Everyone is on the Nice List at PBDG!

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Anna Newman

Happy Holidays! If you donated at the $50 or more level, there is an original limited edition Pinball Donut Girl poster making its way toward you. The first batch went out this weekend, so watch for Santa in the guise of a mailman, delivering at your door.

I’m hoping to start getting letters in my mailbox too, letters from festivals saying we have been accepted. If any of you have a film festival in your area, especially one that you regularly attend and know people at, mail me and I’ll see if I can submit to them so there is a screening in your area.

In the meantime, our sound editor Josh Wolfer of Austin is working on the director’s cut so I can wrap up the DVD and get that out to you in early spring as well.

Here is more Christmas Cheer in the form of drive through donuts, courtesy of Mark Czarnowski. PBDG’s most reliable man in the field, Mark has personally tested and approved the Donuts at this shop in Harvard, IL (home of Jersey Jack’s midwest headquarters!).

Harvard Donut photos by Mark Czarnowski

PS: if you mailing address has changed since you donated, and I don’t already know you have moved, please send me your new address so your poster arrives correctly.

Visiting the Exploratorium — best Thanksgiving trip

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Anna Newman

This year I’m thankful for a chance to see the Visible Pinball machine in its new home at the Exploratorium. Visiting his awesome San Francisco science museum was the perfect end to a long Thanksgiving weekend. Kids and adults were playing pinball nonstop, so excited to see the game. Wade and the Pacific Pinball Museum created a gift to the city and beyond when they made this machine.

Exploratorium will be moving to a new home at Pier 15 in San Francisco this spring — I can’t wait to see the magic they make in an expanded space. Based on the huge interest and enjoyment I saw with the exhibit, I hope more museums buy clear pinball machines for their visitors.

Ned Kopp – Pinball Donut Girl’s Bond Guy

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Anna Newman

Great article yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle Pink Section honoring Pinball Donut Girl’s Ned Kopp:

Ned Kopp on the set of Pinball Donut Girl
– photo by Audrey Daniel

A longtime Bay Area production supervisor, Kopp was who the Bond production team, headed by Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, turned to when James Bond came to San Francisco to make “A View to a Kill,” which was partially filmed here in 1984. The film, Roger Moore‘s seventh and final appearance as Bond, was released in 1985.

The Bond team liked Kopp’s work so much that they called the next time it shot in the United States – four years later for “License to Kill,” with Timothy Dalton as Bond, in Key West, Fla.

In the early 1970s, Kopp served as an assistant cameraman on George Lucas‘ “THX 1138” and was Lucas’ assistant director on “American Graffiti.” (You can see Kopp in any Mel’s diner. In a photograph with actor Ron Howard in the foreground and Lucas hunched beneath a lunch counter, Kopp is the bearded, balding man standing above the counter.) He also worked on films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Phil Kaufman and Alan Parker, among others.

But a Bond set is something else.