Goats (2012) Comedy This quirky coming of age film, adapted from the novel by Mark Poirier, tells the story of Ellis (Graham Phillips), a 15-year-old boy leaving his non-traditional home in Tucson to attend the Gates Academy, a prep school on the East coast. The film, a Sundance Festival selection, was also one of nine chosen for the Sundance USA tour which dispatched the filmmakers to The Loft Cinema, Tucson’s own art film house. Exciting stuff, but what excited me most about seeing the film wasn’t its connection to Sundance or the opportunity to meet its writer, director, and producer—what I really couldn’t wait to see was how they represented my home town of Tucson. Tucson, otherwise known as The Old Pueblo, has been my home since 1991. That’s when I left my job at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, packed up my NYU Cinema Studies degree along with my husband, our two kittens, one lonely love bird, everything else we owned, and headed west. Nearly 2,5...
A collection of writing samples by Lesley Kontowicz