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'Precious' director pushes worst aspects of child abuse to screen

The first movie Lee Daniels directed, the 2005 drama Shadowboxer about a terminally ill assassin and her unusual relationship with her partner in crime, was largely derided by critics and virtually ignored by audiences, grossing less than $1 million worldwide.

So when Daniels, who had also produced other films about profoundly dysfunctional families ( Monster's Ball , The Woodsman ), set out to try again, he kept expectations low. Even though his second film, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire , is adapted from a highly lauded and widely read book, Daniels didn't believe many people would turn out to see it.

``I basically made this movie for my mother and her demographic,'' Daniels says. ``She was always telling me `Why are you making movies about pedophiles and killers? Why can't you make movies like Tyler Perry?' And I said `OK, Mom, I will.' So I was really thinking about an African-American audience when I embarked on this. I really didn't expect it to go anywhere but straight

Directions for would-be directors

So you think you're a natural-born filmmaker who was put on this earth to direct movies? Join the club, pal.

With the advent of cheap cameras, the Internet and online video-sharing sites like YouTube and BitTorrent, practically everybody is an aspiring Spielberg or Fellini these days.

But making a movie, be it a five-minute short or a two-hour feature, takes more than vision. In his witty and addictively readable book The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn't Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film (Faber & Faber, $25), author Reed Martin provides 500 pages of how-to advice for would-be De Palmas -- everything from financing to casting, scoring to marketing -- and backs it up with cautionary anecdotes and tips from famous directors.

Braille Institute helps people keep reading

Jean Van Dam used to read two to three books a week. But at the age of 88, her deteriorating vision made it impossible for her to keep up that pace.

``Books are educational and take you all over the world -- and right from your armchair,'' said Van Dam.

Over the years, the Jewish Braille Institute came to her rescue and many others whose visual impairment or physical disability prevented them from reading.

'Color Purple,' the musical, comes to Arsht

Celie, the central character in Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple , lives a life most folks would consider unendurable.

A poor black girl who grows up in Georgia in the early 1900s, she's still a young teenager when she gives birth to two babies fathered by the man she thinks is her father, babies he takes away right after they're born. She is traded, along with a cow, to a cruel widower with kids, a farmer who abuses her verbally and physically, a man so determined to deny Celie any joy that he hides years' worth of loving letters from the sister who left to work as a missionary in Africa.

Yet Celie does endure, finds love, reclaims her life and her family. Walker's powerful tale of trial and triumph has sparked the imaginations of uncounted readers, the millions who saw Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated 1985 film of The Color Purple -- and, since 2005, the nearly two million theatergoers who have gone on Celie's journey in its newest form as a Broadway musical

For the love of film: Dana Keith realized a decades-long dream with Miami Beach Cinematheque

The seats at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, the cozy oasis for movie lovers on Española Way, are not arranged in parallel lines, as in most theaters. Instead, the rows have been installed in a V pattern around the screen, so at any moment you can turn and watch the faces of fellow viewers as clearly as you can see the movie.

''It's one of my hobbies, watching the audience as they watch the film,'' says Cinematheque founder-programmer Dana Keith. ``Seeing their reaction gives me as much pleasure as the films themselves. To watch someone discovering a film the same way I did is very rewarding. It makes me feel good.''

Lacking the splashy marketing campaigns of multiplex fare, as most of them do, the eclectic films Keith programs at the Cinematheque are, in fact, the types of movies that beg to be discovered by discerning cinemaphiles.