It seems odd to think of someone who had more than one eponymous television show, shared the stage with some of music’s most recognizable artists and lent style tips to Elvis himself as having a disappointing career. But there’s a running thread throughout "Billy Mize and the Bakersfield Sound" that suggests its titular subject was capable of a level of stardom far greater than what actually achieved. Even if those closest to him may lament that Billy Mize isn’t as much of a household name as his most notable peers (Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and Roger Miller, among others), William J. Saunders' documentary does an admirable job of demonstrating the many ways Mize's efforts still resonated in the history of the country music genre. A product of the post-Depression migration to better prospects in California, a young Billy picked up the guitar and became one of...
- 6/19/2014
- by Steve Greene
- Indiewire
Joe Saunders - who goes by "Joe" but is named William after his grandfather Billy Mize, the country music personality and star of Billy Mize and the Bakersfield Sound - didn't exactly realize who his grandfather was while growing up. He knew he'd sung with Merle Haggard and that he was a country musician, but he didn't know how significant it all was."You never Googled him?" I ask, sitting across from the quietly handsome filmmaker at the Los Angeles Film Festival's filmmaker lounge."We didn't have the Internet when I was growing up," he says. Fair point. The initial conversation with his mother (Karen, Mize's oldest daughter) happened in 2001, right around when Google was becoming a verb. And while Saunders was making sports documentaries at Espn Films...
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- 6/19/2014
- Screen Anarchy
William J. Saunders worked at NFL Films after graduating from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. There he learnt the craft of documentary filmmaking, directing and producing various projects. Since he was involved in the first season of the HBO series "Hard Knocks." At the Los Angeles Film Festival he's premiering his new film "Billy Mize and the Bakersfield Sound."[Editor's Note: Indiewire reached out to filmmakers with films playing at the 20th La Film Festival (June 11-19) to ask them about how they shot their indie, and what advice they had for other filmmakers. We'll be posting their responses throughout the run of the festival. Go Here for the master list.]What camera and lens did you use? Because this documentary was shot over the course of 5 years, in the middle of the digital camera revolution, I used several different cameras. Sony EX1, Panasonic Hvx, Cannon 7D - everything. I have to admit, my favorite camera to use was the Cannon 7D with a...
- 6/17/2014
- by Oliver MacMahon
- Indiewire
Title: Sweet Little Lies Director: William J. Saunders Starring: Bill Sage, Caitlin Kinnunen, Joseph Montes, Jesse Lenat, Pedro Pascal, Natasha Williams A West Coast premiere as part of the unfolding 14th annual Dances With Films festival, ‘Sweet Little Lies’ is a nicely photographed misfits’ road movie in which a kid and adult both experience some unlikely maturation. Bess (Caitlin Kinnunen) is a rebellious trailer park teenager who’s just lost her mother. With only a faded photograph, old address and the story that her estranged father might be working in Las Vegas as an Elvis impersonator, she corrals her younger friend Waldo (Joseph Montes), and alights from Kansas, setting off for points west in the...
- 6/6/2011
- by bsimon
- ShockYa
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