Paper Trails

Arkansans' first film to premiere; John Tesh in Little Rock; Def Leppard meets Deaf Leopards

TAKING FLIGHT: Brothers Miles and Joshua Miller will hold the world premiere of their first feature film, All the Birds Have Flown South, at the Seattle International Film Festival next month. The Southern Gothic film, shot in central Arkansas in early 2014, stars North Little Rock native Joey Lauren Adams, Paul Sparks (Boardwalk Empire, Midnight Special, Mud) and Dallas Roberts (The Walking Dead, Dallas Buyers Club). Most of the cast and crew are Arkansans. It was produced by Little Rock native Kathryn Francis Tucker (daughter of downtown real estate developer Rett Tucker), who's previously been an assistant director on major films shot in Los Angeles.

The film competes in the festival's New American Cinema Competition on June 10-11 for a $5,000 prize. Its description: "This unsettling psycho-thriller follows a disturbed man grieving for his mother who begins obsessing over a waitress ... even taking care of her abusive, terminally ill husband."

"We are very proud of our film and the product our Arkansas crew produced," Miles Miller tells Paper Trails.

FUN AND SMART: An intimate crowd of KURB-FM 98.5 listeners were recently treated to a free VIP event at PianoKraft in Little Rock catered by South on Main. The reason for the gathering? John Tesh, host of the syndicated Intelligence for Your Life show, which airs nationally on dozens of TV and radio stations including B98.5, was visiting the station's staff. The former Entertainment Tonight co-host, who later pursued a music career, played piano and sang during the event. His wife and co-host actress Connie Sellecca didn't join him but her son, Gib, did. And Gib has an Arkansas connection -- his dad, actor Gil Gerard, is a Little Rock native who graduated from Catholic High.

THEY'RE WITH THE BAND: In the past two months, Cary Tyson, a program officer at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, gathered 1,400 signatures on an online petition on change.org to ask the British rock band Def Leppard, in town Wednesday at Verizon Arena, to pose in front of the Arkansas School for the Deaf's scoreboard in Little Rock. The connection? The team's mascot is the Leopards, hence the deaf Leopards.

The band's time constraints made posing in front of the actual sign impossible, but with help from the folks at Verizon Arena, students Stephen Cathcart, Henry James, Alex Gossett and Jewel Brandon posed for a photo with the band backstage while holding a 5-foot-wide foam board replica of their scoreboard.

The photo appeared in this newspaper last week.

"We're so proud for anyone to shine a light on our school, on deaf education and on the work we do here," says Stacey Tatera, spokesman for the school.

This newspaper earlier reported that the school has used the name Leopards since at least 1941, long before the band was founded in 1977.

Contact Linda S. Haymes at (501) 399-3636 or lhaymes@arkansasonline.com

SundayMonday on 05/15/2016

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