Finding the Actor in You
Week of May 22, 2021
Finding the Actor in You
Are you thrilled by the acting chops of Meryl Streep. And always excited to watch Bradley Cooper. Come spend an enjoyable hour with Director Sheldon Larry (who discovered Bradley!) in a workshop that will unleash your own acting talents. Are you ready for your closeup? Come find out.
Flying Daggers: Making Movies in China
Sheldon Larry has spent the last three years making Festival-worthy, award-winning short films in China. He has guided filmmakers there to navigate their way through censorship and self-expression. Come see the intriguing best of the films made on his fascinating journey!
Sheldon Larry has had a distinguished 40-year career in film, television and theatre, having directed and/or produced more than fifteen plays, twenty-five films and 500 hours of television. He learned his craft in Britain where he accumulated more than 300 credits with the British Broadcasting Corporation and did documentaries on Luchino Visconti, Pierpaolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli, Noel Coward, and Joe Orton. And he was lucky enough to work on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He won a National Endowment Award and moved to New York City where for the next 10 years, he worked off-Broadway as a theater director on plays including Sorrows of Stephen, Sunday Runners in the Rain, Curse of the Starving Class and Romance Languages. He won an Obie for his production of Forty-Deuce, worked with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy on Many Faces of Love, and directed Blythe Danner and David Hyde Pierce in Candida. Among his favorite films are An American Daughter with Christine Lahti (for which she received a Golden Globe nomination); Split Images, a film adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel; the Bradley Cooper rom-com, I Want to Mary Ryan Banks.; The First Circle, an adaptation of the novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn starring Christopher Plummer and F. Murray Abraham; At The End of the Day won a Gemini Award. Color of Love starred the sublime Gena Rowlands and Long Shadows was nominated for an Emmy. His indie film musical, Leave It on the Floor was embraced by critics and by more than eighty film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Berlinale, Los Angeles Film Festival and Chicago International Film Festival, Frameline and OUTFEST. For the last four years, he has created and supervised a ten-week masterclass working with 15 feature film directors each year in Shanghai, China where he produced more than 25 award-winning short films currently playing international festivals. He has also taught at USC in their School of Cinematic Arts for the last twelve years where he has mentored, among others, Ryan Coogler, director of Black Panther. And he teaches screenwriting, cinema history and filmmaking for actors at the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in Los Angeles. He has loved raising his twin daughters who are now 28. One is a doctor in Dublin, Ireland, while the other is an Emergency Nurse at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Both have been on the frontlines battling COVID. Neither has followed him into the film business.