This is overdue, but THANKS to Tacoma and Portland for fantastic back-to-back 90-Second Newbery Film Festival screenings on March 1 and 2!

The Tacoma Public Library really pulled out all the stops for the March 1 screening, as you can see in their video above. We packed the house! The library actually provided popcorn, rolled out a red carpet with paparazzi for the filmmakers . . . and I kid you not, even crafted custom Oscar-like 90-Second Newbery statuettes for each filmmaker, laser-cut from wood at the library’s Maker Lab!

Here I am with co-presenter Catalyst and co-host “Sir Douglas” (playing the role of “England’s foremost John Newbery expert”), holding those ingenious trophies (which also smelled awesome, like a campfire):

I received lots of great 90-Second Newbery videos from Tacoma because of librarian Sara Sunshine Holloway, who brilliantly integrated 90-Second Newbery moviemaking seminars into the library’s yearlong programming. Thanks, Sara!

Here is Sara (she’s the redhead in sunglasses) with some of the young filmmakers whose movies were shown at the Tacoma screening. (Click here to check out all the 90-Second Newbery movies I received from Tacoma this year!)

We not only had a great screening in Tacoma, but also the next day in Portland! This year we moved the program from the Multnomah County Public Library (thanks for the first two years, fellas!) to the more spacious auditorium at Da Vinci Arts Middle School. The space suited the film festival well! Biologist-turned-writer Amber Keyser proved a game and witty co-host, and many of the Portland filmmakers came onstage, including the folks at Portland Community Media who made this hallucinatory 90-Second Newbery adaptation of William Bowen’s wackadoodle 1922 Honor Book The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure.

Here are the perpetrators:

Jacob (whom we’ve featured on the blog before, here and here) even brought up one of the puppets used in the movie, and made it talk, hilariously and sorta terrifyingly:

I stand by my statement: Jacob’s bizarre puppet would’ve made a wonderful third co-host for the rest of the evening. Get him with another puppet, and it could’ve been a kind of Statler-and-Waldorf for Ms. Keyser’s and my hijinks. What has more gravitas that a puppet? To ask the question is to answer it.

The final 90-Second Newbery screening for the season is March 22 in New York City, with co-host Libba Bray! We’ve already “sold out” all 500 seats at the Bartos Forum at the NYPL’s flagship branch, the Stephen A. Schwarzman building. Looking forward to it!

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is coming to the Pacific Northwest this weekend! We’re doing a screening in Portland on Sunday, March 2 with co-host Amber Keyser, and in Tacoma on Saturday, March 1 with a mystery co-host. Check out the events page for details on places, times, and reservations. All screenings free.

In honor of the upcoming 90-Second Newbery in Portland this Sunday, I’d like to share a few more standout movies I’ve received from there (I’ll do a similar post for Tacoma later this week).

For instance, check out Kieran’s great adaptation of Louis Sachar’s 1999 Medal winner Holes, above! There’s a lot to like here, and one thing I particularly appreciated, although it seems small, is how everything was clearly explained at the beginning. So often these short movies are so abbreviated and chaotic it’s hard to tell what’s going on. But I was able to follow everything quite clearly. That’s hard to pull off!

And Kieran pulled it off with style! I especially liked the two great fight scenes: when they attack Mr. Sir in order to escape, and the lizard attack. Everyone was acting with such confidence and humor. It was ingenious to tilt the camera for the mountain-climbing scene, and it made it all the more funny when they said the line “Oh so we’re about halfway there? oh look, we’re there.” And I love how Stanley’s natural first reaction, upon finding lots of money, is to fling it away into the wind as quickly as possible. The bit at the end where they’re “making it rain” by fluttering down the dollar bills was quite amusing. Well done, Kieran and friends!

The next selection from Portland is by the Gresham Teen Council, a group of 15 middle- and high-school students who volunteer at the Gresham library. They adapted E.L. Konigsburg’s 1968 Medal winner From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler:

Very entertaining! I especially enjoyed all the careful little touches and details, like how at the beginning, Claudia is holding the book of the very story they’re experiencing. Postmodern! The music was effective and well-chosen. The eating-the-gum-out-of-the-fountain was funny and gross. The script zipped quite effectively and amusingly through the story. Solid work!

And finally from Portland, Claire, Dalya, Kayra and Will return to the 90-Second Newbery, after their triumph last year, with a new adaptation of Patricia MacLachlan’s 1986 Medal winner Sarah, Plain and Tall:

Looks great! Again, a nice tight script that hits all the necessary plot points with swiftness and verve. It’s harder than it looks! The singing at the beginning was an engaging way to introduce the movie, and the “beard” that the Dad was wearing at the start was pretty awesome too (and the prememptory way Pa says “I didn’t like it much anyway, it itched” after he shaves it off had just the right gruff bashfulness). I liked how the “beach” scene was shot in the bathroom, too. Resourceful! Overall, a great job (And of course I laughed at the WHAT’S THIS, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE?! tag at the end, followed by a pratfall . . . )

I’ll proudly screen these movies, and many other spectacular entries, at the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival in Portland this Sunday, March 2, from 3-5 pm at the Da Vinci Arts Middle School. Admission is free, but I encourage you to reserve your seat anyway. See you there!

Next post: Tacoma . . .

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival season is in full swing! A few weeks ago we packed the house in San Francisco and Oakland for screenings, and it was a great time. Thanks to Newbery-winning authors Katherine Applegate (The One and Only Ivan), who co-hosted the San Francisco screening with me, and Jenni Holm (Our Only May Amelia, Penny From Heaven, Turtle in Paradise) who co-hosted the Oakland screening with me. Not only were both of them game for our goofy singing-and-dancing shtick at the beginning, but both also brought their own sparkling wit to the proceedings. I’m lucky to have such generous and talented co-conspirators for this film festival!

This upcoming weekend we’ll be doing the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival in Portland (with co-host Amber Keyser) and Tacoma (with a mystery co-host!). Details in the events sidebar. I’m looking forward to it!

To whet your appetite, I’ll be featuring 90-Second Newberys I’ve received from Tacoma and Portland all week. Let’s start today with these two completely different versions of Wanda Gag’s bizarre 1929 Newbery Honor Book, Millions of Cats. Why bizarre? Perhaps because the climax of the book involves “hundreds and thousands and millions and billions and trillions of cats” literally murdering each other in order to determine who is the “prettiest.” It is by far the bloodiest Newbery book with the highest body count (top “trillions”). Even better, it’s a picture book aimed at 4-year-olds! Everyone wins?

So check out Elliott and Jen’s (of Tacoma) version of Millions of Cats above. It’s a crowd-pleaser, from the old-tymey-film style in which they did it, to the hilarious performances of the old man and the old woman, to the tons of kids dressed as actual cats. And it really underscores the bloody absurdity of the story. Good Lord, how did this nightmare ever get published?! Who reads this to their children?

Here’s another entry from Tacoma, by the Tacoma Public Library Action Faction (Young Adult Volunteer Group) and the Tacoma Public Library Digital Media StoryLab users. It also puts its finger squarely on what makes this children’s story so disturbing—and even better, does it in Minecraft:

It’s especially appropriate to use Minecraft to adapt a book like this, because how else are you going to wrangle that many cats for your movie, especially when they’re called upon to accomplish large-scale shenanigans like drinking up a pond or devouring the countryside? Funny script too: “I know how to solve this. We’ll have a kitty thunderdome!” And when the cat-beast rose up with a sword, shouting “there can be only one” and going on a murderous rampage—I love it! And all the guts out in the field in the end, blech! And that final hideous laugh from the demon cat, as everything turns red, and the camera goes cockeyed—a nice horror-movie final touch, which really brings the sadism of this “children’s” story home.

I’m looking forward to screening these movies, and more, at the Portland and Tacoma screenings this weekend! Check out the events sidebar for more details, and to make your free reservation for the Portland show.