After Adderall

[Stephen Elliott]

Hi! I know it's been a really long time since I've sent an email to this list. I'm very nostalgic even beginning this note. After all The Progressive Reading Series, and then The Monthly Rumpus, was easily some of the best times/nights of my life. I'm not on a stage as often these days.

I wanted to let you know the thing I spent the last year doing, mostly, was making a movie called After Adderall. And it's playing in San Francisco next Friday, and I'll be there and it might be the only chance to see the movie in San Francisco, ever:

 October 14th at 6pm at Timken Auditorium on the campus of CCA, 1111 8th Street 

 

You can get free tickets here to reserve a space, but the theater is pretty large and it's very unlikely anyone would be turned away.

So... a little about this movie. First off, it can never be distributed legally because I don't have contracts with any of the actors and for other reasons (stolen footage, etc.). So the only way to see it is at festivals and schools and special screenings sponsored by a non-profit.

After Adderall is a movie about James Franco making a movie about me (kind of). I know that sounded weird. But what happened was James Franco made a movie out of my memoir, The Adderall Diaries. It premiered at TriBeca last year in April. After I saw the premiere I was so inspired and caught up in thoughts of who owns a story, the shifting nature of truth, that I wrote a surreal movie about that surreal experience and shot it with my own money for $10,000. Here's the trailer: 

https://vimeo.com/154393857

It's also a movie about the nature of story, and how we force other people into our narrative. My roommate in the movie, for example, played by Mickaela Tombrock, doesn't want to be a character in my movie. She wants to be the star of her own. Our fight over who the movie you're watching is about is one of the key threads of the plot-line

The screening is part of the LitQuake festival and sponsored by CCA. After the movie I'll do a Q&A with Tom Barbash. Then there'll be a party with free wine, I think.

You might (or you might not) wonder why Litquake is sponsoring a screening. But the movie is all about literature. Michael Cunningham called After Adderall "the most literary movie ever made" (tongue in cheek?) and it features cameos by Susan Orlean, Nick Flynn, Marie Howe, Evan Wright, Derrick C. Brown, Anthony Swofford, and Jerry Stahl.

I really hope to see a bunch of old friends and familiar faces at the screening. Trigger warning, I star in the movie and I'm also naked in it. There are three beautiful women who are naked in the movie too but nobody seems to mind that part.

Hope to see you Friday at 6pm!

lots of love,

stephen