Gillian G. Gaar

Get ready to get fabulous—the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival kicks off this Thursday, Oct. 11—National Coming Out Day—and runs through Oct. 21. The opening night film is a Struck By Lightning, a set-in-high-school comedy written by and...

Memphis returns to Seattle, where the show had its pre-Broadway tryout in 2009, from a successful stint on Broadway, having scooped up four Tony awards during its run, including Best Musical. Like the musical Hairspray, which also got a pre-Broadway...

Outside the Elvistravaganza exhibit at this year’s Bumbershoot, a woman was overheard explaining why her friend, an African-American, wouldn’t go inside. “She said, ‘I couldn’t possibly! After all, he stole our music!’” It’s not the...

It’s common enough to be a cliché: the story of a performer who rises to the top of their profession, sinks into a haze of drugs and alcohol, then finds redemption and rises again. And that’s certainly something hovering in the background of...

Though Green Day’s American Idiot is a concept album, its “concept” is more thematic than narrative; there’s no clear storyline. In the broadest sense, the 2004 release is a coming of age story of a bored young suburbanite who ventures off to...

For the first time in the history of the Seattle International Film Festival, the opening and closing night films were both shot in the Northwest. Grassroots, the closing night film, is even based on a real life event: poet/activist Grant Cogswell’s...

Roger Waters’ rock opera The Wall was famously inspired by his own contempt for Pink Floyd’s audience and his horror at what that contempt could make him do. On the last date of a 1977 Pink Floyd tour, Waters was so irritated at being harangued by...

After sell-out screenings as the opening night film at the Seattle International Film Festival’s Renton venue, the Renton IKEA Performing Arts Center, and the Egyptian Theatre in Seattle, an additional screening of Fat Kid Rules the World has been...

With a pedigree that includes stints at Seattle’s KNDD (as Music Director and on-air host), VH1 in New York City, and radio stations in San Francisco and LA, — as well as a rabid interest in film — Marco Collins has the perfect background for...