Kathy Lindboe and Robin Van Ert have been friends since they were 7, back in a small town in near Wisconsin Rapids.
Nearly three decades after their meeting, they have completed a film that draws on that small-town Wisconsin experience and "NONAMES" gets a Milwaukee screening at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Oriental Theater.
Lindboe tells me that the story she and Van Ert came up with is loosely based on their two brothers, and will be familiar to people who know small-town life in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the country. The film was shot in the Wisconsin Rapids area.
"Anyone who grew up in a small town who has seen the film, has said 'I understand these people,'" says Lindboe, who has followed up a series of film festivals with screenings across Wisconsin.
More interesting is the reaction from an audience with no connection to small-town life. Independent films like "NONAMES" generally play art houses in larger cities.
"Some people don't quite get the life," says Lindboe, who now does freelance film work in New York City. Van Ert lives in Madison.
The film, which I haven't seen in advance, features two actors who are growing more familiar to audiences. James Badge Dale had just finished filming HBO's "The Pacific," when filming started on "NONAMES." Female lead Gillian Jacobs is a regular on NBC's "Community."
"I didn't know either of the actors at all," Lindboe says of their casting. But it can't do anything by help the film that they're careers are on the upswing.
It's not clear what happens next. There's talk of a West Coast opening, and, down the road, there are cable channels -- one of the modern routes for independent films to reach a wider audience.
In the meantime, there are screenings this weekend in Mineral Point and Wisconsin Rapids on July 17, following Thursday's Milwaukee premiere.
Advance tickets to Thursday's screening at the Oriental, which is followed by a 30-minute question-and-answer session with crew and cast members, are available at www.NONAMESthefilm.com.
Here's a trailer for "NONAMES," and Lindboe cautions it makes the movie look a bit more intense that it really is. "The trailers don't tell the story correctly," she says.
On TV: Milwaukee TV favorite Contessa Brewer talks about her on-air flubs in a video interview with TV Newser. Says the former Channel 4 anchor/reporter about confusing Jesse Jackson for Al Sharpton, "those things make me crazy ... when something shows up in a teleprompter that's wrong, I'm the final gatekeeper."
- Emmy nominations are scheduled to be announced at 7:30 a.m. Thursday, with the cable news channels offering coverage.
- ESPN plans a live special at 8 p.m. Thursday on LeBron James future NBA plans.
- TV Guide's Matt Roush says FX has decided to cancel "Damages," although nothing's official.
- "Mad Men" fans waiting for the July 25 season premiere can kill time between now and then playing with this site, which allows them to add themselves to the 1960s advertising action.
Big "Idol" tour changes: Friday's second night of the "American Idol" tour at the Marcus Amphitheater had a number of empty seats, and that could be one of the reasons for a shuffling of "Idol" tour dates around the country.
The tour was supposed to run into mid-September, but now ends at the end of next month. It's the first time that so many scheduled dates -- eight at the latest count -- have been cut from the tour, and six other dates have been changed.
Last Friday's Summerfest show drew a sizable crowd of Lee DeWyze fans from the Chicago area to see their hometown "Idol." For the record, Chicago's own "Idol" tour date has been changed from Aug. 30 to Aug. 28.
Tweeted DeWyze after the dates were changed: "I hope you can all still make it."
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
