Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Manuel Molina - from Being in the World a film by Tao Ruspoli

Monday, December 14, 2009

Being in The World movie trailer

Being in the World teaser: John Haugeland

Being in the World teaser: Sean Kelly

Being in the World teaser: Hubert Dreyfus

Being in the World teaser: Technological Understanding of Being

Being in the World teaser: Jazz Drums

Being in the World teaser: Mark Wrathall

Being in the World teaser: Austin Peralta

Being in the World teaser: Jumanee Smith

Being in the World teaser: Ryan Cross

Being in the World teaser: Tony Austin

Being in the World teaser: Iain Thomson

Being in the World teaser: Lindsay Benner

Being in the World teaser: Leah Chase

Being in the World teaser: Taylor Carman

Being in the World teaser: Hiroshi Sakaguchi


Sunday, November 22, 2009

Impromptu

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

FIX Starring Shawn Andrews and Olivia Wilde exclusive clip

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Burning Man 2009 by Tao Ruspoli and the Laughing Mongoose Team

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Ruspoli Family Reunion

Just got back from Vignanello where we had a wonderful family reunion at the ruspoli castle. Click on image for full gallery.

Saturday, October 03, 2009

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

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Friday, October 02, 2009

Beau Garrett

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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

FIX movie trailer: Starring Shawn Andrews & Olivia Wilde

Friday, September 18, 2009

Oh My God It's Pollyanna and Sarah

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Sunday, September 13, 2009

Tao Ruspoli Flamenco Guitar Solea

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Tao Ruspoli--Bulerias de Diego Del Gastor (flamenco guitar)

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

New FIX poster

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Burning Man 2009

Click on image to view full gallery.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Olivia Wilde Malibu Magazine Selects

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Friday, July 24, 2009

Dead Prez Summertime music video directed by yours truly

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Manu Designs

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Saturday, June 27, 2009

Behind the Wheel now on Youtube!

Seeing film as art is easy. Remembering that art is about challenging the world can be hard. Putting film art into action? Well, that can be damn near impossible for people... but not the members of the LA Film Co-op. Determined to make their own state of the union address and filled with youthful energy, they bought a bus, fit a modern day editing suite into it and headed out from coast to coast, interviewing notable artists wherever they found them.

Bumping into such luminaries as Dead Prez, director Oliver Stone, guerilla poster artist Robbie Conal, among all those citizens just living day-to-day, the Film Co-op has created a profound record for their time. With a new age of change sweeping into America with 2009, Behind the Wheel is an amazing final summary of the Bush years. It captures with joy and anger the spirit of resistance at a time when the majority of Americans felt disenfranchised from a country and a leader who didn't stand for them.

Enjoy and leave comments. We want to hear from you!

Click here to watch the film in one playlist on youtube. Below are the individual parts. Feel free to share and embed all or individual parts; we want your help promoting the film!

Part 1: Robbie Conal, Francisco Letelier and Oliver Stone. Opening narrated by Olivia Wilde


Part 2: Hualapai Indian Reservation and Santa Fe


Part 3: Santa Fe


Part 4: Oklahoma, Texas, Alexander Cockburn


Part 5: New Orleans


Part 6: New Orleans


Part 7: Atlanta: Home Boys Only, Malachi, Stic.man of Dead Prez


Part 8:Leaving Atlanta, Pierre Sprey of Mapleshade Records, Scott Beibin of the Lost Film Festival


Part 9: New York City/Brooklyn: M1 of Dead Prez

IF YOU ONLY HAVE TIME FOR ONE PART, MAKE IT PART 9!
Creative Commons License
Behind the Wheel by LAFCO & Tao Ruspoli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Shot Olivia for Malibu Magazine today

Monday, June 15, 2009

Billy Burke

Click on image to view full gallery.

New photo gallery: ZINTA


Click on image for full gallery.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

A little Solea from Vignanello


See part one here.

Tao Ruspoli Flamenco Guitar--Alegrias Vignanello 2009

Friday, May 15, 2009

Melusine Ruspoli

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Friday, May 01, 2009

Steve Kahn, Flamenco guitarist: Brooklyn 2005

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Nana the Nomadic Filmmaker


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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Diana Getting Ready

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Saturday, April 11, 2009

Prints, Mugs, Tshirts, etc. with my photography now on sale

All my photography now on sale at www.taoruspoli.com
adding images all the time; if you see something here you like that's not there, email me and I'll add it.
Thanks!

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

W Magazine


Tao Ruspoli at home in Venice, California
Tao Ruspoli at home in Venice, California.

Celluloid Prince

His aristo family hails from Rome, but filmmaker Tao Ruspoli prefers Venice—California, that is.

April 2009
Filmmaker Tao Ruspoli sallies forth from his live-work loft on a gritty lane in Venice, California, and strolls to a road-worn RV parked at the curb. One rear tire is flat, and the side door is unlocked. “Hello?” Ruspoli calls into the cabin, adding with the wry smile of someone who has found surprises there in the past, “You never know.”
The vehicle, a 1977 GMC Eleganza bought on eBay, was the mobile production headquarters for Fix, Ruspoli’s first feature-length drama. A day-in-the-life story, the movie stars Ruspoli and his wife, House’s Olivia Wilde, as a couple escorting a family member to rehab; the filmmaking team of 10 used the RV for hair, makeup, wardrobe, craft service, technical work and editing. “We did everything out of that RV,” recalls Ruspoli, a slim 33-year-old, saying that they piled in the vehicle yet again to drive to film festivals across the country: “We took it to Sundance. We took it to Marfa. We parked, pulled out the awning and relaxed for five days before driving back.”
The RV may have been a practical solution for a microbudget filmmaker—and a mode of group transport as old as Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus—but it’s a far cry from the director’s ancestral home, Rome’s Palazzo Ruspoli. (His family also owns the Castello Ruspoli in Vignanello, which boasts one of the most celebrated gardens in Europe.) Ruspoli is perhaps the only director who can legitimately claim the title of Hollywood royalty. He’s an Italian prince from a lineage dating to the year 800, and his father was the late Dado Ruspoli, one of the richest, most exuberant playboys of la dolce vita—a fabled era when the motto, says Ruspoli, was, “Let’s live to the maximum.”
“My father’s friends were Cocteau, Picasso, Orson Welles,” says Ruspoli, who discusses his family with the bemused fascination of an anthropologist among an eccentric but peaceable tribe. “He spent money like there was no tomorrow, throwing lavish parties.”
The younger Ruspoli, though, seems more SoCal artist than Italian aristo. His maternal grandfather was actor William Berger, and his mother, actress Debra Berger, met Dado in Italy when she was only 17. (He was nearly 50.) The unlikely—and unmarried—couple went to Thailand, where Dado frequented opium dens and palled around with the king’s cousin. The following year Tao was born under the South Asian sky, as his name denotes. Raised in Rome and California by his mother, Ruspoli got to know his Italian ancestry—and his siblings by his father’s various wives—during summertime visits to the castello, where he recalls feeling right at home. “Despite the fact that my father squandered nearly all of the family fortune and had kids all over the place, it was wonderful,” he says.
Ruspoli went on to study philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and began his film career working for production designer Dean Tavoularis (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) on the set of Bulworth. After nearly a decade of making mostly short documentaries on a shoestring—topics included flamenco and his father’s drug addiction—Ruspoli cobbled together Fix’s $300,000 budget with help from former investment banker Giancarlo Canavesio. “We showed it to the William Morris Agency, and they fell in love with it,” Ruspoli says. “They took me as a client, but they were shocked that the movie was made for so little. I thought it was a huge amount.”
Today Ruspoli’s Mangusta & LAFCO Productions is developing two documentaries, and he’s reading scripts for more-mainstream movies. Fix hasn’t yet found a distributor following its 35 festival screenings, but Ruspoli imagines a day when independent directors will be able to deliver films directly to consumers, much as indie bands sell their music through MySpace and iTunes.
Asked what his father, who died in 2005 at age 80, thought of the young prince’s moviemaking ambitions, Ruspoli replies that both his parents were supportive. “Many people have trouble living up to famous parents,” he adds. “I always joke I was lucky because my father was famous for not doing anything. That’s not hard to live up to.”

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Polly & Bluesy

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Monday, February 23, 2009

English Bulldog Walking Fail

Thursday, February 12, 2009

RESCUE: a little film by Tao Ruspoli