"The Iron Mule" is a 1925 slapstick comedy by the great silent comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, featuring Buster Keaton as an Indian! The name also encapsulates the kind of movies we love to show; tough, burly, uncompromising shorts which can't be stopped. The Iron Mule was also an early name for the movie camera (perhaps an allusion to "The Iron Horse," a term for the locomotive).
The Iron Mule Short Comedy Screening Series was founded in April, 2002, as First Sundays, at the Chicago City Limits Theater in NYC and has been screening monthly ever since.
We are a collective of filmmakers and film lovers who meet monthly to celebrate funny and inventive short cinema among friends. Join us if you dare!
See the Jay & Victor Interview
at The New Roots Project!
FEATURED
IN TIME
OUT NEW YORK!
Jay
and Victor interviewed on
independentfilm.com
watch the
interview here!
THE IRON MULE TEAM
JAY STERN
Jay's short film work has won awards from the Montreal Film
Festival and the National Educational Media Network. Jay is
also a founding member of Quicksilver Radio Theater, whose
award-winning radio dramas have been syndicated nationally.
He is a former producer of Chicago City Limits and is a Ph.D. candiate at
the European
Graduate School, where he has studied with Peter Greenaway,
John Waters, Siegfried Zielinski, Claude Lanzmann, Agnes Varda
and Volker Schlöndorff. Jay's first
feature film The Changeling opened in 2007, and his next feature, The Adventures of Paul and Marian, is scheduled to shoot in early 2010. Some of his short films, made in collaboration
with M. Sweeney Lawless, can be seen at www.jaystern.com.
VICTOR
VARNADO
Victor Varnado is a comedian, actor, writer, and director. As a comedian he has appeared on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Comedy Central, and as an actor he has appeared alongside Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Julia Stiles, and Werner Herzog. As a director, Victor has worked with Charlie Murphy and Dave Attell (in Warner Brother's Twisted Fortune) and most recently with Michel Gondry for Victor's latest short film Roboto Supremo. His latest feature, The Awkward Kings, a documentary about alternative African-American comedians, is scheduled for a February 2010 broadcast on Comedy Central. Learn more about Victor at bestalbino.com.
PAUL ZUCKERMAN
is artistic director and producer at Chicago City Limits,
and a founding member of Chicago City Limits. He studied improvisation
in Chicago with Del Close and Jo Forsberg at The Second City
, and helped bring CCL to New York in 1979. He performed with
the company for over 10 years, and has appeared in a number
of TV and film productions, including Lovesick, Cagney
& Lacey, PBS's Reading Rainbow, Tales of the
Unexpected, The Today Show and Reel News
on the USA Network. Directing Credits include 25 Chicago City
Limits comedy Revues, Comedy Et Al, television's first
interactive comedy series, and the Off-Broadway comedy Rosa
Krantz and Gilda Stern Aren't Dead, which featured CCL
alumnae Linda Gelman and Carol Schindler. Paul holds a doctoral
degree in psychology from the University of Michigan. He is
married to Linda Gelman, with whom he co-produced Zara, Philip
and Eli.
LIN SORENSEN
Lin Sorensen has been a writer, producer, director, and actor in film and theater. He has studied documentary production in San Francisco, experimental ennui in Portland, and gambling on the ponies in Los Angeles. His short films have screened up and down the West Coast, and he recently completed a feature film, Uncle Sam's House, inspired by the stories of friends with relatives deployed in Iraq. He has worked for several festivals including the San Francisco & Portland Int'l Film Festivals, and has served on the jury for the Slamdance Screenwriting Competition. Lin is happy to be involved with the Iron Mule team on the very serious work of being funny.
RICHARD BURST-LAZARUS
Richard was exiled
from the New York suburbs, grew up in Texas, fled the country
for an odd and obscure school in Wales, then went to college
in the frozen American North. He moved to Brooklyn after school
and became a journalist, then a finance guy, then a producer,
then a lackey, and then a producer again. He aspires to some
combination of making movies and having steady, respectable
work, and he cannot watch a movie without trying to guess
the budget.
