Writer/Director Roger Paradiso has been interested in Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding since 1986.  He was dating an actress who was in this weird showcase about an Italian wedding.  “It was only going to run for one weekend because that’s all the money they had.  I thought it worked great as an improv for theatre.  I really liked the skeleton of the story.  I thought it would work as a Film if you could capture the helter skelter nature of the improv and were able to develope a more structured story.”

Paradiso became friendly with the creators of the show, in particular a talented young lady named Nancy Cassaro.  “Nancy’s father, a doctor, had financed the weekend workshop.  There was some doubt as to whether she would be able to finance another weekend, so she begged me to borrow a 16mm camera and shoot the next workshop performance.  I told her this would be impossible to do and wouldn’t do the story I had in mind justice.  In hindsight, if I had known it would take 17 years to get it made, I would have grabbed that camera and shot the workshop.”

Paradiso had been a writer-director in the New York Off-Off-Broadway Theatre scene and to make ends meet had been leading a double life as a Location Manager, Assistant Director and Line Producer in feature films and commercials.  “All my friends from high school, college and my early years in New York knew me as a creative person.  I had been writing and directing in theatre and I had also been a set and lighting designer at some regional and Off-Broadway theatres.  But to pay the rent, since everybody knows there is no money in theatre, I started working in Film.  And I enjoyed Film tremendously, not only as a young kid seeing all those Roger Corman and Samuel Z.  Arkoff matinees, but I had experimented with film since high school.  What a  learning experience it was for me to work with Writers and Directors like John Huston, Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman, Norman Jewison, John McTiernan, Michael Caton-Jones and Adrian Lyne.  It was like taking a Master Class in Filmmaking.”

But back to Tony N’ Tina’s Wedding: Paradiso had taken an option on the property, really an improv, and proceeded to develop a screenplay with some of the creators.  “We’ve had  offers over the years but none of us wanted to compromise the story.  I know it may sound stupid to some people, but we turned down several offers to make the movie.  It was either  because we had to develop the story as a big budget movie with two stars and cut out all the other characters, or can you make this movie in Toronto, Rome, South Africa or Mexico?  It all came down to the integrity of the story.  Tony and Tina are important, of course, but unbalancing the story by cutting other characters was unacceptable.  Also, over the years I have become a regional filmmaker for many personal and ethical reasons, so the idea of shooting the movie anywhere but New York was also unacceptable.  I felt that not only would I be selling out Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding, but I would be selling out all the other regional filmmakers in the US by supporting runaway film production.”

Being a 50 year old first-time feature director is also so politically incorrect that it appealed to Paradiso.  “I’ve directed award-winning shorts and industrials as well as commercials and theatre, but there were many conversations about replacing myself as a director and just writing and Producing.  But I figured that was just buying into more politically correct crap so I decided to go with my heart and direct the film no matter what anyone thought.  I know a lot of people may wonder why an older person is directing what is essentially a young person’s movie, but I don’t buy into limiting yourself.”

HENRY CAPLAN-The Ultimate VINNIE BLACK
From the Times Square cast

Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding finally found a dream investor who not only believed in Paradiso and the script, but supported production in New York.  “We had a very modest $1.5 million budget and I had 15 days to shoot.  I told all the actors that this may be the closest thing to theatre that they would ever experience in film.  We did improvs, rehearsed and rewrote scenes and roughed in the entire film in a very condensed two week rehearsal.  I actually started working with many of the actors weeks before that two week rehearsal period.  We did bios of their characters and had everyone email and call each other so they could develop their group mythology.  They had to behave as if they knew each other for many years.  I like to rehearse in film but it’s different than a theatre rehearsal.  In film I like to rough things in but not over-rehearse scenes, because I think scenes have to be fresh to make the audience think that this is really happening moment to moment.  In film, you want accidents to happen and you want the actors to perform as if they are hearing and seeing the scene for the first time.  Hopefully , we did that.  I know we did very long takes and I kept the camera moving so that the actors always had to be ‘On’.”

Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding

Tony And Tina’s Wedding -BROADWAY

THIS IS USEFUL

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Fraud, Katrina Contracts Could Waste $2B

Tally for Hurricane Katrina Waste, Fraud Could Top $2 Billion in 2007, Federal Auditors Say

By HOPE YEN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON – The tally for Hurricane Katrina waste
could top $2 billion next year because half of the lucrative government
contracts valued at $500,000 or greater for cleanup work are being
awarded without little competition.

Federal investigators have already determined the Bush
administration squandered $1 billion on fraudulent disaster aid to
individuals after the 2005 storm. Now they are shifting their attention
to the multimillion dollar contracts to politically connected firms
that critics have long said are a prime area for abuse.

In January, investigators will release the first of several audits
examining more than $12 billion in Katrina contracts. The charges range
from political favoritism to limited opportunities for small and
minority-owned firms, which initially got only 1.5 percent of the total
work.

“Based on their track record, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw
another billion more in waste,” said Clark Kent Ervin, the Homeland
Security Department’s inspector general from 2003-2004. “I don’t think
sufficient progress has been made.”

He called it inexcusable that the Bush administration would still
have so many no-bid contracts. Under pressure last year, Federal
Emergency Management Agency director David Paulison pledged to rebid
many of the agreements, only to backtrack months later and reopen only
a portion.

Investigators are now examining whether some of the agreements which
in some cases were extended without warning rather than rebid are still
unfairly benefiting large firms.

“It’s a combination of laziness, ineptitude and it may well be nefarious,” Ervin said.

FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said the agency was working to fix its
mistakes by awarding contracts for future disasters through competitive
bidding. Paulison has said he welcomes additional oversight but
cautioned against investigations that aren’t based on “new evidence and
allegations.”

“As always, FEMA will work with Congress in all aspects to ensure
that we are carrying out the agency’s responsibilities,” McIntyre said.

The Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane swept ashore in southern Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama, leveling homes and businesses along the Gulf
Coast. Its storm surge breached levees in New Orleans, unleashing a
flood that left more than 1,300 people dead, hundreds of thousands
homeless and tens of billions of dollars worth of damage.

A series of government investigations in the storm’s wake faulted
the Bush administration for underestimating the threat and failing to
prepare by pre-negotiating contracts for basic supplies in what has
become the nation’s costliest disaster.

Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office said its
initial estimate of $1 billion in disaster aid waste was “likely
understated,” citing continuing problems in which FEMA doled out tens
of millions of dollars in fraudulent housing assistance.

Democrats in Congress called for more accountability. When they take
over in January, at least seven committees plan hearings or other
oversight from housing to disaster loans on how the $88 billion
approved for Katrina relief is being spent.

Among the current investigations:

The propriety of four no-bid contracts together worth $400 million
to Shaw Group Inc., Bechtel Group Inc., CH2M Hill Companies Ltd., and
Fluor Corp. that were awarded without competition.

The contracts drew immediate criticism because of the companies’
extensive political and government ties, prompting a promise last year
from Paulison to rebid them. Instead, FEMA rebid only a portion and
then extended their contracts once, if not twice to $3.4 billion total
so the firms could finish their remaining Katrina work.

The four companies, which have denied that connections played a
factor, were among six that also won new contracts after open bidding
in August. The latest contracts are worth up to $250 million each for
future disaster work.

The propriety of 36 trailer contract awards designated for small
and local businesses as part of Paulison’s promise to rebid large
contracts.

Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner is reviewing
whether some small and local businesses were unfairly shut out in favor
of winners such as joint venture PRI-DJI. DJI stands for Del-Jen Inc.,
a subsidiary of Fluor, which has donated more than $930,000 to mostly
Republican candidates since 2000.

“It’s not what you know, what your expertise is. I don’t even
believe it’s got much to do with price. It’s who you know,” contends
Ken Edmonds, owner of River Parish RV Inc. in Louisiana, a company of 9
people whose application was rejected.

PRI, a minority-owned firm based in San Diego, said it is the
“majority partner” with Del-Jen as part of a federal mentoring program
offered by the Small Business Administration. The joint venture
received four Katrina contracts worth up to $100 million each based on
price and “knowledge of work with the federal government,” president
Frank Loscavio said.

Whether small and minority-owned businesses were unfairly hurt
after the Bush administration initially waived competition requirements.

For many weeks after the storm, minority firms received 1.5 percent
of the total work less than one-third of the 5 percent normally
required because they weren’t allowed to bid for many of the emergency
contracts.

The National Black Chamber of Commerce called the figure appalling
because of the disproportionate number of poor, black people in the
stricken Gulf Coast, prompting Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Rep.
Donald Manzullo, R-Ill., to request GAO to investigate.

FEMA has since restored many of its competition rules, and the
number of contracts given to minority firms is now about 8.8 percent,
according to the agency.

On the Net:

A copy of the semiannual report on Katrina spending by the agencies’ inspectors general:

http://www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/katovrsght/OIG pcie sept06.pdf

ABC News:

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Interior, Pentagon Faulted In Audits – washingtonpost.com

Interior, Pentagon Faulted In Audits
Effort to Speed Defense Contracts Wasted Millions

By Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 25, 2006; A01

The
Defense Department paid two procurement operations at the Department of
the Interior to arrange for Pentagon purchases totaling $1.7 billion
that resulted in excessive fees and tens of millions of dollars in
waste, documents show.

Defense turned to Interior, which manages
federal lands and resources, in an effort to speed up its contracting.
Interior is one of several government agencies allowed to manage
contracts for other agencies in exchange for a fee.

But the
arrangement between Interior and Defense “routinely violated rules
designed to protect U.S. Government interests,” according to draft
audit documents obtained by The Washington Post.

More than half
of the contracts examined were awarded without competition or without
checks to determine that the prices were reasonable, according to the
audits by the inspectors general for Defense (DOD) and Interior (DOI).
Ninety-two percent of the work reviewed was awarded without verifying
that the contractors’ cost estimates were accurate; 96 percent was
inadequately monitored.

In one instance, Interior officials
bought armor to reinforce Army vehicles from a software maker. In
another, Interior bought furniture for Defense from a company that
apparently had not previously been in the furniture business. One
contract worth $100 million, to lease office space for a top-secret
intelligence unit in Northern Virginia, was awarded without
competition. Defense auditors said that deal cost taxpayers millions
more than necessary, and they have referred the matter for possible
criminal investigation.

“These poor contracting practices have
left DOD vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse and DOI vulnerable to
sanctions and the loss of the public trust,” the Interior auditors
concluded in their report.

They examined 49 deals and concluded
that 61 percent had evidence of “illegal contracts, ill advised
contracts, and various failings of contract administration procedures.”

The
auditors’ findings underscore the difficulties that have come with
efforts over the past decade to streamline government by outsourcing
work, simplifying contracting procedures and cutting back on the
procurement workforce. Agencies such as Interior are allowed to handle
contracts for other agencies under the theory that they can perform
some services more efficiently. But in this case, auditors found that
Interior did not follow through on oversight and collected $22.8
million in fees for work the Pentagon could have done itself.

Officials at Defense and Interior said they have been working to fix contracting problems cited in the audits.

“We
are currently reviewing the findings of the DOD IG, and we have been
meeting with representatives of the DOI regarding the specifics of the
draft report,” said Shay Assad, director of defense procurement and
acquisition policy at the Pentagon. “It would be premature to comment
specifically except to say that we understand DOI is actively taking
actions to improve their contracting practices in response to a number
of the draft findings.”

Interior officials said they are adopting
many of the auditors’ recommendations and have made “giant strides.”
They said they are examining “specific contracts of concern” as well as
reviewing the qualifications of their contracting officers and
improving their training.

“We believe that many of your
recommendations can help us further improve our internal controls
related to the acquisition environment,” R. Thomas Weimer, Interior’s
assistant secretary for policy, management and budget, wrote in a Nov.
30 response to his department’s inspector general.

Unnamed contracting officials were quoted in the Defense audit as saying that they went to Interior to save time.

“We used DOI because they are able to expedite the contracting process,” one Defense official said.

Another said that the Defense office “did not have enough contracting people to handle the requirements.”

The
Interior procurement operations were allowed to charge fees for
managing contracts on behalf of other government agencies. One of the
operations, GovWorks, is located in Herndon. The other is the Southwest
Acquisition Branch of the National Business Center at Fort Huachuca,
Ariz., an Army base.

Defense paid Interior management fees of up
to 4 percent for everything from pistol holsters to intelligence
consultants to office leases. The Defense inspector general said the
Pentagon could have saved $22.8 million by using the U.S. General
Services Administration (GSA).

The Interior inspector general
said Defense “could have used these monies to purchase as many as
50,000 sets of body armor to protect our soldiers.”

At the
Southwest Acquisition Branch office in Arizona, the auditors concluded,
$411 million worth of deals were struck without a fundamental step in
government contracting: review and approval by properly trained and
certified contracting officers.

The Defense auditors found that
nearly half of the 49 contract files they reviewed failed to document
that the prices “were fair and reasonable.” Contracting officials
relied upon e-mailed statements and cursory reviews from the Pentagon,
rather than “documenting a detailed analysis of the contractor’s
proposal.”

At Interior, there was little supervision of the work.
The Defense inspector general “questioned the adequacy of government
surveillance for 23 of the 24 contracts” — or 96 percent of the total
reviewed in one analysis.

Key documents were missing from
contract files. “Lack of good documentation can create serious
problems,” the auditors noted. “If it is not documented, it never
happened.”

The findings prompted the inspector general’s office to demand that the Pentagon stop using Interior’s contracting shops.

The
auditors singled out two contracting arrangements for particularly
sharp criticism. In 2002, the Pentagon opened a new office called
Counterintelligence Field Activity, known as CIFA, which supervises
protection at Defense facilities against terror attacks.

When
CIFA needed office space in Northern Virginia, Defense officials turned
to Interior’s GovWorks program instead of the GSA, which manages office
space for the government, the audit said. GovWorks awarded a 10-year,
no-bid deal worth $100 million to a private company based in Anchorage
to acquire and manage the space, the auditors said.

The auditors said Defense officials violated regulations by not using the GSA for their office space.

“CIFA
and DOI circumvented numerous laws in contracting for leased space,”
the auditors said. “By not following the proper procedures, they
entered into a lease without the legal authority to do so.”

Auditors
found that the lease cost taxpayers up to $2.7 million more than it
should have. Auditors also found that the deal violated procedures
because it was not cleared by the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

In
May, members of the Defense inspector general’s office told senior CIFA
staffers that they could be in violation of the law if they continued
to make payments on the lease.

“Subsequently, we learned that CIFA had continued to make lease payments, totaling $2.9 million,” the auditors wrote.

The auditors referred the matter for possible criminal investigation to the deputy inspector general for investigations.

Weimer,
Interior’s policy and budget chief, disputed the auditor’s findings on
the lease arrangement. In his written response, he argued that CIFA did
not have to go through the GSA to obtain the office space. Weimer also
said CIFA did not enter into an improper lease because the lease was
between CIFA’s contractor and the managers of the office building.
Moreover, he said, the chief counsel for the Justice Department’s
Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force advised CIFA that the arrangement
was appropriate.

The other arrangement that received sharp
criticism from the auditors involved the Open Market Corridor, an
online buying program billed as a way to save tax money.

Built by
a California company, the Open Market Corridor began as a research
project for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. In 2002,
management of the contract was handed to officials at Interior’s Fort
Huachuca operation. The California company, the Naval school and
Interior all received a small percentage when the system was used to
order goods and services.

Auditors found that select companies
were favored, in violation of federal regulations. The contracting
officer responsible for overseeing the online purchases “was unable to
provide a list of either the customers or participating vendors who
were using the system,” the auditors said.

Sixteen vendors
“appeared to be Government employees or firms that appeared to be
affiliated with Government employees,” another apparent violation of
regulations and a possible violation of federal criminal statutes,
auditors said.

One official who processed 1,616 “contract
actions” worth nearly $135 million was a lecturer at the Naval school
who did not have the authority to award government work.

Senior
Interior officials were not even “aware that the system existed” or
that it was processing tens of millions of dollars in deals each year
without approval, the audit said.

In March, after auditors reported the abuses, officials at the Naval school took the system offline.

The
auditors concluded that Defense should not continue to manage or use
the Open Market Corridor “because of the serious legal and other
problems we found.”

They referred their findings to the deputy
inspector general and the Navy Acquisition Integrity Office for further
investigation.

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Police in Naples have arrested an Italian who met a former Russian

agent, Alexander Litvinenko the day he fell ill in London from
radiation poisoning.

Mario Sacaramella, who was discharged from University College Hospital
in London earlier this month after testing positive for radioactivity,
was arrested by Italian police as he stepped off a British Airways
plane in Naples.

He had already been under investigation by Italian prosecutors for
alleged arms trafficking, before Mr Litvenenko’s death from radiation
poisoning.

Police said Mr Scaramella, who claims he holds a teaching post at Naples University, will be brought to Rome for interrogation.

ABC News Online

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Bill Kristol gets off on the “long surge” troop fantasy
By:
John Amato

If your stomach can take it, Bill “the Vampire” Kristol practically orgasms at the thought of a long and sustained troop level surge in Iraq. “What’s needed is a sustained and large surge.” Billie got almost three solid minutes to praise Bush for his—cough—cough—leadership.

Video-WMP Video-QT

There’s nothing like some hot burning warmongering love for Billie.
His neocon fantasy got a little pick me up like a sex addict with an
unlimited porn pass on DirecTV.

Crooks and Liars » 2006 » December » 25

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The neo-conservative dream faded in 2006.

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