ILYA CHAIKEN
Ilya Chaiken (born February 10, 1973) is an American film director and screenwriter. She is best known for her debut feature Margarita Happy Hour, a film about motherhood, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001 and went on to the Los Angeles Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. (More from Wikipedia)
I knew that Holly Ramos had worked in film as well as music in my research for the post on her punk rock band Fur more than five years ago. In silent testimony to her acumen in the acting field, Holly appears in four different photographs on the cover and in the booklet and also on the Fur CD itself. By looking closely, you can tell that it is Holly in all four pictures, but her look is startlingly different in each of them.
Holly Ramos was one of the actors in a 2001 independent film that was the debut feature by Ilya Chaiken called Margarita Happy Hour. The Fur song “Sex Drive” was featured in the soundtrack for this film. The movie was nominated for a Prism Award; from Wikipedia: “The Annual Prism Awards honor the creative community for accurate portrayals of substance abuse, addiction and mental health in entertainment programming.”
In fact, Holly Ramos had basically pulled an Orson Welles a few years later by writing, producing and starring in a short film in 2004 called The 100 Lovers of Jesus Reynolds; this film was also directed by Ilya Chaiken. For many years, the entry for this film on my website was at the top of the alphabetical list in the index that I at length completed around the middle of last year. There are three entries ahead of it now. I really should try to track down the indie films that Holly Ramos has been in; perhaps it is not an impossible mission.
(Year 9 Review)
