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"THE HILTON PROJECT"
Calling Jeff Krulik:Kathy Hilton, mother of Paris and Nicky, continues her search for "14 deserving men and women" to take part in an unscripted television series for NBC. "Hilton will use her social status, celebrity connections, knowledge and experience to help transform the lives of the worthy contestants by exposing them to the glamorous lifestyle of the rich, famous and powerful."
The throngs of social-climbers who show up this Saturday, June 12, from 9AM - 5PM at New York's Tavern on the Green, headshots in hand, could potentially transform this casting call for NBC's ill-conceived reality series into the 21st-century equivalent of a Depression-era bread line.
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 6/10/2004 11:26:54 AM Comments (0)
LUST IN TRANSLATION
In the late sixties and seventies, foreign films and foreign-film distributors found themselves sharing theaters with a burgeoning porn industry. In fact many serious European art films were promoted by enterprising theater owners in lurid and lascivious ways, suggesting some heady cinematic brew was actually a steamy orgy. Of course, art theaters -- and porno -- have gone the way of DVD. But China has now revived this cinematic bait-and-switch.
Reuters recently chronicled the history of one small film, Maiden Work, which was pushed it into the realm of pornography by the Chinese company that purchased it for distribution.
# posted by Peter Bowen @ 6/9/2004 02:55:48 PM Comments (0)
As reported in the Guardian Unlimited today: "The Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has thrown Bayreuth into confusion. Not by his outrageous take on the operas of Richard Wagner, nor by spectacular fallouts with divas -- but by admitting that he is not up to the job of directing the festival's forthcoming Ring cycle.
"A statement from the festival said the sudden resignation by Von Trier, the director of Dogville and The Idiots, stemmed from his conviction that 'the Ring would clearly exceed his powers, and that therefore he would not be able to fulfill his ambitions of his own high standards and the special standards of the Bayreuth festival.' "
Another filmmaker who has thrown in the towel on a future project according to the Guardian is Kevin Smith, who "has reportedly taken himself out of the director's seat on Miramax's forthcoming comic book adaptation of The Green Hornet."
Smith's decision is apparently unrelated to speculation that Disney is ready to sell the Miramax film company back to founders and co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein after the row over Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11 -- which Moore, following a well-received preview screening of the film in Los Angeles yesterday, predicted would gross as much as three times the box office of Bowling for Columbine.
According to yesterday's New York Times, Disney chief executive Michael Eisner was considering the move after experiencing "accumulated aggravation with the Weinstein brothers."
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 6/9/2004 12:10:57 PM Comments (0)
Via the folks at the excellent music ezine Pitchforkmedia comes news of this Matador Records contest in which contestants are asked to create a film for the upcoming release of the great NYC band Interpol. Visit either site for more info, but entries are due by July 5 and winners receive $1,000 and some footage of the band to make their video.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 6/9/2004 11:17:13 AM Comments (0)
MADSTONED
When I was a teenager growing up in Washington, D.C., I was held briefly in the thrall of an amazing radio station, WGTB. I say "briefly" because the station, a fixture in the D.C. alternative/punk/progressive/radical politics communities, was shut down by its patron, the Jesuit-owned Georgetown University, over an abortion rights program only a couple of months after I had discovered it. But during that time, the programming (the closest comparison for New Yorker's is WFMU) had a big impact on me, and bands and musicians I discovered on its airwaves shaped my tastes forever.
One of the things WGTB did in its news program was a sort of "negative obituary" -- a death notice that, in contrast to the the typical obituary found in the mainstream media, served up caustic and critical commentary about the deceased. I thought of WGTB recently while suffering through all the Ronald Reagan hagiographies clogging up our cable bandwidth, and I thought of the station also when I saw the news item in IndieWIRE today that Madstone, the N.Y.-based production and exhibition company, has abruptly shut its doors, laying off 180 people and issuing only a terse press release: "The company was not able to achieve its business goals."
We have to be a bit sad when any company that purports to help young filmmakers fails. However, being "not able to achieve its business goals" is what Madstone has been doing for years, and, personally, I found their strategy of co-opting indie-film buzz in order to window-dress real-estate capital plays particularly cynical.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Madstone was a company formed in 1999 by financial guys Chip Seelig and Tom Gruenberg with ambitious plans to create digital cinemas as well as the original content to fill them. Big investment bank money was raised -- the company was said to have attracted about $30 million in investment. One of Madstone's first ventures was a widely publicized plan to "hire" three first-time-feature makers to both make movies as well as other content. The plan got a lot of play in the industry press, but few articles questioned whether hiring three inexperienced filmmakers to provide the seed content of a company with such a valuation was a smart idea in the first place. (I'll cop here to running one of these un-critical pieces myself in Filmmaker a few years back.) What most articles didn't mention was that the independent filmmakers were giving up a sizable amount of their independence in return for a yearly salary of $50,000 and health insurance. That these two rather paltry incentives made Madstone some kind of indie godsend is in itself pretty depressing.
Lisa Siwe, Joan Stein and Aaron Woodley, who the company discovered by reading Filmmaker's "25 New Faces" feature, were the maiden three filmmakers, but only Woodley managed to make his feature, Rhinocerous Eyes. However, from what I've heard, even the making of that feature was plagued by pre-production Madstone indecision and meddling. And also, from what I've heard, the company left considerable human wreckage in its wake as it used the dreams of independent producers and filmmakers to leverage itself up the capital ladder.
Given all the folks out there hustling for money -- either for their films or their production companies -- it's sad that business relationships within the capital markets steer so much money towards companies like Madstone, which are helmed by people with so little aptitude for this business. Ultimately, I can't say it better than this anonymous IndieWIRE poster, so I'll give him the last word and go back to watching Tom Clancy eulogize Ronald Reagan on Charlie Rose:
"It's always sad to see a NY film company go belly up but Madstone had a new business plan every day. It only makes it harder for new companies to raise money in the film business when there are public failures such as this one, lead by individuals with little experience except how to spend good money after bad."
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 6/8/2004 11:44:48 PM Comments (0)
RONALD REAGAN: THE MOVIE
With the passing of Ronald Reagan this weekend the airwaves are quickly becoming saturated with programs summarizing his long career as both an actor and politician -- but none are likely to examine the intersection of the two as effectively as Michael Rogin did in his groundbreaking 1987 essay "Ronald Reagan -- The Movie" (Radical History Review, No. 38), which was republished as Chapter 1 of his book Ronald Reagan, the Movie: and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, about the countersubversive tradition in America.In his essay, Rogin writes, "'Movies Are Forever,' was the theme of the 1981 Academy Awards. President Ronald Reagan, the first Hollywood actor elevated to the Presidency, was scheduled to welcome the Academy from the White House. 'Film is forever,' the President was to tell the Academy. 'It is the motion picture that tells us not only how we look and sound -- but more important[ly] -- how we feel.' Hollywood movies, Reagan was suggesting, mirror back to us the feelings we see on the screen as if they were our own. As if to confirm the President's faith in the power of film, John W. Hinckley, Jr., imitiating the plot of Taxi Driver, deliberately shot the President on the day of the Academy Awards.
"Millions of Americans experienced the assassination attempt by watching it over and over again on TV. The power of the image to confirm the shooting also allowed Reagan to speak to the Academy the next night as if it had never happened. The television audience watching their screens saw a Hollywood audience watching another screen. One audience saw the other applaud a taped image of a healthy Reagan, while the real President lay in a hospital bed. Reagan was President because of film, hospitalized because of film, and present as image because of film. The shooting climaxed the film's ingestion of reality. In doing so it culminated, in an uncanny way, Reagan's personal project: the creation of a disembodied self that, by rising above real inner conflicts, would reflect back to the President and all the rest of us not only how he looked and sounded but -- more importantly -- how he felt and who he was."
Douglas Kellner picks up on Rogin's thesis in his essay "Presidential Politics: The Movie", which he summarizes as follows: "One can depict the relationship between media and politics from the Kennedy administration to Bush II in terms of the narrative and cinematic spectacle that framed the respective presidency. From this perspective, successful presidencies presented good movies that succeeded in being effective and entertaining in selling a presidency to the public. Failed presidencies, by contrast, can be characterized as bad movies that fashioned a negative public image that bombed with the public and left behind disparaging or indifferent images and reviews of the presidency in question...
"The Reagan Administration was one of the most successful media presidencies and set of political spectacles in history. Michael Rogin has written a book Ronald Reagan, The Movie... that documents the intersection of Reagan's film and political career. Reagan, contrary to some popular misrepresentations, was a top-line A and not B-movie actor. His presidency was scripted to act out and play his presidential role. Reagan rehearsed his lines everyday and generally gave a good performance. Every move was scripted and his media handlers had camera on hand to provide the image, photo opportunity, and political line of the day that they wanted to convey to the media...
"The centrality of media spectacle and political narrative to contemporary politics means that making sense of the current era requires the tools of a critical social theory and cultural studies in order to analyze the images, discourses, events, and narratives of presidential politics. Of course, politics is more than merely narrative, there are real events with material interests and consequences, and often behind the scenes maneuvering that are not part of the public record. Yet publics see presidencies and administrations in terms of narrative and spectacle, so that theorizing the cinematic and narrative nature of contemporary politics can help us understand, critique and transform our political system."
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 6/7/2004 12:48:21 PM Comments (0)
COLOR ME CYAN
Filmmaker's blog, which we are having fun doing, hasn't either ascended or descended, according to your point of view, into the realm of the purely personal yet. I have to say, while most of my favorite blogs are either link-oriented (like the great Greencine Daily) or else a mixture of links and commentary (like my favorite political blog, the Whisky Bar), I do admire those who lay their lives out on the web, updating the world on their business and/or personal adventures.
There aren't a huge number of working filmmakers who are doing this, but there are a few. Writer/director Roger Avary is one, and I have heard that his diligent blogging has ruffled studio feathers from time to time -- like when he posted about his meeting to direct Dawn of the Dead, spawning a fanboy frenzy. And then there's potential A-lister, potential poseur Rance, whose blog seems to have inspired some kind of new media frenzy. (Is he George Clooney?! Is he Luke Wilson?!)
Re the latter, I'll admit to not quite getting it. Rance has a kind of engaging "I don't really give a fuck tone," but his overheard conversations at Hollywood hotspots or tales of meeting suburban dominatrices haven't yet excited me enough to add him to my "Favorites" bar. (I do like his "guest blog" idea, where he posts a question -- "What would you do if you ran Fox Studios?" is a current one -- and posts reader replies; maybe we'll do that soon.)
But one site I check in with from time to time is the Cyan Pictures site. When they started in New York a couple of years ago, the company announced big plans to produce and finance a number of movies. And, company head Josh Newman is a religious blogger. You have to parse out the puffery, promotion and excess optimism from his writings, but if you do, his web archives are an interesting chronicle of a newbie entering the motion picture business.
One thing Newman does which, frankly, I'd feel nervous doing if I regularly blogged my film production activities, is not only build up anticipation for upcoming releases but actually set targets and deadlines for "breaking good news." Of course, as anyone in this business knows, there's an element of pure chance to all of this. Sometimes, as they say, "good things only come to those who wait." If you work in film, I'd add a "and wait and wait and wait" to the end of that.
Anyway, if you've been reading the Cyan site you'll have followed the saga of Adam Goldberg's debut film I Love Your Work, which Cyan produced along with Chris Hanley and Muse, himself another out-there internet poster (check out the Muse mailroom, in which Hanley reprints scathing business emails he's sent and received from the likes of Vincent Gallo and Don Murphy). The film debuted at Toronto to generally mixed notices, but the site breathlessly reported distributor interest and important meetings. Then, according to the site, "technical problems" prevented the film from being screened again until almost six months later at SXSW, at which it was one of the "much anticipated" titles. Then, the site posted that a distribution deal was imminent and would be announced at Cannes. With Cannes come and gone, Newman has turned philosophical and appears to be shifting Cyan from the "picture by picture" model embraced by most newer or younger production companies to the "slate" model:
"Despite our initial feeling that everything on I Love Your Work took ages longer to move ahead than we would have liked, we've since come to realize we were actually spoiled by the relatively fast pace of progress on that film.
Making movies seems to be a process of herding cats, of aligning the many moons necessary to launch projects into production. As a result, our internal model has slowly changed, from trying to push through one film at a time, to simultaneously pushing ahead an array of projects, all of which we're excited about, all of which continue to crank ahead, and any of which might switch from planning to shooting at moments notice."
I've spent months searching for a distribution deal too -- in two cases even distributing the film myself -- so I know what Newman is going through. But, like I said, I'm just not up to putting it all up on the web yet...
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 6/6/2004 06:07:22 PM Comments (0)
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