Top of the Rock for March 2005

King of the Corner!


Here's to the world premiere of the film King of the Corner, a sly, deadpan social comedy about the dangers of navigating life without a compass. Written by Gerald Shapiro and Peter Riegert, and based on Shapiro's collection Bad Jews, the film is about a man facing a midlife crisis. He can’t handle the pressures of his life: His father is dying, his daughter is growing up, his protégé is after his job, his wife is running out of patience, and his judgment is becoming blurred. Leo has met the enemy and it is he, but through a twist of fate and the wisdom of his rabbi, he redeems himself and gets a second chance. But at what cost? King of the Corner will show at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center on the campus of the University of Nebraska — Lincoln from March 4 through the 17th.

Riegert and Shapiro will be on hand to speak to the audience at the 7:30 showing on Saturday, March 5th, and a reception will follow next door in the UNL Visitors Center's Great Hall. The event is co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Lincoln, the UNL Harris Center for Judaic Studies, the UNL Department of English, and the University of Nebraska Press.

Complete showtimes for King of the Corner: Fri (3/4) 4:30, 7:30, & 10:30; Sat (3/5) 1:30, 4:30, & 7:30; Sun (3/6) 1, 3, 5, & 9; Mon (3/7) 5, 7, & 9; Tue (3/8) 5 & 9:40; Wed (3/9) 5 & 9:40; and Thu (3/10) 5, 7, & 9.

For more information about the premiere or the schedule, go to the Mary Riepma Ross web site. For more about the film, see the Lincoln Journal Star article and visit the official web site for the film.

Peter Riegert has appeared in more than thirty films including Animal House, Chilly Scenes of Winter, Local Hero, Crossing Delancey, A Shock to the System, The Mask, and Traffic. Asked what it is that first interested him in Gerald Shapiro's work, he said, "His understanding of how funny we are as people, that we're the engineers of our own problems. He has a wonderuflly dry sense of humor and he's very richly detailed in the nuances of life. He captured a tone of life I could identify with. It's rare to see something that's a mirror to your sensibility. It's about what I like, which is people who are the odd men and women out."

Gerald Shapiro is the award-winning author of From Hunger, Bad Jews, a finalist for the 2000 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and Little Men, winner of the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Witness, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Southern Review, and elsewhere. His newest book is Little Men, winner of the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction. One of the book's two novellas, "Spivak in Babylon," is a kind of prequel to the story used as the basis for King of the Corner. In it, Leo Spivak, now an ambitious thirty-year-old copywriter at a large advertising agency, is about to get his big break, but his good fortune comes with a price tag. To learn more about his work, go to his web page. To buy one his books, go to Amazon.com.


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