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KILL THE POOR

Director Alan Taylor (Palookaville) reconstructs early-�80s downtown New York and its community of immigrants, artists and drug dealers in Kill the Poor, a long-in-the-works adaptation of Joel Rose�s East Village novel.

The film is the latest from InDigEnt, the producer of two no-budget DV Sundance hits, Rebecca Miller�s Grand-Prize-winning Personal Velocity and InDigEnt founder Gary Winick�s Miramax-lottery-prize-winning Tadpole.

"We jump around in time over three years, which gives the film an unusual energy," says Taylor, describing the filming. "Because it�s an InDigEnt film, you shoot like a crazy person, in our case 14 days, and post in a conventional length of time. That [combination] really suited the style we were after." David Krumholtz (Slums of Beverly Hills) and Clara Bellar (A.I.) star in the film as a disaffected young couple dealing with the birth of their first child.

Taylor�s been trying to make Kill the Poor since 1991, when his New York University thesis short, That Burning Question, attracted producers Ruth Charny (Love Liza) and Lianne Halfon (Ghost World). He and Rose soon teamed on a screenplay that went to the Sundance labs. "[Rose] was too close to the book," says Taylor. "I ran up against a wall trying to turn a story with very little traditional plot structure into a three-act screenplay." The draft he shot this fall came from a new screenwriter, Daniel Handler, who�s got his own cult following as author of the wickedly dark Lemony Snickets kids� novels.

Waiting 10 years to make Poor gave Taylor some tools that didn�t exist in 1991, specifically four of the digital anamorphic lenses Lars Von Trier built for Dancer in the Dark. "The epic aspect ratio [2:35] is more suited to [films] like Napoleon," he says. "But I loved what it did in small spaces." The real challenge in production designing Poor was finding locations where the war zone atmosphere of the film�s milieu was still tangible. "We looked at Downtown 81 -- that movie�s like an archaeological find," says Taylor. "It was hard to find areas nasty enough to double as the Lower East Side of 1982."

Contact: Ruth Charny at [email protected]