Ninth Street Filmmaker to Show Work, Meet Students

African American screen- writer, filmmaker, playwright, and actor Kevin Willmott will visit Ithaca College for two days in early March for class presentations along with a talk and screening of his recent feature film, Ninth Street. The film will be shown at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, March 1, in Park Hall Auditorium. It is free and open to the public.

A comedy/drama based on Willmott’s experiences growing up in Junction City, Kansas, a small town adjacent to an army base, Ninth Street is set in 1968 and is, both literally and figuratively, a real street movie. The main characters, through whose eyes we see the action, are two out-of-luck but not out-of-pride men who literally live on the street, calling a plump old couch home. There’s a lot for them to observe in this army town, with soldiers and girls and neighbors who know everyone else, and everyone else’s business.

"Everyone in this film is someone I knew as a kid," says Willmott. "My mother ran a pool hall on Ninth Street. She and my father met there and fell in love. Ninth Street was more than a block — it was us." That kind of neighborhood, he says, "doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone."

Willmott, who cowrote and codirected Ninth Street, brings it back to gritty life in this movie, which stars Isaac Hayes and Martin Sheen, as well as Willmott himself as the character Huddie. Ninth Street is Willmott’s first film; it started as a play that was responsible for Willmott’s acceptance into the New York University graduate program long before he started working on it as a film. It was made over the course of seven years — four years of shooting, three years in post-production. Sheen did his part for no money; Hayes accepted only a small honorarium.

Willmott received his B.A. in theater arts from Marymount College of Kansas. After graduation he returned home to work as a peace and civil rights activist, creating shelters for the homeless and helping to force the integration of several long-segregated institutions in his hometown. He later went to study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, receiving several writing awards and an M.F.A. in dramatic writing. His play T-Money and Wolf, cowritten with Ric Averill, dealt with the Holocaust and contemporary gang violence. It was chosen for production by the New Vision/New Voices series of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He recently cowrote the screenplay for Little Brown Brothers for producer Oliver Stone, and the NBC miniseries House of Getty. Shooting is scheduled to begin this fall on his next film, which he will also direct, titled C.S.A. It is a dark satire done as a "mockumentary" about what happened after the South won the Civil War.

While on campus Willmott will be meeting with film, theater, and other classes as well as in informal gatherings with students and faculty. His visit is cosponsored by the Roy H. Park School of Communications, the School of Humanities and Sciences, the Office of College Relations, the Department of Theatre Arts, the Department of Cinema and Photography, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Diversity Awareness Committee. Call 274-3829 for more information.