Larry Fessenden (born 1963 in New York City) is an actor, writer / director, and producer based in New York City.  Fessenden and a community to which he is a Godfather often work in the horror, terror, and science fiction genres.  However, their work is less "schlock," "gore," "slasher" genre-filmmaking than "intellectual" genre filmmaking that foregrounds formal, social, and political concerns.  Fessenden also has created comic books and greeting cards with genre iconography.

In 2008, Larry Fessenden's profile expanded.  In Spring 2008, Larry Fessenden directed an episode for NBC television's anthology series "Fear Itself;" the episode broadcast July 31, 2008.  Then, in May 2008, Fessenden made his first appearance at the Cannes Film Festival, as a performer in and producer of Wendy and Lucy, starring Michelle Williams and directed by longtime collaborator Kelly Reichardt.  In September, Fessenden announced a pact to produce a slate of films in association with Dark Sky Films, with whom his companies had already been working on House of the Devil.

Actor

Fessenden is perhaps best recognized as a character actor in such studio and “indiewood” films as Bringing Out the Dead, Broken Flowers (in which he punches out Bill Murray), and The Brave One (in which he is shot by Jodie Foster). In these and also in many lower-budget New York based productions, Fessenden typically plays uncouth and slightly amusing supporting characters, who often are killed off to advance the plot. Among films released in 2007 alone, Fessenden was killed off at least five times.  In The Last Winter, the environmental horror film he wrote and directed which was released in 2007, Fessenden even killed himself off.  Several other deathscenes were simultaneously in post-production, and no doubt others were being planned.

Godfather

Fessenden’s sacrifices before the camera coincide with enormous sacrifices and expressions of support behind the camera, and also beyond into the arena of film exhibition.  To an inviting yet exclusive community, Fessenden functions as a kind of film scene godfather.

This support is partially as a financier. Despite his tendency to play lower class characters - capitalizing on his wild hair, offbeat fashion sense, and missing front tooth - Fessenden seems to come from a higher-class background. Details are vague, but that background seems close to that of the melancholic, alcoholic Columbia University Professor’s son he portrays in Habit (1997), his breakthrough writing/directing effort. Most likely drawing from that world and also from his own mid-level successes as an actor and producer, Fessenden has, through his production company Glass Eye Pix, invested in several notable dramatic filmmakers, among them Kelly Reichardt (director of River of Grass, Ode, and Wendy and Lucy), Jeff Winner (Satellite), Ilya Chaiken (Margarita Happy Hour), and Ira Sachs (The Delta, Forty Shades of Blue). He has also funded a stable of wildly talented and resourceful directors of horror and science fiction, who create intellectual genre films under Glass Eye’s Scareflix banner. In forty years, film historians will probably speak of the Glass Eye and Scareflix stable as they now speak of Roger Corman’s American International Pictures of the 60s and 70s. Corman had, among others, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Joe Dante; Fessenden now has, in addition to those mentioned above, James Felix McKenney (writer/director of The Off Season, Automatons, the forthcoming Satan Hates You), Ti West (The Roost, Trigger Man, the forthcoming House of the Devil and Cabin Fever 2), Douglas Buck (Family Portraits, Sisters), Glenn McQuaid (the forthcoming I Sell the Dead), Graham Reznick (the forthcoming I Can See You), and many others.

Money is important, of course, as is the willingness to be killed off to advance plots. But Fessenden’s support is stronger, more foundational, because money for production fuses with cultivation of a collaborative, interactive community for filmmaking and film-viewing. Glass Eye and Scareflix directors regularly work on each others’ projects. Beyond writing and directing I Sell the Dead, Glenn McQuaid has done visual effects or title design for at least six other Scareflix titles. He has also designed the internet and marketing presence for Automatons and Trigger Man, while modernizing the Glass Eye and Scareflix designs originally created by Fessenden’s wife, the artist Beck Underwood. James Felix McKenney and Ti West have appeared in and worked on each others’ productions. Douglas Buck shot the “making of” video for The Last Winter; and most Scareflix filmmakers were involved one way or another with The Last Winter. Meanwhile, Fessenden and McKenney are perfectly willing to work with office and production manager Brent Kunkle to create and send out materials to venues and critics.

One venue with whom they have often worked is the Pioneer Theater, where the author of this essay collaborated with them. The Pioneer is in the neighborhood where Fessenden has lived since 1981: New York City’s Lower East Side, part of which is also known as the East Village. Fessenden’s ties to the Pioneer are profound. His friendships with Phil Hartman and Doris Kornish - the theater’s controversial owners - have endured over more than two decades. Indeed, Phil and Phil’s brother Jesse both appear in Habit: Phil in a bit part and Jesse in a supporting role; Fessenden had also worked with Jesse on River of Grass. The Fessenden family has patronized and supported the Pioneer since its opening; Fessenden even directed a stop-motion trailer that ran often at the theater for its first few years, featuring himself himself looking over the East Village from the rooftop of the building where his family lives, across the street from the Pioneer.  Beck Underwood, too, has been involved with Hartman and Kornish: she  created much of the original graphic work for th Two Boots pizza organization they own.

Fessenden’s support of the Pioneer has not been “purely” generous: the Pioneer has shown many Glass Eye / Scareflix productions in ways that have increased the value of those films. However, the relationship is gentle and generous: Fessenden historically has not forced programs onto the theater, but instead has been respectful and deferential in all negotiations. He also has functioned as a sounding board and constant source of moral support for theater administrators.

Despite this deep relationship, the Pioneer cannot, should not, and historically has not claimed exclusivity over Fessenden’s work. He has strong, long-standing relationships with several other theaters across the city. Cinema Village, on 12th street, opened Habit, and the Film Forum on west Houston opened Wendigo.

On east Houston, the Landmark Sunshine - now owned by the same company as owns Magnolia Pictures, which had distributed Wendigo - offered a free public screening of The Last Winter, the night before IFC Films opened it at Cablevision's IFC Center on Sixth Avenue in the West Village. Fessenden has now even crossed way beyond the Village’s traditional border of 14th street, and screened on the Upper West Side: The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theatre gave The Last Winter its New York City premiere in an event presented by the Film Society’s magazine Film Comment.  The Film Society has also screened Wendy and Lucy, though at their temporary location at the Ziegfeld in midtown.

 Movie theaters have their rivalries and their battles; their bureaucrats come and go and interests in various programs fluctuate. However, Fessenden’s relationships endure, evolve, and expand into neighborhoods beyond his own.

"An East Village Filmmaker"

Nonetheless, Fessenden’s identification with the East Village runs deep, as does his cultivation of community there. Habit, with which Fessenden made his breakthrough, takes place mostly in the neighborhood, and that film’s metaphysical vampirism serves in part as a commentary on and lament about the heroin and AIDS epidemics that killed many East Villagers especially in the 80s and 90s. For Captured: A Film / Video History of the Lower East Side - the mammoth, unwieldy, nearly 600 page book, edited by Clayton Patterson and published with some support from Phil Hartman - Fessenden wrote an essay called “Notes from An East Village Filmmaker.” That piece includes numerous tidbits about his last thirty years in the neighborhood. Fessenden recalls “making the 140-minute caper movie Experienced Movers [1985] with a Sony video camera and Beta II porta-pac,” and also working with such neighborhood performance artists as Pat Oleszko, Penny Arcade (with whom he shot the late Jack Smith’s apartment), and David Leslie (aka The Impact Addict). He also references screening X-Movers in 1986, “in bars and storefronts around the East Village on 11 TVs hooked in an RF cable daisy chain. We never got any press; it was neither art nor cinema, but it’s how I learned to make and distribute movies,” and recalls screening films at Anthology Film Archives (”that crazy fortress on 2nd Avenue”), PS 122 on 9th Street and First Avenue, and elsewhere around the neighborhood. The piece closes with a reference to Habit’s triumphant return to the East Village: “When Habit came out on video [through Fox Lorber video], the Blockbusters [sic] on Houston Street had 24 copies for rent. Now that’s a small-town feel.”

A small-town of Glass Eye Pix and Scareflix, within the Lower East Side: a fascinating, nurturing, generous, and talented community, whose mayor offers more to his constituency than could ever be expected of anyone. Unfortunately, that mayor does get killed off with alarming frequency. But he just keeps coming back, making more films and cultivating community.  

(c) Ray Privett

Larry Fessenden at the Internet Movie Database
Glass Eye Pix
Scareflix

Fessenden Links

WENDIGO trailer

Larry Fessenden interview about WENDIGO

THE LAST WINTER trailer

THE LAST WINTER: Graphic Novel