all honesty, I did not fair so well at the windsurfing.  As I injured my foot the second day out on the water and then I was stuck on the beach reading and writing for the next 7 days.

All of this brings me to SUNSET RISING, the script I’ve been writing and continued writing on the beach. It is quickly coming to an end. So, I guess, I am going to gather some troops together and try to make this little movie. More soon!

RHG

New Films In The Works

I am now developing two different scripts SUNSET RISING and NO EXIT. It is strange how when you are working on more than one of this little monsters at the same time; the character’s sometimes walk in and out of the correct script, in your head. I am sure this has to be some low level version of schizophrenia. What ever the case it is going very well.

NO EXIT which I am developing with Kris Youmans is toughening up more and more every week. I am getting to the point were I can’t wait to show it to people and start begging for money to make this movie. The main character jumps off the page and all the other characters are coming to life more and more everyday. I am really excited to see what the actors will bring as we are going threw and beefing them all up right now. I can’t wait!

SUNSET RISING my sweat little secret is coming along nicely as well. I had a long script session yesterday and really believe I am going to be able to get this together by January. My creative session was so strong I believe my brain was overflowing with magic and revelry so much that it caused my car to break down… Or maybe cars just break down. I don’t know for sure but I am going to assume it was because of the magic seeping from my ears.

Also here is a little Picture from the set of Jeff Picket’s NATURE that I just wrapped on and he is slaving away to finish his first cut.

I am about to take a dip in the coldest water ever!

Nature Driving

sunset sets us on our head

Nature takes to the hills

We are heading onto Mt. Hood for our first day of shooting on the great mountain. danger awaits… we will keep on the look out for Bigfoot, Blake.

working a scene in the car