Stir of Echoes

Stir of Echoes is a supernatural horror-thriller released in the US in 1999, starring Kevin Bacon and directed by David Koepp. The film is loosely based on the novel A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson.

Plot

Tom Witzky is a phone lineman living in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago with his pregnant wife Maggie and his son Jake, who possesses the ability to commune with the dead. At a party one evening, Tom challenges Maggie's sister Lisa, a believer in paranormal activity, to hypnotize him. After putting him under, Lisa plants a post-hypnotic suggestion in Tom urging him to "be more open-minded". Tom then begins experiencing visions of a violent scuffle involving a girl who he later learns is Samantha Kozac, a 17-year-old that disappeared from the neighborhood six months prior.

While Tom and Maggie attend a high school football game, Jake is overheard by his babysitter, Debbie Kozac, as he speaks with Samantha. Debbie gets upset and snatches Jake, running off with him in the night. Meanwhile, Tom senses Jake is in danger and rushes home but finds him gone. Tom then sees strange flashes of red light that eventually leads him to the 'L' station where Debbie is speaking with her mother about Jake. When Tom and Maggie confront her, Debbie angrily questions them about her sister Samantha, explaining that she had an intellectual disability: having the mental capacity of an 8-year-old and thus a child's tendency to trust strangers. Tom denies knowing her to Debbie but admits to Maggie that she is the girl in his visions.

Kevin Bacon

Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American actor and musician whose films include musical-drama film Footloose (1984), the controversial historical conspiracy legal thriller JFK (1991), the legal drama A Few Good Men (1992), the historical docudrama Apollo 13 (1995), and the mystery drama Mystic River (2003). Also on television, he starred in the Fox series The Following from 2013 to 2015. Bacon has won a Golden Globe Award and three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. The Guardian named him one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. In 2003, Bacon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Bacon has become an icon for the concept of interconnectedness (as in social networks), having been popularized by the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". In 2007, he created SixDegrees.org, a charitable foundation.

Early life and education

Bacon, one of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005), was a well-respected architect and a prominent Philadelphian who had been Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission for many years.

David Koepp

David Koepp (born June 9, 1963) is an American screenwriter and director. Koepp is the fifth most successful screenwriter of all time in terms of U.S. box office receipts with a total gross of over $2.3 billion.

Koepp has achieved both critical and commercial success in a wide variety of genres: thriller, science fiction, comedy, action, drama, crime, superhero, horror, adventure, and fantasy.

Some of the best known films he has written include the sci-fi adventure films Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008); the action spy films Mission: Impossible (1996) and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014); the superhero film Spider-Man (2002); the sci-fi disaster film War of the Worlds (2005) and the mystery thriller Angels & Demons (2009). Koepp has directed six films over the course of his career: The Trigger Effect (1996), Stir of Echoes (1999), Secret Window (2004), Ghost Town (2008), Premium Rush (2012), and Mortdecai (2015).

Kathryn Erbe

Kathryn Elsbeth Erbe (born July 5, 1965) is an American actress known for her role as Det. Alexandra Eames on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a spin-off of Law & Order, and death row inmate Shirley Bellinger in the HBO series Oz.

Early life

Erbe was born the oldest of three children in Newton, Massachusetts. Her mother, Elisabeth Magnarelli, was a vice-president of a Boston management firm, and her father, Dr. Richard Erbe, is an internist at the University at Buffalo subspecialized as a medical geneticist. Her youngest brother, Barrett Erbe, is an up-and-coming political mogul and Associate of Regional Development at Buffalo Niagara Partnership.

She graduated from New York University in 1989.

Career

While an undergraduate student at NYU, Erbe was cast as the daughter of Lynn Redgrave's character on the sitcom Chicken Soup. She later became a member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company and has starred in many of their productions, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Curse of the Starving Class, and The Grapes of Wrath, which ran for six months and won the 1990 Tony Award for Best Play. Erbe earned a Tony Award nomination in 1991 for her portrayal of Mary in The Speed of Darkness.

David Cope

David Cope (born May 17, 1941, San Francisco, California) is an American author, composer, scientist, and former professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His primary area of research involves artificial intelligence and music; he writes programs and algorithms that can analyse existing music and create new compositions in the style of the original input music. He teaches a summer Workshop in Algorithmic Computer Music that is open to the public (but not free) as well as a general education course entitled Artificial Intelligence and Music for enrolled UCSC students. Cope is also cofounder and CTO Emeritus of Recombinant Inc, a music technology company.

Inventions

Cope is the inventor of US Patent #7696426 Recombinant Music Composition Algorithm and Method of Using the Same.

Composition

His EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) software has produced works in the style of various composers, some of which have been commercially recorded (Cockrell 2001)—ranging from short pieces to full length operas.