TheGoldenChild

Tribeca: A look at 'American Cannibal'
Source: THN
Date: 27th April, 2006
Posted by: Paul Heath

As you may know, the Tribeca film festival is in full swing over in New York at the moment, and today we received a review from one of our readers, Jonathan, who managed to catch AMERICAN CANNIBAL, which the IMDB says documents the train-wreck production and sudden shutdown of American Cannibal, the reality TV show produced by the promoter behind the Paris Hilton sex tape. There is an official website for this movie here. This is a positve review of the movie and contains minor spoilers. Thanks to Jonathan.

American Cannibal premiered yesterday at the 5th annual Tribeca Film Festival. Tribeca has easily become one of the top festivals in North America. The highlight of the festival yesterday was the documentary "American Cannibal: The Road to Reality". Over the last 6 weeks there has been a public fight between the American Cannibal filmmakers Michael Nigro and Perry Grebin and Porn Promoter Kevin Blatt who is featured in the documentary. After reading about the film from a link off of DrudgeReport.com I had to buy a ticket to see what the fuss was about.

Kevin Blatt is featured in the documentary along with two writers Gil Ripley and Dave Roberts. The film follows Gil and Dave while they go on a quest to get their TV Show ideas turned into a reality. The TV show they pitch Blatt is called Virgin Territories, "When you win it, You Lose It", they explain its like Big Brother but more sexy. Blatt decides he wants to go main stream and decides to have the guys do a TV show called "American Cannibal". They put in one-hundred-thousand dollars into the production of a television pilot they hope to sell to a network. This is Blatt's first attempt to go main stream and it fails miserably.

The documentary process follows every process of making a Reality TV show from the pitching to the casting all the way to the production. Game Show host George Gray is the host for American Cannibal, but he ends up having a problem from SAG and has to leave the show 3 days into production. Once they decide to speed up production one of the big breasted blonde contestant falls over and gets a laceration across her chest. It turns out she fell into coma but is supposedly fine now.

On the controversial side, Kevin Blatt talks about Paris Hilton and the porn tape in depth in a couple of scenes. He also said that the DVD "One Night in Paris" had the wholesale price of 22 dollars which is unheard of for any type of film.

I sat in the far back row and about 30 seconds before the film began Kevin Blatt came into the screening and sat down with a hat and a porn star on his arm. I could not tell if he was happy with how he is portrayed but he got up and left before the end of the credits. For the Q&A, Dave Roberts said that he thought he was fairly portrayed, but his writing partner Gil Ripley also left before the Q&A.

The filmmakers said that making this film was a two year process and it turned out much differently than it began.

Overall I thought this was an excellent documentary and I know the filmmakers will go far with this film. While watching the film all I could think was that this was like Lost In La Mancha. Instead of a feature film falling apart this was like watching the behind the scenes of TV show tear apart at its seams. Hopefully one day, the footage that was shot of the TV show "American Cannibal" will be released so we can see how bad it really was.

Overall I would give this film a 8/10.

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