Starving Artists Opens in Boston

Starving Artists, the independent feature film made by Old South members Catherine Burns and Allan Piper, will open a run at the Museum of Fine Arts from March 25 to April 17th.

In addition to smashing piggy-banks, maxing out credit cards, and attempting to sell bodily fluids, Burns and Piper came up with a surprisingly successful fund-raising scheme. In an indie (Independent) twist on product placement, they practiced "person placement". The name of everyone who gave even $1 appears somewhere in the movie. Names appear in graffiti, news headlines, and other creative spots.

The "Starving Artists" team shot the movie in Boston and Cambridge during three weeks of eighteen-plus hour days, during which the artists almost literally starved. Piper lost close to twenty pounds and developed a heart condition when the filmmakers ran out of money for food. Old South helped fend off starvation by providing the cast & crew with a generous meal on one of the hardest days of the shoot.

The team's suffering appears to have paid off. Film Threat described Starving Artists as the "underdog hit" of the Hawaii International Film Festival and one of the best three pictures at San Francisco IndieFest. It won "Best Original Screenplay" and "Best Production Design in a Comedy" at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival, and an "Audience Award for Comedy" at Film Fest New Haven. Piper also has traveled with the movie to festivals in southern California, Arizona, Detroit, and Sweden. "One day, I'm in an Hawaiian jungle tree house talking to Quentin Tarantino," describes Piper, "next I'm in the Arctic Circle, eating reindeer meat and watching movies in a theatre made entirely of ice. The life of an independent filmmaker is pretty surreal."

The movie is a screwball romantic comedy about the calamitous courtship between a Mormon and an atheist, a preacher proclaiming the end of the world, and a mysterious barrel of monkeys.