My Dinner With Howard

In 1981, a very strange film emerged.  It had no chase scenes, no exploding fortresses of evil, and no special effects.  Instead it simply focused on two men talking over a dinner table.

The director was Louis Malle—winner of an Academy Award for Best Documentary.  And the two men at the table were theater director Andre Gregory and actor Wallace Shawn. Why was this film–My Dinner with Andre–the very opposite of the bore it could have been?  Because the conversation Andre and Wally had was riveting.

In 2019, another film maker set out to make a film along the same lines.  No spaceships.  No aliens.  No CGI.  Just two men at a dinner table talking.  Why did the film maker feel he could get away with this high-wire act?  Because he was Noel B. Murphy, the film biographer of one of the greatest intellects and creators of modern times–Buckminster Fuller.  And Murphy felt he had found another Buckminster Fuller.  Another human whose every sentence was two things: outside the box; and fascinating.  That human being was Howard Bloom, the man Britain’s Channel Four TV calls  “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, [and] Freud,” and Gear Magazine calls “the next Stephen Hawking…the philosopher at the edge of the universe.”

It is said that in the documentary world, it’s impossible to have two non-fiction films on the same person.  My Dinner with Howard breaks that rule.  On November 10, 2019, a 66-minute documentary on Bloom emerged from three-time Emmy-winning director Charlie Hoxie.  It world-premiered at the Doc NYC film festival and sold out Manhattan’s 244-seat SVA Theater.  Then it packed the Metro 4 Theater at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. 

Yet My Dinner with Howard will emerge in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the publication of Bloom’s seventh book, Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: a Search  for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock & Roll.

Why is the impossible possible when the subject is Howard Bloom?  Says My Dinner With Howard’s maker, Noel B. Murphy,  “I’ve hardly ever met a speaker like Howard Bloom in my life.  He weaves the stars, the galaxies, and our bacterial ancestors into a fabric that captures some of the strongest but most unspoken truths of our deep and wordless private lives.”

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The precise release date of My Dinner with Howard is to be announced.