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.

So no surprise that our Saturday morning breakfast special screening (10:10am!) was packed.  And happy to report it couldn’t possibly have gone better.

It’s still a relatively new experience to see The Kids Grow Up with an audience, so I was relieved and thrilled at how loud and frequent the laughs came during the first half hour, which is where most of the intended laughs happen to be.  As for the last half hour, where we invite the audience to go weak-kneed, curl into fetal position and burst into tears, well, it looks like we succeeded on that account, as well.

It was hugely gratifying over the next two days to have people come up to me and Marjorie and tell us how much they loved the film.  Many said it was their favorite film of the festival, which is nice even if they were stretching things a bit, or even flat-out lying.   Feel free to continue to lie to me like that in the future, dear readers.

I return much more confident that the film touches audiences deeply.  The notion has been reinforced by any number of Facebook and Twitter postings, and emails like the following from an audience member named Leah Janosko from Cary, North Carolina.

I just wanted to express my gratitude for your film “The Kids Grow Up.” I was one of the lucky (sniffling) people that had the fortune to attend your screening on Saturday morning in Durham. I was moved and touched. Your ability to put yourself and your family totally out there in such an honest, authentic and vulnerable way is such a gift to anyone who sees this film. I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate it.

I am the mother of a 16 year old girl (my only daughter) and it was as if you made this film specifically for me. The insights of both you and your wife were comforting in the sense that I am not the only one with these feelings. I found it interesting that during one of your answers from the Q&A following the viewing, you explained that your daughter was concerned that people would see this film and think that they know her. I came away not with knowing her but better knowing myself. Lucy represented my daughter with her laughter, intelligence, eye rolls and need for independence. Seeing how you coped (and anguished) with Lucy, is helping me process the complexity of emotions that I am feeling during this similar period of my life.

My only suggestion would be to please include longer credits at the end as I needed more time to compose myself before the lights came up and talking about the improvement in future education technology surrounding kids.

I will keep up with information on your website and look forward to recommending this film to friends who may have an opportunity to view it. I congratulate you on an amazing piece of work and look forward to your future projects.

Leah

Our web design worker bees are working hard to create a discussion forum on the website here, not just for wonderful reactions to the film (though don’t hesitate) but for wise and pithy discussion of parenting issues brought up by the film.   Having had a ton of experience from The  D-Word, I’ll be doing some of the moderating myself, and hope to bring in an experienced co-host, as well.  It will hopefully be up and running sometime in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

In a few days, the fun begins. The film gets out in front of audiences again.

Full Frame, Sarasota, Stranger Than Fiction and Hot Docs, for starters.

It’s been a quite a while since IDFA, we’ve been laying low.  But a lot is happening behind the scenes and hopefully we can share the news soon.   All I can say at this point is The Kids Grow Up will almost certainly have a theatrical release, probably beginning in the early fall.  So stay tuned.

But now it’s time to get out on the festival circuit at last.  On Thursday, Lori and I head down to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, NC, and it’s going to be a great three days.   Like at IDFA, we come not just to screen The Kids Grow Up but as producers of The Edge of Dreaming, which is part of the New Docs competition.  And I’ll be on the Grand Jury, which means the festival flies me down and puts me up in the lap of luxury!

On Friday, Marjorie arrives to once again take part in our Q&A.  Meanwhile, we get to see a slew of great friends and colleagues, not to mention take in some world class documentaries.  Apart from the 18 I’ve already had the pleasure to pre-screen for my jury duty, that is.

The following weekend is the Sarasota Film Festival, where we had such a great experience with 51 Birch Street.   Then on April 20, we have a one-time showing at one of the great documentary screening series around, Stranger Than Fiction, here in New York City.   Finally, we head back to one of my favorite film cities, Toronto, for Hot Docs, which is North America’s largest documentary festival.

I’m so looking forward to showing my film, meeting with audiences and sharing my family story with them.  It’s always a great interaction,  one that I get so much out of.   Then there’s the  online discussion component, coming here soon, which will allow everyone the chance to share their own family stories around parenting, kids growing up and empty nest issues.

So, this is just the beginning.  Here we come.

Still, seeing the completed film for the first time before an audience of over 200 people is quite another matter.  Marjorie arrived in Amsterdam last week just in time for our second IDFA screening.    I had her join me for the audience Q&A immediately afterwards and, sure enough, the very first question was whether it was difficult to see herself so exposed on screen.  Here’s her answer in a short Flip clip…

Anyway, posters and postcards – check.  International replacement cell phone – check.  An email announcement to attending IDFA buyers and press – check.   An itinerary to make sense of all the screenings and meetings and parties – check.  Ambien for the red-eye flight over – check!!!

We had a private screening on Monday for a small group of distributors, industry folk and friends at Soho House and the audience reaction was all I could have possibly hoped for.  It’s clear this is a film that works better on a big screen with an audience, so I’m a bit calmer heading into IDFA than I would have been.   But we’ll see.

I have my Flip video camera with me, and I’ll try to post a couple of Flip Clips during the festival if I can find the time and wherewithal.  And I’ll definitely post about how things are going.  And now, fingers crossed…