Comic film 'Cold Weather' has Pittsburgh connections
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Actor Cris Lankenau, left, and director Aaron Katz during the making of "Cold Weather."
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It's rare that a movie opens in New York and Los Angeles and then leapfrogs to Pittsburgh, but "Cold Weather" has cool Pittsburgh connections.
Producer and co-writer Brendan McFadden, 30, lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Shaler and Hampton and took classes at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.
Director, writer and college pal Aaron Katz, 29, is from Portland, Ore., but shares an apartment in Wilkinsburg with his girlfriend. They moved here from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and have fallen in love with Pittsburgh's beauty, quality of life and reasonable rent.
"We just really, really wanted to open the film in Pittsburgh. Even though I've only lived here a year, I feel like I really love Pittsburgh," Mr. Katz said this week over croissants and caffeine at Voluto Coffee in Garfield.
Mr. McFadden, for his part, learned to love the movies at theaters past and present such as the Showcase Cinemas North (now owned by Rave), Beehive, Pittsburgh Filmmakers venues and arthouse magnets in Squirrel Hill.
He did the underage switcheroo at the Showcase North -- buying a ticket for something else and ducking into "Pulp Fiction" -- and remembers sitting there captivated by the stolen glances in the listening-booth scene with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in "Before Sunrise."
He talked his father into accompanying him to "Kids," a fictional but controversial story of New York teens that was released unrated to avoid an NC-17.
"My dad took me to the Beehive to see 'Kids' when I was 13. I think he was really uncomfortable the whole time, but I was in eighth grade, and I really wanted to see it," he said over coffee.
His father also regularly drove him from the North Hills to Squirrel Hill and to Filmmakers theaters. Today, he says of his parents, Kelly and Linda McFadden of Hampton, "They've always been very supportive of what I've been doing."
First Published February 18, 2011 12:00 am
