Click on the "page 2" link above to read interviews with the crew of Favorite Son.
Director/Co-writer – Howard Libov
Howard Libov directed and co-wrote the feature film Midnight Edition, which won the Best First Feature Award at the Festival of Fantastic Film, played at the London, Dublin, and Hamptons Film Festivals, and was broadcast on HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime. Midnight Edition was released on home-video by MCA/Universal. Libov also directed the comedic short film, Men Will Be Boys, with a score by Mike Mills of REM, which starred members of Chicago’s Second City Theater and was syndicated nationally on PBS stations as a modern day companion piece to Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar winning Marty.
Libov’s documentary "Fourteen Stations" profiled Madison, New Jersey artist and resident Arie Galles, and his ten year quest to complete a series of drawings he started out thinking would take him only a year to finish. "Fourteen Stations" is also in distribution with The Cinema Guild.
Libov's short film Little Man won the award for Best Short Drama at the International Festival of Sport Film in Italy. Libov wrote the story, and Michael Stewart the screenplay for Little Man, which co-starred Frankie Muniz, of Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle", and featured an original musical score by Murray Attaway ("In Thrall", Geffen Records).
Producer – Brian Gonsar
Brian Gonsar is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University's film program. His producer/director role while at the university led him to direct an indie music video for Brooklyn band Radio Mundial (Palm Pictures) which played in 7 different countries and rose to the top of the several music video program's playlists, while his video for the NJ band Copperpot went on to win Best Music Video at the CU2 Video & Film Festival in New York City. He has shot footage for Arista recording artist, Dido, the United States Golf Association, and the NY Redbulls soccer team.
He produced at J. Walter Thompson from 2004-2007 and currently works for one of the largest ad agencies in the world, BBDO, as a commercial producer. His client list includes Dominos, JetBlue, Bubblicious, Kleenex, the Ad Council, Welchs, and J&J to name a few.
Co-writer – Michael Stewart
Michael Stewart is a graduate of New York University’s film program at the Tisch School of the Arts. He co-wrote the story for the feature film Bad Dreams, directed by Andrew Fleming and produced by Gale Ann Hurd, and co-wrote the screenplay for the feature Eye of the Storm with Yuri Zeltser, the director of the film, which was produced by Roland Emmerich. Stewart also co-wrote, with Zeltser and Howard Libov, the screenplay for Libov's Midnight Edition.
Director of Photography – Benjamin Wolf
Ben Wolf’s first film, the short Gold Mountain, won a student Academy Award. His most recent features include: James Ryan's The Young Girl and the Monsoon, now on Showtime, starring Terry Kinney and Diane Venora; David Sporn's The Road from Erebus, currently playing on HBO; and Art Jones' Going Nomad, starring Damian Young and Victor Argo. That last collaboration led to 2003's Lustre, the feature by Art Jones starring Victor Argo -- featuring Ben's keen eye for dramatic setting and the beauty of the New York cityscape.
Ben photographed Deborah Kampmeier's Virgin, featuring Robin Wright Penn, Elizabeth Moss, and Daphne Rubin-Vega, which was nominated for two 2004 Independent Spirit Awards.
Ben takes his trade to the far reaches for documentaries - from Oaxaca, Mexico to Lijiang, China. His cinematography has been praised in a series of American Cinematographer articles, notably for Going Nomad and Charles Weinstein's Under the Bridge. Ben's photography helped bring Bernard Malamud's short story, "The First Seven Years", to life on PBS. It guided Howard Libov's Little Man and "Under the Radar" to festival acclaim, and lifted Shoja Azari's K, which screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2002.
May 2003 marked a second career milestone for Ben, who managed to photograph three films at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival - and in three distinct categories: short (The Last Word by the internationally renowned Shirin Neshat), documentary (Witnessing by Aileen Ghee), and feature (Lustre).
Editor – Emily Gumpel Clifton
Emily Gumpel Clifton graduated from SUNY Purchase in 1993 with a degree in Fine Arts and a minor in Film Theory. She began working in the film industry as an assistant editor on films such as New Jersey Drive, Surviving Picasso and American Psycho.
She has edited more than 20 feature films, shorts and television shows including the feature Miss Monday, which won an award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, Black Picket Fence, a feature documentary, which won several awards at both the 2001 Brooklyn Film Festival and the Urban World Festival, and "60 Odd Hours in Italy" which was directed and produced by Russell Crowe and premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. She also edited Etienne Sauret's documentary Collateral Damages which looked at the after-effects of September 11th on several New York City firefighters. The movie won Special Jury Award at Silverdocs, and had a theatrical run at New York's Film Forum.
Emily's website is editornyc.com.
Music – Murray Attaway
Murray was a founding member of "Guadalcanal Diary", noted for a sound that was at once melodic and rhythmically aggressive, with a decidedly literary and spiritual bent to the group's lyrics. Guadalcanal Diary was formed in 1981 by guitarist and singer Murray and lead guitarist Jeff Walls, who'd first met in 1977 when they both joined a punk band called Strictly American. Attaway chose the name Guadalcanal Diary from a book by Richard Tregaski about the U.S. campaign against Japan during World War II, enamored of the name's surface ambiguities and undertones of patriotism and warfare.
Murray went on to record as a solo artist for Geffen Records, with the release of In Thrall. (Bio courtesy of Pandora.com.)
Songs - Mike Mills
R.E.M. formed at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, in January 1980. Discovering they had similar tastes, vocalist Michael Stipe and guitarist Peter Buck began working together, eventually meeting bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry. In April 1980, the band formed under the name Twisted Kites, playing psychedelic bubblegum, and punk covers in a converted Episcopalian church. By the summer, the band had settled on the name R.E.M. after flipping randomly through the dictionary.
Though Mike is known primarily as a bassist and piano player, his musical repertoire includes many other keyboard, string, wind and percussion instruments. He is responsible for the songwriting behind some of R.E.M.'s most respected songs, including "Find the River", "At My Most Beautiful", "Why Not Smile", "Let Me In", and "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?". In addition to providing backing melodies, he has also sung lead vocals on "Texarkana", "Near Wild Heaven", The Clique cover "Superman" and The Troggs cover, "Love Is All Around". (Bio courtesy of wikipedia.com.)