If you and a guest are interested in attending, send us an email and we’ll follow up with an official invite and details: info (at) thekidsgrowup (dot) com.  If you’re interested in writing about The Kids Grow Up and can’t make the screening, email us and HBO will get a dvd screener to you a week or two before the broadcast.

For those who don’t get HBO, the dvd, with 45-minutes of great bonus material, will be available from New Video starting July 19.  You can pre-order it now.

Screenings galore from Honolulu to Helsinki.

Doing dozens of interviews.

Unexpectedly coming aboard a new doc as Executive Producer.

It wins the Best Director prize for U.S. documentaries at Sundance.

Continued praise for The Kids makes my hat size swell.

It’s enough to make a boy feel, well… resurrected!

It’s not like I’m hardened to all this, but we have a group of eager young people in our office here, and they’re super excited about the upcoming weekend.  And everyone’s thrilled with the incredible coverage and many great reviews we’ve gotten. A. O. Scott in the New York Times calls The Kids “remarkable” and gives it a Critics’ Pick, as does New York Magazine. Eric Hynes in the Village Voice calls it “nakedly personal” and “profoundly universal,” and Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com says it’s a “powerful, wrenching movie” (not to worry, he also called it “funny” and “irresistible”).

As to a few critics who feel I’m full of myself, well, it comes with the territory when you make personal documentaries.  It’s an issue I’m eager to address at a later time, since there’s a lot of validity in the accusation and it’s worthy of a longer and more thoughtful response.

But today, most of all, we’re all curious about what you’ll say about it yourself. If you’re in the NYC area and thinking about seeing The Kids, I’d urge you to do it this weekend.  Our weekend box office numbers will impact the entire theatrical run, especially in terms of the number of cities we’ll get booked in.  If you’re not from around here, keep checking in to our Screenings page and see if it will soon be playing at a theater somwhat near you.  If not, you can always bug your local theater owner about it – they might just listen.

And now, our premiere party preparations continue! We hope we’ll see you at the theaters soon.

More press coverage coming in the days ahead, as well: The Village Voice, Wall Street Journal and indieWIRE, among others.

Thanks and kudos to our extraordinary publicist, Susan Norget, who’s believed in the film from the moment she saw it at our first industry screening last fall.  Our entire print ad budget will pay for exactly two postage-stamp sized ads in the Times.  And journalists, face it, generally aren’t interested in any film that isn’t celebrity driven, much less a personal documentary.   So you can see what kind of job she’s done.

And now it all comes down to getting butts in the seats at the Angelika this coming weekend.  If you’re in the NYC area, hope one of them will be yours.

That’s why I’ll be in Atlanta for the next 3 days at a noteworthy event called the Modern Media Man Summit.  Saturday morning I’ll be speaking on a panel called “Over-Sharing: When it comes to your family, how much is too much?”  It’s meant for bloggers but could there possibly be a more apropos topic for someone who makes personal docs about his family (not to mention, his teenage daughter!)?

If nothing else, the Summit should bring up lots of food for thought.  How are men experiencing fatherhood these days?  How are they writing about it?  Will the “daddy blogger” movement ever grow to anywhere near the level of “mommy bloggers“?  Where oh where is the male Dooce?

I’m bringing along my adorable new notebook laptop, will take it all in like a sponge and hopefully be a bloggin’ and twitterin’ fool.  So check back often, I’ll be updating my posts throughout the event.