Jon (Adam Trese) and Denise (Edie Falco) talk over tough times in Nick Gomez’s LAWS OF GRAVITY
LAWS OF GRAVITY (Nick Gomez, 1992)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, April 7, 2:00
Series runs through April 15
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
Nick Gomez wrote and directed this gritty urban drama about Jimmy (Peter Greene) and Jon (Adam Trese), a couple of guys on the mean streets of Brooklyn who get more than they bargained for when a friend stores some guns in Jimmy’s apartment and Jon thinks he’s ready for the big time. The film features Edie Falco in one of her earliest major performances, as Jimmy’s tough-talking girlfriend, Denise. Powerful acting, dead-on dialogue, and expert location shooting drive this film, which was made for a mere thirty-eight grand. Gomez (Drowning Mona) has gone on to direct multiple episodes of some of the best television shows of the last twenty years, including Homicide, Oz, The Shield, and Dexter, among others. Laws of Gravity is screening at MoMA on April 7 at 2:00 as part of “Carte Blanche: Scott Macaulay and 20 Years of Filmmaker Magazine,” which celebrates the continuing success of the IFP publication that focuses on independent film from the filmmakers’ point of view. Curated by the magazine’s editor in chief, Scott Macaulay, the series continues through April 15 with such other films as Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Hal Hartley’s Amateur, Miguel Arteta’s Chuck and Buck, Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy, and Todd Haynes’s Safe. In the Winter 1992/93 issue of Filmmaker, Peter Broderick went behind-the-scenes of Laws of Gravity, detailing the financing, casting process, rehearsals, and equipment and publishing the budget itself, which included $33 for prop blood, $48 for Polaroids, and $60 for phone calls. “The breathless, handheld 16mm camerawork by Jean de Segonzac, which always seems to be racing to catch up with the characters, made its mark on generations of subsequent filmmakers,” Macaulay writes on the MoMA website about the film.