Cornell Cinema presents preview of the Ithaca-based film 'Green Lights'

What happens when a big idea hits a small town? Love, life, chaos and comedy, that's what -- all to be viewed on the big screen with a special sneak preview in September for the hundreds of people in Ithaca who made the film a reality.

At last, Ithaca audiences can see the movie shot right here in town. Cornell Cinema offers a sneak preview of "Green Lights," written, directed and produced by Robert Lieberman, a novelist and physics lecturer at Cornell, on Friday, Sept. 21, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 23, at 4:30 p.m.

Cornell Cinema presents "Green Lights," written, directed and produced by best-selling novelist Robert H. Lieberman, Cornell senior lecturer in physics, on Friday, Sept. 21, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 23, at 4:30 p.m. Both screenings are in Willard Straight Theatre, and admission is $7 general/$6 students, seniors and kids 12 and under.

Lieberman, along with members of the cast and crew, will introduce the Sept. 21 screening. The film will start a run at Cinemapolis in Center Ithaca on Friday, Sept. 28, with screenings at 7:15 and 9 p.m. daily, plus Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:15 and 4:35 p.m.

"Green Lights" was produced in collaboration by Lieberman and Emmy Award-winning cinematographer Slawomir Grunberg. The 90-minute feature, kept carefully under wraps for the past year while the producers completed postproduction, is a colorful fusion of fiction and reality entertainment. Hundreds of real Ithacans were auditioned to play themselves -- or others -- in this frenetic comedy. The production was then seeded with a core of professional actors placed in real-life settings and situations as the camera rolled.

The film is the story of Bob Beeman, a ne'er-do-well location scout who arrives in town and is mistaken for a big-time movie producer. Beeman, played by John FitzGibbon, takes the star-struck town for a roller coaster ride in this comedy/drama. Daniel Dressner and Shawn Randall co-star as a composer/writer team who have written a musical and "convince" Beeman to produce it. The fact that Ithaca was once the center of the silent film industry is cleverly incorporated into the film with authentic clips from the Wharton Studios' films, circa 1914.

"Life imitated art," Lieberman said. "Apparently everybody wants to be in the movies. At times it seemed as if every person in town had a part. We took over the town, harnessing all local resources. We had cops playing cops, lawyers playing lawyers. We used dozens of local merchants and shopkeepers, pilots, ambulance drivers, hospital nurses. We even put some cops and a county judge behind bars as prisoners in the city jail. In one scene our actors became participants in an actual Rotary meeting. The net result is fast-paced hilarity, with the viewer never quite knowing where the boundary lies between fiction and reality."

The original and eclectic score for "Green Lights" was composed by Jesse Krebs, a graduate of Rochester's famed Eastman School of Music, and is performed by 17 musicians. Additional music for the song and dance numbers was written by Nashville (former Ithacan) composer David Kent. MP3s of the music can be downloaded from the web site <http://www.nothingbutgreenlights.com>.

Lieberman's newest novel, The Last Boy, is scheduled to be published in April 2002 as a lead title for Source Books and has been optioned by Nick Wechsler ("Quills") and Michael Gruskoff at Industry Entertainment, with Gary Fleeder as director. An earlier Lieberman novel set in Ithaca, Baby, was a best seller.

Grunberg's documentary film, "School Prayer," received an Emmy last fall, and this year "Legacy," for which he was photographer, was nominated for an Academy Award.