Jennifer Phang's Sundance Frontier entry Half-Life received something of a critical honor recently when producer Mike Ryan, whose thoughtful and passionate reviews can be found at the new Hammer To Nail, cited the film as his favorite of the 34 he saw at this year's festival.
An excerpt:
We often see an art film that may leap around in perspective, mostly for rhetorical or comic effect, but it is truly rare to be carried emotionally through a film that tells a multi-perspective story through a seamless integration of naturalistic action, animation and self consciously artificial CGI compositing. Half-Life exists on a whole other, higher level of cinematic ambition than any other film at Sundance this year. It is formally inventive, deeply personal and emotionally compelling, all on a tiny indie budget! This is ambitious indie filmmaking at its best!
For more with Phang, check out this interview with her appearing on the KCPW Sundance podcast.
As a side note, Half-Life was one of two Park City films that received mentorship and support from the IFP Rough Cut Labs. The other was Tom Quinn's The New Year's Parade, which won the Grand Prize at Slamdance.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/31/2008 06:53:00 PM
Comments (0)
ASSAYAS RETROSPECTIVE AT YALE, ANTHOLOGY
Over the next eleven days, Anthology Film Archives, in association with Yale University, is hosting the first serious stateside retrospective of Olivier Assayas, one of the most consistently daring Gallic auteurs working today. He'll be at Yale today having tea with students and introducing the first American screening of his Boarding Gate, which played Cannes last year to mixed notices. Tomorrow he'll sit down with Kent Jones of Film Comment, one of the first American critics to recognize Assayas' work, for a long public chat before heading to Manhattan to introduce Irma Vep at Saturday night's Anthology screening.
It's poised to be a terrific month at the little downtown repository for Avant-Garde and other forms of non-pasteurized cinema. Right on the heels of the ten day Assayas retro, Anthology plays host to a Charles Burnett retrospective, featuring not only the recently rereleased Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding, but his forays into early 90s indiewood, To Sleep With Anger and The Glass Shield. Also on tap are a number of shorts spanning his entire career, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, his part doc part experimental deconstruction of the myths surrounding the slave rebellion leader, and an extremely rare revival of Billy Woodberry's 1983 feature, Bless Their Little Hearts, which Burnett shot for his UCLA classmate and friend.
# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/31/2008 09:48:00 AM
Comments (0)
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
FIENNES WINS ROTTERDAM'S CINEMART COMPETITION
On the 25th anniversary of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Cinemart, the prize for the "best project" has gone to Sophie Fiennes' The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, a follow-up to her The Pervert's Guide to Cinema which also features philosopher Slajov Zizek. The award comes with a cash prize of 10,000 euros, which one guest at the party tonight quipped would be about equal to the film's first clip license.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/30/2008 07:59:00 PM
Comments (0)
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
RAY CARNEY ON QUIET CITY
If you just bookmark this blog page and don't check the main site, head over there so as not to miss professor and critic Ray Carney's essay on Aaron Katz's Quiet City, which hits DVD stores this week.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/29/2008 09:21:00 PM
Comments (0)
ROTTERDAM: WHO'S AFRAID OF KATHY ACKER?
Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker, premiering here in Rotterdam, is Barbara Caspar's thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the '70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon. A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice. And with her appearance in several conceptual art videos in the '70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos and her piercings, Acker was also performance artist, proto riot grrl, and living link to the transgressive authors of the '50s and '60s U.S. and French experimental fiction scenes. Acker died of breast cancer in 1997 and now, just over ten years later, Caspar has made a film that captures the essence of both Acker the writer and Acker the person while arguing convincingly for the continuing relevance of her work today.
Caspar includes a lot of the conventions of the artist bio-doc -- interviews with friends and associates, archival footage, etc. -- in a film that covers in broad strokes the different eras of Acker's life. There's a lot here that I didn't know, from those conceptual art videos to her quite vanilla (and short-lived) marriage when she was 20. Perhaps one of the strengths of the doc is that I didn't think about what is left out, like some of her key relationships (her marriage to the composer Peter Gordon is not included here) and artistic endeavors (like her large-scale theatrical collaboration with Gordon, Richard Foreman, and David Salle, The Birth of a Poet) until the next day. In fact, Caspar doesn't discuss Acker's books with any great degree of specificity. She's all about capturing the broad strokes of Acker's ideas as well as conveying to the viewer the galvanizing, seductive and complicated nature of her persona. Caspar includes discussion of Acker's attraction to sexual masochism, the plagiarism charges against her, and her willful but misguided attempt to beat cancer by rejecting Western medical treatments, refusing to allow Acker to go gently into the good night of literary respectability.
In addition to the conventions of the artist bio mentioned above, Caspar creatively employs a number of other devices which are both bold, and, I think, rewarding. She includes crudely roto-scoped animated dramatizations of scenes from Acker's work, which play out in stark blacks, whites and reds underneath a voiceover reading Acker's prose. Even more interestingly, she often cuts to a series of interviews with young women, who look to be from about 16 to their early 20s, discussing what Acker's work means to them. There's something compelling about these women and the casual way they are shot and recorded. I ran into Caspar here and asked her about these scenes, and she told me the footage comes from casting tapes she recorded when looking for actors to play the girls in the animated sequences. It wasn't until post-production that she realized that the comments and passion of these young voices made the perfect argument for the continuing vitality of Acker's work. (Caspar also told me that she cut a more conventional version without this material for broadcast, but that the Rotterdam version is her "director's cut").
I knew Acker just a little bit in the late '80s, when I was the Programming Director at The Kitchen and Ira Silverberg, eloquent here in his discussion of her life and career, was the Literary Curator. She kindly agreed to play a philosophy professor in the first film I was ever involved with, Raul Ruiz's The Golden Boat, although I remember her laughing that the dialogue Ruiz had written for her represented a philosophical position that she pretty much disagreed with. Caspar's film beautifully captures the smart, funny and quite warm Acker I remembered.
There's a great moment in the film when Acker, lecturing in San Francisco in the early '90s, is asked what she thinks about cyber-sex. She admits to knowing nothing about it -- "I like relationships and I like flesh," she says. The question made me realize that she died near the beginning of the Internet Era and that so many of her issues, from polysexuality to new forms of literary creations, are now being explored actively online. It would have been fascinating had she lived to have seen where her work would have gone.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/29/2008 08:10:00 PM
Comments (0)
ARIN CRUMLEY WAS ROBBED!!!
The Four Eyed Monsters filmmaker is offering a handshake and a hug to the perpetrator if his stuff is returned.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/29/2008 05:11:00 PM
Comments (1)
THE THREE FACES OF INDIE
Over at her Thompson on Hollywood blog, Ann Thompson posts an email she received from indie producer and former distributor Jonathan Dana about "the surfeit of Sundance acquisition titles, many of which remain unsold at fest's end." He breaks the indie sphere down into three sections, from the studio specialty titles down to the out-of-nowhere surprises, and concentrates his commentary on the middle sphere, the professionally produced films with name actors that are financed by new money largely based on their presumed marketability. It's worth a read.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/29/2008 08:13:00 AM
Comments (0)
Monday, January 28, 2008
STUART'S CUT SHORT
Over at Filmmaker Videos, Jamie Stuart's latest short from the Sundance Film Festival is up. Starring George A. Romero, Ellen Kuras and Stacy Peralta among others, Stuart shows us how '08 Sundance looked through his eyes.
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/28/2008 10:50:00 AM
Comments (0)
Sunday, January 27, 2008
SUNDANCE DOCS: FIELDS OF FUEL and IOUSA
Tuesday at Sundance I saw two documentaries back to back that each deals with one of this country’s most pressing and complex political issues. Josh Tickell’s Fields of Fuel tackles America’s reliance on imported fossil fuels while Patrick Creadon in his follow-up to Wordplay, IOUSA, wrestles with the exploding United States budget deficit.
Both films employ what is now a familiar doc style of exploring political and social issue subject matter: quick editing, talking heads, a chapter-by-chapter structure, use of humorous archival material, and energetic source cue-driven montages. Of the two films, Fields of Fuel is the slicker. It segues from a first-person history of its maker, an Australian-born alternative fuel activist, through a history of the fossil fuel industry to an upbeat final section that demonstrates the feasibility of converting to alternative fuel sources, most notably, biodiesel fuel that can be manufactured from everything from vegetable oil to, one day, algae.
We’re first introduced to Tickell as he tools across the country in a biodiesel-fueled hippie van, filling up each night at a fast-food restaurant by siphoning used frying oil. After quickly interjecting a note of personal tragedy (his mother suffered nine miscarriages after she moved the family to “a cancer corridor” in Louisiana where illness rates have spiked due to oil industry pollutants), Tickell proceeds to hopscotch through a dizzying set of facts and histories. The invention of the diesel engine; the growth of the oil industry from Standard Oil to Exxon; global warming; the financial health of the US. auto industry; government tax subsidies to fuel-inefficient vehicles; hybrid cars; 9/11 and U.S. energy policy; the Iraq War; peak oil; ethanol; solar power; green start-ups — all are covered in Tickell ’s breathless montage. Like Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, Fields of Fuel tempers its alarmism with a final emphasis on the positive and the possible. I knew little about biodiesel fuel going into this movie and I left impressed with how much has already been done in both the States and around the world to implement it and other practical new forms of energy.
As a filmmaker, Tickell knows how to cleverly structure non-fiction subject matter. Early in the film he employs a clip from the TV show Dallas, discussing how the program presented to him as a child in Australia a fantasy vision of the U.S. Later we meet Dallas star Larry Hagman, who now powers his home through solar power and is a critic of the oil industry his show so glamorously depicted. Tickell is usually one-step ahead of viewers, anticipating and countering the questions we’ll inevitably pose in our minds as the film progresses, although he doesn't address recent arguments by environmental groups, including Oxfam, who argue that biodiesel fuel production contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and increases world poverty.
In terms of its moviemaking, Fields of Fuel has its occasional faults, which mostly occur when Tickell clumsily tries to illustrate the coolness of biodiesel energy. Shots of smiling kids testifying as to how great biodiesel fuel smells, a “hipper than Hasselhoff” German biodiesel activist rapper and, most egregiously, two music-video styled sequences in which Tickell attempts to co-opt patriotic post-9/11 imagery in service of his eco-cause have the creepy enthusiasm of “morning in America” campaign ads. And the soundtrack contains so many sentimental songs of uplift – obvious tracks from Moby, Sheryl Crow and the soundtrack of Heat, for example – that it sometimes feels T1’d-in in from the lobby of a W Hotel. But for the most part, Fields of Fuel is an achievement, an energetic and entertaining doc that not only informs audiences but also leaves them with a concrete vision of how to advocate saner public energy policies while implementing practical changes in their own lives.
Compared to the issues discussed in Creadon’s doc, America’s reliance on foreign oil seems like a minor problem. IOUSA deals with not just the U.S. budget deficit but also related topics ranging from America’s trade deficit and savings shortfalls to our shrinking dollar and loss of global economic leverage. Like Tickell, Creadon zippily cuts from a range of interview subjects, including taxpayers, government officials and, also, annoyingly, clueless kids who are asked to guess how big the budget deficit is (answer: $8.6 trillion). The film’s human through line comes in the form of U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, who lectures across the country about the catastrophe awaiting future generations of Americans if the U.S. doesn’t begin to balance its budgets and reduce its deficit. The film also focuses on the activities of the Concord Coalition, an advocacy group comprised of members of both the centrist Brookings Institution and the right-wing Heritage Foundation – political opponents brought together by the looming disaster.
IOUSA is most successful when it finds ways to entertainingly and concisely convey decades of economic history through animated charts, archival photos, and, even, a Saturday Night Live skit. In one sequence a penny is rolled up and down a rollercoaster of a bar graph, illustrating how the budget deficit expanded and sometimes contracted across wars and social program expansions. But while Creadon references some of the customary explanations for the budget deficit, he mostly analogizes the U.S. to the proverbial maxed out consumer who can’t stop spending until his credit card implodes.
IOUSA’s press notes state, “This film is not an endorsement of any political party or political candidate,” and indeed, Creadon’s film initially appears non-political and intended to simply raise awareness about the deficit issue. But here’s the thing — framing a discussion of the health of the U.S. economy by focusing solely on the budget deficit is inherently an idelogical act. “Deficit hawks” can be found all across the political spectrum, but they are most often found on the right and among those seeking to cut social spending and entitlement programs. (Indeed, the recently passed Medicare prescription drug benefit is given a few whacks in IOUSA.) The film is “inspired by” Empire of Debt, Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggins's book that discusses the U.S. debt crisis from a right/libertarian viewpoint and places it within a larger critique of America as an “empire” that has overextended itself in both domestic and foreign policy. Creadon has left out most of the book’s “America as empire” argument, but he has uncritically embraced their argument regarding the deficit. You’d never know from IOUSA that not every economist is as worried about the deficit as Walker is. In fact, the word “Keynes” – as is John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose work discussed the economic benefits of deficit spending, is never uttered in this doc. Also not included are any of the many contemporary academic economists who might argue against the film’s theories. There’s no real discussion of the large deficits of other Western nations as a percentage of their GDPs, and while the trade imbalance with China is talked about, more nuanced globalist arguments that look at the interdependency between U.S. borrowing, the American consumer, and the development of the Chinese as a trading partner are not. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is interviewed, and the film salutes the Clinton administration for managing revenues and spending in order to balance the budget… without mentioning the technology-fueled economic boom that led to the increased taxed revenues that allowed the budget to be balanced during this time. And because the film avoids ideology, that also means that it avoids politically charged but necessary discussions of just how our deficit got to where it is today. You won't hear in this doc anything about “starving the beast,” the phrase describing right-wing efforts during the Reagan era to deliberately create a deficit crisis in order to force cuts in social spending.
But the film’s refusal to present more than one side of the deficit issue is not its most problematic element. I don’t have to agree with every aspect of Creadon's deficit doom mongering to accept that, in the absence of a crystal ball, his is a valid argument. IOUSA’s main problem concerns its final message to its viewers. Let me back up. I suspect that if you ask the average man on the street if the U.S. should have a balanced budget, that person would say yes. Ask if that person’s Social Security payments should be reduced, or if his taxes should be raised, or if a favorite government program be axed and you’d get a different response. IOUSA throws around terms like “leadership” when discussing how we get out of the deficit mess, but it doesn’t include a discussion of the types of initiatives a real leader on this issue would be forced to propose. It concludes by simply imploring readers to “write their elected officials” and demand that the deficit issue be addressed. Unlike Tickell’s film, which ends with a detailed breakdown of how we can wean ourselves from foreign oil, IOUSA punts when it comes to the public policy specifics needed to resolve the problem as the film formulates it. (Indeed, in a recession, which we are probably in right now, cutting the deficit by the obvious methods — decreasing spending or raising taxes — is probably disastrous economic policy.) The only clue as to just what kind of deficit strategy is recommended by Creadon, Walker, Bonner et al comes, coyly, in the form of an end-title song:
Nick Lowe’s "Cruel to be Kind."
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/27/2008 05:08:00 PM
Comments (0)
MUSTACHES & PISTACHIOS
Any festival you go to there's going to be one film that most people don't get and just spend their time discussing why they didn't like it and question why it was ever made. Chusy (Anthony Haney-Jardine)'s Anywhere, USA has become that film at Sundance '08... but I'm in the minority. I thought it was one of the most fun viewing experiences I had there. Now, I won't say that I got what Chusy's three-part so-called autobiography was about because I don't know if there's anything to get. All I know is he has a bizarre imagination, gets great performances from amateur or non-actors and the man loves mustaches.
Guided by a smooth talking narrator, we enter Chusy's America with stunning shots of empty rooms that will shortly be inhabited with strange characters. Chapter one is PENANCE, here we come to a trailer park where at 2:00 in the afternoon Gene (Mike Ellis) walks into his trailer for his weekly beating by his wife, Tammy (Mary Griffin). It's simple really, Gene overreacted and now Tammy gets to beat him with a tennis racket every Tuesday. What did he do? Well, he and his redneck R/C racing midget friend Ricky (Brian Fox) overreacted when they found a pistachio nut in between the couch cushions and came to the conclusion that Tammy was having an affair with an Arab man. Seeing the pistachio is the nut of the Middle East. What follows can only be described as plain weird. LOSS is the title of the second chapter. In it, Chusy's daughter Perla Haney-Jardine (the only professional actor in the film) plays a seven year old girl who realizes there's no tooth fairy and goes through a painful incident to realize there really isn't one. Then there's the third and final chapter: IGNORANCE. And it's just that. At times bordering on inappropriate, without giving it away all I can say is a man (Ralph Brierley) who has reached to the heights of the financially elite, thanks in part to his well crafted beard, becomes bored one day and while chewing on a steak comes to a realization.
Many of the characters are interconnected in the stories and some of the gags find their way into the others bringing a Pulp Fiction-like quality to the film. The biggest knock on the movie though is its running time (123 min.). The viewer with extreme patients (like yours truly) is the one who will make it through, though the PENANCE story has constant laughs, the film kind of hits a roadblock at LOSS and takes a while to start up again.
But the performances, cinematography, trippy score and just the flat out strange stories are worth taking the ride. I wouldn't be surprised if the film gains a cult following on the regional fest circuit.
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/27/2008 12:51:00 AM
Comments (0)
Saturday, January 26, 2008
SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES WINNERS
Below is the complete list of Sundance 2008 Winners:
Grand Jury Prize: Documentary Trouble The Water -- directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Frozen River -- directed by Courtney Hunt
World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary Man on Wire -- directed by James Marsh
World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic King of Ping Pong (Ping Pongkingen) -- directed by Jens Jonsson
Audience Award: Documentary Fields of Fuel -- directed by Josh Tickell
Audience Award: Dramatic The Wackness -- directed by Jonathan Levine
World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary Man on Wire -- directed by James Marsh
World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic Captain Abu Raed -- directed by Amin Matalqa
Directing Award: Documentary Nanette Burstein for American Teen
Directing Award: Dramatic Lance Hammer for Ballast
World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary Nino Kirtadze for Durakovo: Village of Fools (Durakovo: Le Village Des Fous)
World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic Anna Melikyan for Mermaid (Rusalka)
World Cinema Screenwriting Award Samuel Benchetrit for I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster (J'ai Toujours Reve D'Etre Un Gangster)
World Cinema Documentary Editing Award Irena Dol for The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins
Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring for Patti Smith: Dream of Life
Excellence in Cinematography Award: Dramatic Lol Crawley for Ballast
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary al Massad for Recycle
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic Askild Vik Edvardsen for King of King Pong (Ping Pongkingen)
Documentary Editing Award Joe Bini for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award Alex Rivera and David Riker for Sleep Dealer
Special Jury Prizes
World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic Blue Eyelids (Parpados Azules) -- directed by Ernesto Contreas
Special Jury Prize: Documentary Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo -- directed by Lisa F. Jackson
Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, The Spirit of Independence Anywhere, U.S.A. -- directed by Chusy Haney-Jardine
Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, Work by an Ensemble Cast Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald and Brad Henke for Choke
Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking My Olympic Summer -- directed by Daniel Robin Sikumi (On the Ice) -- directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean
Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking Soft -- directed by Simon Ellis
Shorts Jury Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking Aquarium -- directed by Rob Meyer August 15th -- directed by Xuan Jiang La Corona (The Crown) -- directed by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega Oiran Lyrics -- directed by Ryosuke Ogawa Spider -- directed by Nash Edgerton Suspension -- directed by Nicolas Provost W. -- directed by The Vikings
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/26/2008 11:39:00 PM
Comments (0)
SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES SLOAN AND NHK AWARD WINNERS
In addition to the competition, juried and audience prizes conferred during the festival, several Sundance co-sponsored special-category prizes are also awarded.
During a Jan. 26 invitation-only reception at the Sundance House in Park City, the $20,000 Alfred P. Sloan Prize was awarded to writer-director Alex Rivera for his debut feature, Sleep Dealer. The film is described in festival programming notes as a “fascinating and prescient work of science fiction.”
The prize, provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes a feature film depicting science or technology as a thematic focus, or a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. Previous recipients have included Mark Decena’s Dopamine, Primer by Shane Carruth and Chen Shi-zheng’s Dark Matter.
A committee of five film and science professionals selected Sleep Dealer for “its visionary and humane tale of a young man grappling with a technological future in which neural implants, telerobotics and ubiquitous computing serve a global economy rife with fundamental challenges and opportunities, and for its powerful and original storytelling and direction.”
Rivera had previously workshopped the film at the 2000 and 2001 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program Labs, and is a prior recipient of the Sundance/NHK award and an Annenberg Feature Film Fellowship. Acknowledging the ongoing support of Institute programs, Rivera noted that “Sundance has been at the side of this project for seven years.” Sleep Dealer debuted in the Dramatic Competition at this year’s festival.
The day before, the Sundance Institute and NHK, Japan’s largest broadcaster, presented the winners of the 2008 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards, selected from a group of 12 finalists.
The four winners were Alejandro Fernandez Almendras (Chile) for Huacho, Braden King (USA) with Here, Radu Jude (Romania) -- The Happiest Girl in the World -- and Aiko Nagatsu (Japan) for Apoptosis. Nagatsu noted that “there are not any awards like this in Japan, so I’m inspired very much.”
The annual award was created in 1996 to honor visionary directors from four global regions (Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan) and support the development and production of their winning narrative feature scripts.
Each director receives a $10,000 cash award and a guarantee from NHK to purchase the Japanese television broadcast rights for their projects, as well as ongoing staff support from the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program with seeking financing and distribution of their films.
The curtain came down on the 14th Slamdance Film Festival last night with a ceremony to announce winners in fifteen categories. Tom Quinn's standout The New Year's Parade, a clear favorite among a pedestrian narrative field, walked away with the grand jury prize, while Greg Kohs' Song Sung Blue won both the jury and audience awards for documentary. A full list of winners follows:
Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature
Prize: $15,000 Credit at Filmworksfx
LP3 Pictures Grip, Electric, and Studio Package ($15,000 value)
$3,500 Credit on legal services from Pierce Law Group, LLP
Winner: "The New Year Parade" directed by Tom Quinn
Special Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Feature
"How To Be" directed by Oliver Irving
Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature
Prize: Panasonic HVX200 Camera
$10,000 Credit Filmworksfx
$3,500 Credit on legal services from Pierce Law Group, LLP
$500 Credit from Discmakers
Winner: "Song Sung Blue" directed by Greg Kohs
Special Jury Honorable Mention for Documentary Feature
Winner: "My Mother¹s Garden" directed by Cynthia Lester
Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short
Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX
Winner: "Blood Will Tell" directed by Andrew McPhillips
Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short
Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX
Winner: "The Ladies" directed by C.A. Voros
Grand Jury Award for Best Experimental Short
Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX
Winner: "Doxology" directed by Michael Langan
Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Short
Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX
Winner: “Son” directed by Daniel Mulloy
Special Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Short
Winner: “4960” directed by Wing-Yee Wu
Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature
Prize: $4,000 Credit from Filmworksfx
Winner: "The Project" directed by Ryan Piotrowicz
Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature
Prize: $4,000 Credit from Filmworksfx
Winner: "Song Sung Blue" directed by Greg Kohs
Global Audience Award for Best Anarchy Film
Prize: $2,500 Credit from Filmworksfx
Winner: "Rock Garden" directed by Gloria Kim
Spirit of Slamdance Award*
Prize: Jagermeister Gift Basket
Winner: "Woman in Burka" directed by Jonathan Lisecki
*Awarded by the 2008 filmmakers, for exhibiting passion and talent as a filmmaker, commitment to the independent community, and enthusiastically embracing all Slamdance has to offer.
Award for Best Feature Length Screenplay
Prize: $7,000 cash
Winner: "The Wonder Girls" by Anthony Meindl
Award for Best Short Screenplay
Prize: $500.00 cash
Winner: "Easy Pickins'" by Will Hartman
Award for Best Teleplay
Prize: $5,000 cash
Winner: "Stage Six Pandemic" by Barbara Marshall
Award for Best Horror Competition Screenplay
Prize: $10,000 cash prize and a production deal with Angel Baby Entertainment & Maverick Films
Winner: "The Punished" by Tony Mosher
Creative Excellence Award for the Horror Screenplay Competition
Prize: $1,000 cash
Winner: "Child in the Dark" by Damian Lahey & Ian Ogden
Kodak Vision Award for Best Cinematography
Prize: $10,000 worth of Kodak film (16mm or 35mm)
This is the 11th year Kodak is sponsoring the Kodak Vision Award at Slamdance
Winner: "Portage" cinematography by Sascha Drews & Ezra Krybus
Though documentaries are always what I'm most excited about when I go to festivals, none at Sundance really jumped out at me this year... except one.
Brit filmmaker Chris Waitt came to Park City with a delicious doc that's so funny and superbly structured it's hard to believe that it's non-fiction, but he insists that it's all real.
In A Complete History of My Sexual Failures Waitt has recently been dumped, and having never been good with women he takes the moment of emptiness to examine why his life has been full of failed relationships by deciding to look up his old flames and ask them what went wrong.
Armed with a boom mic, huge headphones and a tattered wardrobe, Waitt sits down with his exes (many of them very reluctant to do the interviews) to get the brutal truth about what was wrong with him. Some hated his tardiness to everything, some hated his self-absorption, one was so turned off by him that she stopped dated white people completely and one hated him so much that she would not be filmed for the interview and would only reply to his questions via a computer that would generate automated responses.
But the film isn't just watching Waitt (who also has a puppet show in the works at MTV) crash and burn, during his journey of inadequacy he decides to use the Internet to score some dates. On one where he gets the girl back to his flat a new problem is revealed as Waitt can't close the deal. This begins a sub plot that brings Waitt to a hypnotist, abusing Viagra and a trip to a sado-masochist in a scene that's filled with so much full-frontal hilarity it's hard to imagine how the scene will work once the ratings board gets its hands on it.
With a mix of Borat and Michael Moore, A History of My Sexual Failures can certainly find an audience.
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/25/2008 07:30:00 PM
Comments (0)
DUTCH TREATS
I've still got most of my Sundance commentary to get up and I'm on my way to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where I'll try to file some short reports on the fest and the concurrent Cinemart, which is a great financing conference that plans, this year, to begin a dialogue about how it can be reshaped for the future. (Full disclosure: I'm on the CineMart's Advisory Board.)
From the festival's Tiger Daily:
Eschewing conference and panel formats and instead deploying the tried and tested device of brainstorming towards a consensus, IFFR management and industry experts will sit down this weekend to thrash out how future CineMarts will be shaped. Or to quote the event’s remit: ‘how can CineMart position itself in a world in which the way cinema is produced, distributed and watched changes all the time, and in which digital opportunities offer filmmakers new ways of getting their films made and seen?’
‘This discussion of our future marks the beginning of the new-style CineMart’ comments CineMart head Marit van den Elshout. ‘But our future shape will not be determined in one festival, or one year. I think that it’s important to keep the discussion open. We always try to look at our own festival in a critical way, and that’s why I hope that this discussion will throw up some interesting stuff for us.’
Van den Elshout confirmed that CineMart is looking to install a ‘New Style’ section that will dovetail with the existing project-based format; one that will embrace and encourage, ‘daring new business models, using innovative platforms of distribution and marketing to reach audiences. There is no blueprint for filmmakers to say what the rules are if they want to self-distribute their film,’ she stresses. ‘Or to attract an audience through the internet and then get some revenues back. So I had the idea of incorporating this small digital section within CineMart.’
Sunday afternoon’s debate kicks off with a presentation of three innovative projects by Dutch and international digital filmmakers. These are Mini Movies by Femke Wolting and Bruno Felix (Submarine, the Netherlands), Jeremy Nathan’s Clam (DV8, South Africa) and Illuminated by Josh Store (Illuminated Productions, USA). The afternoon think tank sessions will assess the future focus of the IFFR and CineMart – the basic steps a filmmaker can/should follow in deploying net-based methods to ply their trade, and how national and European funding bodies can accommodate filmmakers within these new business models.
‘It’s not as if we want to re-shape CineMart completely, to throw away the old and start something new,’ Van den Elshout stresses. ‘The core of CineMart is still going to be the projects. Even though they are traditionally-financed, narrative, art-house cinema projects, we still have 800 people coming for them. But I think it’s important to bend things a bit. The good thing about being around for so long is that you can fine tune yourself every year, and that’s why I think CineMart is working so well.’
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/25/2008 06:16:00 PM
Comments (0)
CONSIDERING ALL THINGS JAMIE STUART
While Jamie Stuart has been here at Sundance shooting the goings on, NPR has been shooting him for a short video segment that's now up on their website. We have no idea what Jamie will turn in this year, although we do know that it won't be all shot in the Albertson's parking lot.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/25/2008 02:20:00 PM
Comments (0)
Thursday, January 24, 2008
FOR LOVE OF THE GAME
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden return to Sundance with another intimate portrait, this time looking at baseball, particularly a Dominican player and how the game not only can change his life but his family's as well if he plays to his potential.
Outside of documentaries, independent filmmakers rarely focus on sports, but you can tell Fleck and Boden are baseball fans, and being a baseball addict myself (three weeks till spring training!) it's fun to see a sports film that isn't sensationalized for widespread appeal. Their film Sugar shows the harsh reality of trying to get into professional sports and is the most realistic narrative film about baseball that I can ever remember seeing.
The film begins in the Dominican Republic at the Kansas City Knights' facility (Films love to use Knights as a team name. The team Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs played for in The Natural was named the New York Knights.) where on the mound young right-hander Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) throws fire as he mows down batter after batter. Nicknamed Sugar for his love of the sweets and the ladies, he finds himself the envy of his small village and on the cusp of going to the States to show his talents to the big club. After a scout shows him how to throw a knuckle curve -- a devastating off-speed pitch that adds to his fastball -- he's called up to spring training with the professional squad in Phoenix.
Though players of Dominican decent are the vast majority in today's game, we see it's still a huge adjustment for them to play for a big league team (though in the Dominican Sugar and the other players take English language classes to learn much-needed phrases like "I've got it," "line drive," "fly ball" and "home run") and dealing with temptations they've never encountered before -- like the hotel minibar.
Sugar wins over the Knights coaches and is put on the club's Single A minor league team in Iowa. There in the farmland horizon where you're lucky to find a Spanish station let alone someone speaking it, Sugar shows if he has what it takes to make it in the pros and give his family back home much-needed financial stability.
Boden and Fleck continue the style they used in Half Nelson and Gowanus -- handheld, intimate camerawork and a limited score -- to capture Sugar's journey which is part fish-out-of-water, part rags-to-riches, but always intriguing and at times heart wrenching to watch, whether you're a baseball fan or not.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/24/2008 12:05:00 AM
Comments (0)
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
FROZEN RIVER TO SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
Sharon Swart and Mike Jones in Variety are reporting that Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, a character-based thriller starring Melissa Leo which was the first film I saw at Sundance and one of the best, has sold to Sony PIctures Classics for a low-to-mid six-figure sum. I'll try to get some further thoughts about this film up on the blog before the end of the festival.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/23/2008 11:41:00 PM
Comments (0)
SLAMDANCE DIRECTORS INTERVIEW: JOHN EALER, LAURA BIALIS VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: STORIES FROM KOSOVO
Mon, Jan 21st 7pm Thurs, Jan 24th 12:30pm
View from the Bridge - the first documentary feature about post-war Kosovo. Sometimes hopeful, sometimes tragic, the struggle to make peace in Kosovo opens a profound window into the human cost of the politics of hate, and reminds us that the ultimate responsibility for peace lies within us all.
Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?
Laura was a kilometer from the Gaza strip, shooting her new documentary about Israeli musicians who continue to make music (even rehearsing in bomb shelters) while under daily attack from homemade rockets fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza. John was in the decidedly more comfortable position of shooting tabletop food shots in Bermuda.
Getting into Slamdance was exactly what we needed, and we were thrilled to get in. Though Sundance is great, it's kind of like a really expensive dinner by a famous chef; Slamdance is more like the best comfort food ever from a roadside diner. For a film like ours, which was basically made on our own dime with an amazingly devoted team of filmmakers, getting recognition from a festival like Slamdance somehow seemed perfectly right. We're very grateful for the chance to screen here.
When did the two of you begin collaborating on the project?
Laura started working on the project after she met a UN aid worker named Diane Brown who told her about the situation in Kosovo. Production was originally slated for spring of 2002 (without co-director John Ealer), but just before the crew left there was a wave of ethnic riots in Kosovo, and they could no longer gain entrance to the country. With the project on hold, Laura embarked on another huge project, a retrospective film about the Soviet Jewry movement called "Refusenik" (which premiered in December 2007 at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival.) When John, who worked as a cinematographer on Refusenik, heard about the idled Kosovo project, he was intrigued. In 2003, he re-wrote the treatment for the project, focusing on the bridge in Mitrovica and hence the title, VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE;" new treatment in hand he and Laura were able to secure a small seed grant from the Pacific Pioneer Fund.
A year later, in August 2005, with enough grant money in place to only pay for the plane tickets, Laura, John and cinematographer Sarah Levy left for Kosovo to shoot what they thought would be a fund-raising trailer for the doc. But having a protracted pre-production period and very limited funds (read: maxed out credit cards) turned out to be a blessing in disguise. All the research coupled with the remarkable abilities of Albanian producer Behar Zogiani and Serbian producer Jovica Miljkovic blossomed into 15 of the most arduous, yet amazing shooting days of our lives. When we got on the plane to head back to the states, we knew we had enough material for a feature.
Why has tribalism amongst the ethnic groups of the former Yugoslavia persisted with such force?
That's obviously a really tough question, with no easy answer. But when politicians keep drawing distinctions instead of looking for common ground, when people are focused on the past instead of looking to the future, and when the voices of the people in the center are drowned out by the screamers of extremism, you have the start of a recipe for this kind of cyclical violence. One of the things that we touch on the film is that history has been used as a weapon to divide people in Kosovo for hundreds of years. If Serbs and Albanians chose to look for their common heritage and build their common future and forget what happened 600 years ago, that would be a start in breaking the cycle.
I think you also have to look at the history of the region, it's an area that's been conquered and re-conquered over and over. Spending so many centuries under the Ottoman Turks, I think the "tribal instinct" may have developed as a way to preserve the primacy of the local culture in the face of such a strong outside presence.
Have you shown the film in Kosovo?
Yes. We took an early cut of the film to Kosovo in January of 2007. We felt a responsibility to the people who had shared so much of their lives with us to let them see and comment on the film before we finished it. Over and over as we were filming, people commented that news crews came time and time again only to "film and go home." We wanted to film and come back, to share our film with the people and get their feedback.
Originally, we fantasized about having a big multi-ethnic screening in Mitrovica near the bridge, but the security problems were too much to overcome. In the end, we had two screenings, one in Pristina for an all-Albanian audience, and one in North Mitrovica for Serbs.
The two screenings were very, very different. Since Kosovar Albanians are very pro-American -- and because our Albanian producer, Behar Zogiani did an amazing job reaching out to the community there, there was a ton of interest in the movie in the south. We were getting interviewed on the radio, on TV, there were articles in the newspaper leading up to this big screening.
The venue was the old national theater, a big old communist era building with seats for about 350 people, but no real movie screen, nor any real digital video projection system. We had to find someone who had stitched together what looked like a dozen bedsheets to create a screen, and Behar found a local businesswoman who had bought a really bright projector for doing outdoor advertisements, but who couldn't use it because her screen was in tatters.
The night of the screening came, and I swear, it felt like almost everyone in Pristina came. There were news crews from Germany, from Reuters, from the UN. There were dozens of US solders from Camp Bondsteel who had driven for hours to get there. There were prominent politicians, lots of important folks from the UN and the OSCE. People were standing in the aisles - the place was packed to the gills.
To add to the drama, I have to give you a little bit of technical context. Because the Albanian dialect spoken in Kosovo, known as Gheg, is very difficult to translate for anyone not born in Kosovo, we couldn't really finalize the subtitles until we got to Kosovo for the screening. This, you can surely imagine, led to a very interesting post-production flow. Basically, I brought a hard drive with a quicktime of the entire movie on it, and basically edited the subtitles with Behar in the days before the screening. Even if it was technically possible, there was no time to output the film to tape. So here we were with a packed audience of 500 people and I was playing the film out of my laptop! (Gotta give kudos to Apple computer here...) Literally tears of joy came to my eyes when I pressed play and everything went off without a hitch.
We weren't really sure what to expect from the audience as they watched the film; they seemed to get it, reacting as we hoped. I remember as the credits rolled what an amazingly emotional moment I felt it was, like we had shared something amazing with this entire community. We stepped up to the stage for a question and answer session, and one of our favorite characters in the movie stood up and asked a question.
Of course, it was in Albanian, so we couldn't understand it, but Laura and I, basking in that post-screening euphoria, thought he was saying how much he liked the film.
Then came the translation: "You spent hours filming me and there's only a few minutes in the film. Why didn't you put in the part about the Serbs stabbing the pregnant woman in the stomach? Why didn't you put in the part about them killing my dog and cat? Were you just trying to be fair to the Serbs?"
We were of course, a little speechless. I think I answered something like "Well, we did put in the part about how you buried the bodies of your friends and family killed by Serbs, bodies without arms, legs and brains, with their name on a slip of paper in a plastic bottle so they could be ID'ed later."
It just got worse from there, really, as we stood up on stage and were verbally attacked by many people - people who we later found out were well known for having extreme viewpoints. They accused us of trying to be "too" balanced and in doing so, unfairly representing the situation.
At one point, a young man stood up and chastised the audience that they hadn't even watched the film, that they weren't even trying to get it, so wrapped up everyone was in their own political viewpoint.
Anyway, we had a videographer filming the event. I got the tape from him and promptly labelled it "The Kosovo Bloodbath." To this day I'm too scared to watch it. We think our Albanian producer, Behar, who's simply one of the most remarkable human beings on the planet, actually got death threats after the screening, though he's never admitted it to us directly.
The next day was the screening for Serbs in Mitrovica. This event was a lot lower key, as the UN had warned us not to publicize it at all, otherwise they couldn't guarantee our safety.
Only problem was, we had spent so much time working to get the Albanian subtitles right for the first screening that we hadn't had time to get the Serbian subtitles ready. We had already had the entire dialogue list of the film translated into Serbian, so it was just a matter of cutting and pasting all the titles into Final Cut Pro on my laptop.
Long story short, Laura and I spent the day furiously typing titles into the computer, only to see the time approaching when we would have to leave the hotel for the drive to Mitrovica.
We were already running late when we finishing inputting. Problem was, we still needed to render out the movie, which would take about an hour. Well, the drive to Mitrovica takes about an hour...
And so we found ourselves in Behar's old Opel, itself a veteran of the war. Laura behind the wheel, me with my laptop - and hard drive - plugged into the cigarette lighter, rendering away. But the cigarette lighter was broken, and the plug wouldn't stay in unless I held it there.
So there we were, driving at night across nightmarishly bumpy, dark Kosovo roads, Laura at the wheel of the old stick-shift Opel and me bent over trying to make sure the cigarette adaptor didn't pull loose. I turned to Laura: "Whatever you do, don't let the car stall." She just sneered.
The titles finished rendering just as we were parking the car in Mitrovica. We had to park on the south (Albanian) side of the bridge, of course, since the car had Kosovo plates and would likely get stoned if we drove it into the north. So we packed up the computer and hard drive and walked across the bridge to the screening.
The reception from the Serbs was pretty chilly overall, but we didn't get a chance to get a lot of feedback from the Serbs in the audience as we were advised that it probably in our best interests NOT to have a Q & A in North Mitrovica.
The post-mortem of all this craziness is this: The European Planning Team for Kosovo, the group taking over responsibility for the province from the UN this year, has adopted the film as part of its training protocol for all its member states, telling us that they thought it was the most compassionate and balanced portrayal of the situation there. They actually bought 27 copies of the movie - one for every member state. We also screened at the Camp Bondsteel, the big US military base in Kosovo, where we got an amazing reception.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?
One of best decisions we made was bringing on Bill Haugse (Hoop Dreams) to edit the film. He has such a gift for the lyrical and poetic, he nailed the tone we were going for right off the bat. That part was easy...
As the title suggests, the film is really a collection of stories, so the biggest challenge was really how to organize and arrange them to make a cohesive and compelling film. It was quite a struggle, to try to make an honest portrayal of the place without biasing the audience one way or the other. Flash cards flying all over the place, the movie taken apart and reassembled over and over again trying to find the alchemy that would make it all stick together.
The other huge problem was figuring how much historical context to put in the film. We definitely needed something in the film to orient the viewer, but we also were determined to make a film that wasn't a history lesson, but an emotional and psychological representation of present-day Kosovo.
Any other projects in the pipeline?
Laura's rolling out Refusenik simultaneously with View from the Bridge, while at the same time starting work on her new film about "music rom the bomb shelter" that I mentioned above.
Meanwhile, Towards Darkness, an independent film I DP'd starring America Ferrera, is being released theatrically this spring, and I continue to shoot features, commercials, and docs.
SLAMDANCE DIRECTORS INTERVIEW: CANDELA FIGUEIRA, MAITENA MURUZABAL, UNDER THE SNOW
Fri, Jan 18th 12:30pm Mon, an 21st 9:30pm
Following the unusual connection made between four workers at different stages of their lives, Under the Snow captures factory life in a way rarely seen: personal, flirtatious, introspective.
Tell us about the premise of Under The Snow? What informs it and when did you conceive of it?
Most of the times it is up to us to change our reality. Hard situations can become, lots of times, better with small changes. Under the Snow proposes game, as a way of changing things. The idea came up while Maitena was working at a snow chains factory. I, started working at that factory just to earn some money and have afternoons free to dedicate to my film projects. I didn´t expect anything but the money at the end of the month. It wasn´t a pretty or very creative job, waking up at 5 am and doing the same thing for 8 hours in a cold and ugly factory. However, I found that I could live life in there, that those eight hours weren´t useless, but eight hours to live, to make friends and to have fun during that "ugly" job. Just little changes in the way of working could become that grey factory into a colourful one.
What we're the biggest challenges in creating the look and texture of the images?
Honestly, the main challenge was having almost no crew and no lights. Besides, "Under the snow" takes place in the winter and we had to shoot it in the summer. We didn´t want that the lack of money forced us to have a determined style, we didn´t want to refuse to have a camera car, or dolly, we didn´t want to use hand held because is cheaper, so we made a creative effort and we designed and made a dolly, a camera car and we used natural light as much as we could. So we could have the style we wanted and not the style of no having money determined.
Tell us alittle bit about your background, both as people and filmmakers?
Candela is from Argentina, while Maitena is from Spain. We met at UCLA Extension in Los Angeles, studying film. We became friends and also we worked together in some short films, where we realized that we were a very good working team. In 2004 we created a production company in Pamplona, Spain, to start creating and producing our own projects.
Is the film playing Slamdance largely the film you initially imagined, or did you find it in the editing process?
Definitely, is the film we initially imagined. Since we were writing we knew exactly what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it. Every scene and every shot had its purpose, we found new lights in the editing process, but the film we imagined remained the same.
Can we expect more of the same, or do you plan to work in other genres and forms?
There will be some elements from "Under the snow" in our next movies because of our own style of telling and making films, but we will use the genre and form that is better for the story we want to tell.
What projects are down the pipeline?
Actually, our next project, which we are rewriting now, has nothing to do with "Under the snow" relating to genre and form. It is a romantic comedy we are planning to shoot in october/november 2009 in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Pamplona (Spain).
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: ADAM BUDD, THE WHOLE DAY THROUGH
Sun, Jan 20th 11am Wed, Jan 23rd 2:30pm
A young couple go to a deserted lake for some time alone and during a walk in the lakeside hills a past indiscretion is confessed.
Tell us about the premise of The Whole Day Through? What informs it and when did you conceive of it?
What I think is the base of the film is my relationship to the place I am from, Saskatchewan. In that sense it’s a regional film and I am proud of that fact and I think it’s a strength maybe even radical. I watch a lot of world cinema too and have heavy influences from some of my first loves like Bergman and Antonioni, but recently I have been drawn towards the Taiwanese New Wave, particularly the films of Hou Hsiao Hsien and Tsai Ming Liang. In this way, I have two forces pulling me in different directions, one desire to make films for my hometown and another to make films for the Cannes’ and Toronto’s. The film is almost the literal translation of those feelings, the desire to be free and unencumbered while simultaneously craving the familiarity and stablity of home.
What we're the biggest challenges in creating the look and filmic texture? Why 35mm?
When you work with black and white film you have a range from deep blacks through shades of greys to brillant whites. The ideal is to have that range in every shot. Lea Nakonechny, the cinematographer, did a fantastic job getting that range using mostly available light and creating the moonlite night scenes. The other great attritbute of B+W is that patterns and textures come to the fore and when you’re making a film of static shots you can’t rely on camera movement for visual flair so you start bringing in different textures for visual excitement.
The choice to shoot on 35mm was because I have great respect for the medium and for the filmmakers who used it before us. When you go to the cinema and see your 35mm film print projected on the big screen you feel a part of a great tradition. We (Arid Sea Films) went out and bought an old ’68 Arri 2C 35mm MOS camera, the same Stanley Kubrick used back in his heyday, and used it to shoot the film. The camera is a tank. It’s a simple mechanical device so it’s completely fixable and usable forever.
What are the biggest challenges that you face as a short filmmaker in a world that prioritizes and commercializes feature filmmaking in ways that shorts aren't?
The biggest challenge is always the expectation that your film is a stepping stone. I’ve had comments made to me that I shouldn’t be wasting my time with shorts ’make features that’s where the money’s at!’ I am a part of the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative and they make a couple dozen shorts a year and the films are so important to the community and the filmmakers that it makes the above comment seem ugly and repressive. Short film may not be important in the mainstream, but on the local level it’s vital to a communities sense of identity.
Tell us alittle bit about your background.
I am from Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada and have lived in the province for my entire life, save the last eight months in Montréal. I was educated at the community college in Swift Current and then moved onto Regina, the capital, where I studied film production. By age ten I had snared and killed several gophers, by age thirteen I was driving double-axle grain trucks for harvest, and by sixteen I owned a bar in a small town named Elrose. I also played hockey, was on the school wrestling team and played baseball in the summer. Now I make film, art video and performance art.
Can we expect more of the same, or do you plan to work in other genres and forms?
The next work will be taking the concept of the static image to the next logical step - cinematic stills.
What projects are down the pipeline?
The next project will be a short film from Lea Nakonechny. We take turns at Arid Sea Films with productions, so I have to wait a couple years to direct again.
In this clip, Susanna Ruiz points out value in the massive volume of media content on the Internet, even as most of it is "crap." The crap serves both as a repository of content to be reinterpreted and placed in new contexts (the "remix culture") and as its own art to be judged by many groups of individuals, rather than by a select group of gatekeepers.
Moderator Wendy Levy follows with mention of curation. She says, "we're trying to get away from YouTube and more into spaces where we find trusted guides." I don't think getting away from YouTube is exactly how I'd put it, but rather that there is a need to serve both the curation and aggregation functions.
I am reminded of discussions I had this week with friends at YouTube and Wholphin DVD.
YouTube, like the rest of Google, has indicated that it will never create content, and its curation of content is even limited to featuring a few videos on the front page and in the different sections (Film and Animation, Pets & Animals, etc.). The value that audiences and content creators find in YouTube is mainly transactional: easy and fast posting, searching and viewing of (and advertising on) videos. YouTube is a platform, which has been expensive to create, but is vastly scalable and essential to many.
On the other end, there is Wholphin, a DVD magazine of short films, published quaterly by McSweeney's. The Wholphin team, consisting of only two people, travel to film festivals and solicit submissions to see hundreds, if not thousands of short films. They meet many filmmakers personally and pay all of them for the rights to license their films. It is a painstaking process that is most certainly not scalable without sacrificing quality, but the start-up capital costs are comparatively low. The delivery of the resulting DVD - published only four times a year, in high-end packaging, graphic design by Dave Eggers, with a booklet of "liner notes" - reflects the desired audience experience, completely the opposite of YouTube.
These two models complement, rather than compete with each other, and neither can be dismissed. I'm looking forward to exploring ways in which the two can work more tightly together.
# posted by Brian Chirls @ 1/23/2008 01:47:00 PM
Comments (0)
A TRIP DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
As I didn't get into Park City until Sunday night, I've been playing catch-up for the most part, trying to get the pulse of this year's fest (which for the most part hasn't been the feeding frenzy in terms of deals as last year), and trying to see as many films as possible (and hitting some parties). So far Daniel Barnz's debut feature Phoebe In Wonderland has stuck in my mind the most. Barnz was named one of our "25 New Faces" this past summer so I knew a little about him and his work before going in, but it's one thing to read someones work on paper and gratifyingly another when it translates even better on screen.
With amazing performances by Elle Fanning, Patricia Clarkson and Felicity Huffman, this fantastical look at a young girl's medical illness, how her parents and teachers deal with it and how Alice In Wonderland relates to it all is entertaining, gripping and beautifully crafted.
Fanning (sister of Dakota) plays Phoebe, an imaginative girl who wins the part of Alice in the school rendition of Alice In Wonderland, and in her stress to play the part begins to show OCD-like tendencies, but her parents and teachers are either too naive or too scared to recognize it.
In a tour-de-force performance by Fanning (do the Fanning siblings do any less?) we see her deteriorate before our eyes but Barnz creates a Heavenly Creatures-like world in which she travels into as Phoebe finds solace in the Alice in Wonderland characters. As the film moves on fantasy overtakes reality leaving to a conclusion that many may feel is a little too campy but it's the journey you take to get there that's the thing that kept me into it.
Barnz's screenplay and the production design brings out the feel of watching a stage play, so having stage vets like Clarkson, Huffman, Bill Pullman and Campbell Scott raises the bar.
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/23/2008 08:45:00 AM
Comments (0)
OFF THE BEATEN TRAIL
When they announce the nominations later this week for most innovative Sundance party, the films Half-Life and Portland are sure to get mentioned. Eric Singeltary of Iconoclastic Features arranged to host a party in a yurt, half way up the mountain at The Canyons ski resort. Transportation included a ride in a Snow Cat along a thin windy trail with a wonderful view of the steep slope below. The yurt, a large circular sturdy tent on a platform, came equipped with a full bar, an extensive chocolate fondue and a wood burning stove. Robert Zimmer, producer of Half-Life and Eric even had a raffle with prizes from Adobe and The Canyons resort. Kudos for thinking outside the box.
# posted by Ian Gilmore @ 1/23/2008 07:48:00 AM
Comments (0)
NEW CAMERAS, NEW FRONTIERS
Writer and d.p. David Leitner sent us this report about two new cameras that can be seen here at the Sundance Film Festival.
Located in the basement of a small commercial mall on upper Main Street across from the Egyptian theater, the annual Sundance technology showcase known as New Frontier on Main is particularly worth a visit this year due to two product introductions poised to rock the world of low-budget HD indie production. Word is already out about Sony's EX1, a Handycam-type camcorder bearing both XDCAM EX and CineAlta logos for a strikingly low $7,790 suggested retail price. In a nutshell, EX1 features three 1920x1080 1/2" CMOS sensors, a built-in Fujinon zoom with both mechanical and electronic control, choice of 25Mbps format (equivalent to HDV) and higher-quality 35Mbps format (full 1920x1080 recording), capture to new flash-memory PCExpress cards called SxS (half the size of P2), and a workflow already supported by Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 and Premiere Pro among others. OK, that would be banner news by itself, but Sony is also introducing at the end of February a follow-up (not replacement) to the Z1 (still in production) called the Z7 ($6,850), as well as a shoulder-mount version of the Z7 called the S270 ($10,500). The Z7 and S270 are shot through with breakthroughs: three 1/3" CMOS sensors; HDV, DVCAM, and/or DV to both tape and -- get this! -- Compact Flash (i.e., simultaneous recording of HD and SD); interchangeable lenses including Sony's new Digital SLR Alpha still lenses; and a sharper, finer-grained viewfinder than that of EX1. Moreover, all three of these new HD camcorders -- EX1 and Z7/S270 -- feature greatly improved sensitivity to light, fully matching Sony's PD150/170 series. If you don't believe me, put their sensitivity to the test in the dark, club-like environment of the New Frontier on Main.
So... why would Sony introduce two professional Handycam-type camcorders at the same time, at about the same price? Could it be that one was designed by the CineAlta design group that brought us the F900 and F23 while the other was designed by the prosumer division in a gesture of intra-corporate one-upsmanship? Speculation aside, the EX1 has been mobbed at New Frontier. For my money, however, the real showstopper is its smaller neighbor, a Z7 mounted with a 7mm Zeiss DigiPrime, Fujinon 2/3". to 1/3". optical adapter, and Chroziel follow-focus with matte box. All of these and more --including Sony's remarkable new compact PCM-D50 flash-memory audio recorder, which I'm already using to record voiceovers for an indie feature I'm producing -- will be on display through Saturday, the last day of Sundance. So work your way down to the basement of the mall on upper Main Street and check them out for yourself -- and don't forget to peek through that glorious Z7 color viewfinder! -- David Leitner
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/23/2008 01:23:00 AM
Comments (1)
NICK DAWSON INTERVIEWS U2 3D DIRECTOR CATHERINE OWENS..
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/23/2008 01:03:00 AM
Comments (0)
SUNDANCE INTERVIEW: PERLA HANEY-JARDINE
I met with Perla Haney-Jardine (Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Dark Water) at the party for her new film Anywhere, USA. Among a cast of new actors, along with first-time director/writer dad Chusey Haney-Jardine and first-time producer/writer mom Jennifer MacDonald, Perla was one of the most experienced hands on set. We discussed what it was like to work on a family film, as well as her Sundance experience and the film's prospects for distribution.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/22/2008 11:35:00 PM
Comments (0)
SUNDANCE BUSINESS AT THE MIDPOINT
It happened maybe a day later than last year, but the acquisitions floodgates have opened a bit at the Sundance Film Festival. But it wasn't the typical first-weekend films that enthused distributors. In Variety, Ann Thompson is reporting that Focus Features has bought Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2, which debuted at the unsexy time of Monday at 5:30 in a deal she pegs at over $10 million for worldwide rights. The film stars Steve Coogan as an English teacher who writes a sequel to Shakespeare's play in other to rescue the school's theater department. Perhaps more significantly, the film is directed by an established director, Andrew Fleming (whose Dick is one my favorite underrated comedies) and scripted by South Park writer/producer Pam Brady. The deal is Focus's first film festival acquisition in quite a while, and it comes on the day that the company's Atonement received a Best Picture Oscar nom.
Thompson and Sharon Swart have two other announcements: Fox Searchlight has bought Clark Gregg's debut feature Choke for a reported $5 million (for the world minus a few territories) and Overture Films, whose first release, Mad Money, debuted this past weekend, has picked up U.S. rights to Mark Pellington's Henry Poole is Here, which stars Luke Wilson and Radha Mitchell, for a reported $3.5 million
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/22/2008 03:23:00 PM
Comments (0)
SLAMDANCE DISPATCH #2
At the halfway point at this year's Slamdance Film Festival, few films have emerged as consensus favorites among festivalgoers. So far, the documentary competition seems to boast a much stronger roster of titles than the narrative side. Although it hardly qualifies as a market, in this year of cautious buyers in Park City, no films have picked up significant sales buzz, the way The King of Kong did at last year's festival, where it sold to Picturehouse before its first screening.
Among the strongest titles on the doc side are Adjust Your Color: The Truth About Petey Greene and a harrowing account of a man who simply would not leave his severely flooded New Orleans neighborhood in Katrina's wake, Holdout. Especially thought provoking is Cynthia Lester'sMy Mother's Garden, which takes an unflinching look at the director's mother, a Polish immigrant afflicted with a form of OCD known as Hoarding Disorder. The film chronicles Cynthia and her disparate siblings attempt to help their wayward parent, whose house is filled to the brim with trash and barely valuable collectibles. Her compulsion is unforgiving and we sense the loneliness and emotional insecurities that have fed her disorder in a conventionally structured doc that tracks the effects of the intervention staged by her children.
At a Q&A following the film, Eugenia joined her daughter, stressing that the roots of her problems, which she claims to have been fully aware of before she was forced to seek treatment, rest in her coming of age amongst scarred Holocaust survivors. Not quite as wrenching or aesthetically provocative as Capturing The Friedmans, the film nonetheless is a sneakily powerful portrait of a family torn asunder by secrets, mental illness and denial, with several of Cynthia's siblings having been unaware of just how out of hand Engenia's disorder had gotten until Los Angeles officials threatened to take her house. It's an honest and mature look at a troubled woman, engaging it's subject's neuroses with humor and concern, suggesting, without malice, how her instability led her children down precarious paths that they have seeming recovered from gracefully.
Although the narratives have been a shallower pool, with disappointments ranging from Frost, a brisk Cameron Crowe rip-off that can't hit all of its telegraphed genre beats with anything resembling nuance or style, to The Project, the Brooklyn indie film within a Brooklyn indie film that follows a trio of white filmmakers attempting to document the lives of dope dealing inner city black kids with increasingly exploitative and personally dangerous results, Tom Quinn's magnificent The New Year Parade has easily assumed the mantle of film to beat in the narrative competition.
Rough around the edges, with a temp score that uses Elliot Smith's soulful downer ballads to better effect than Good Will Hunting, the film delves into a year in the lives a a disintegrating family in South Philadelphia's Irish enclaves. Something of a naturalistic, blue collar The Squid and The Whale, the pic revolves around the effect of an infidelity and the power struggle that ensues between parents, as they fight a proxy war through their children. Quinn, who wrote, directed, shot, and edited himself with a bare bones crew, has made a consistently touching movie in which all of his characters, even the most flawed (which, like Baumbach's marital strife narrative, is the mother) are seen with empathy. Quinn creates a recognizable and multi-textured world for his characters to inhabit; South Philadelphia is clearly a place he has thought much about, one tinged with decay and regret, but also love, humor and beauty.
The New Year Parade brims with wonderful glimpses of spaces the cinema rarely visits. Quinn, whose deftness with performers equals his eye for authentic detail, uses real South Philly marching bands, has his characters visit Geno's Steaks and he depicts the unraveling of the family against the backdrop of the implosion of Veteran's Stadium, incorporating into the film a series of places and cultural events that resonate in this working class milieu. Unlike so many bourgeois filmmakers condescending to poor or working class characters (see The Project, or the much hyped Ballast over at Sundance, but more on that somewhere else), seeing their lives as mere vacuums of pain and aesthetic playgrounds in which the filmmakers can work out their own complexes of guilt and lack of understanding in narratives weighed down by arty pretensions, THe New Year Parade, with its flat narrative, subtle sensitivity to class, gently crafted performances by non or marginal actors and its rough hewn yet entirely appropriate hand held camerawork, does many of the things American Independent films have traditionally done well.
MORE SLAMDANCE INTERVIEWS: JON KNAUTZ, PATRICK WHITE, TREVOR MATTHEWS JACK BROOKS: MONSTER SLAYER
Sat, Jan 19th, 10:45pm
After witnessing the brutal murder of his family, plumber Jack Brooks is left with an unquenchable fury that he is constantly fighting to control. One night, Jack attempts to fix a professors old, rusted pipes, but unknowingly awakens an ancient evil.
Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?
White: I was at a shopping mall in Vancouver and I was thrilled we had gotten in, I then immediately called Jon and Trevor to share the news, and started thinking what could we do to stand out at the festival.
How were you able to find financing for the project?
White: We had private investment and we were very lucky that our investor believed in us and supported us.
What debt does the film owe to the tradition of schlocky horror cinema? What film or filmmakers provided some influence?
Knautz: The film was certainly influenced by classic 80’s horror films such as They Fly, Gremlins and the Evil Dead Trilogy. We wanted to make something reminiscent of those kind of movies so CGI was out of the question.
How did Mr. Englund become involved?
Matthews: Robert was our number one choice for the role, we knew that he had a big following from Freddy Kreuger and we were all hugely influenced by Nightmare on Elm Street. We sent him a demo and he enjoyed our short film “Still Life” we then sent him a draft of the script and he signed on.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?
Knautz: Shooting the monsters was difficult. Though they looked great, there were certain things I needed them to do that would unfortunately make them look corny. So the biggest challenge in post was to hang on the monster shots long enough so that they would feel menacing, but not too long so that they would feel fake. There were times where my editor and I just had to bite the bullet, for the most part I feel the monsters work well.
Any other projects in the pipeline?
Matthews: Currently we are developing several original ideas into scripts, we are also looking into doing a remake as well as optioning some books. We will be producing a new feature film this year.
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: NATHAN SILVER, ANECDOTE
Sat, Jan 19th, 4:30pm Thurs, Jan 24th, 11am
In this tragic farce, Kate, after failing the bar exam, realizes that law is not for her. With no sense of a life-plan, she takes a job house cleaning and at first finds comfort in the repetition and routine of the work, but repetition and routine only go so far.
Tell us about the genesis of the project and your preoccupations as a filmmaker.
I thrive on work. So, on a practical level, ANECDOTE came about because I was just about to finish post-production on my third film, and the anxiety of being without another project to fall into was enough to start me writing again.
I'm interested in characters that have a fixed view of the world, but a view that's at odds with reality. When this is the case there are only two possibilities for the character, either giving up on reality or giving up on ideas. I find it depressing when the character gives up on ideas. In this story, the character follows her rigid ideas to the bitter end, and I suppose that's just as depressing, but at least she acts out of her own will -- I find some hope in that.
Where were you when you found out you'd gotten into Slamdance? How did you react?
I was in my apartment in Paris, and I guess I was happily shocked. This was made with a crew of three (the director of photography, the production designer, and myself) for no money, and it's thirty minutes long, which most say is too long for a short if you actually want it to get into a festival.
How were you able to find financing for the project?
Equipment and props were borrowed; there wasn't one rental. It was shot in my hometown – in locations that I knew I had access to, so the only costs were food and transportation. The budget ended up being around $1000, and I was able to borrow this from my family, who are kind and crazy enough to believe in a return one day.
Do you consider yourself a cinephile? What debt does the film owe to other films or filmmakers provided some influence?
Certainly, I'm an addict.
For this particular project, I was watching and re-watching the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Eric Rohmer, Nicholas Ray, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (but he's a constant).
Also, I put into a practice a lot of what I learned from the filmmaker, Julia Loktev, whom I interned for while she was in pre-production for DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT: namely, that you should produce a film as you see fit, big crews are a myth, and video has an integrity all its own.
Why Black & White?
First, because I love black and white video – the tonal range of the grays is so rich – and it's very rarely used. Secondly, black and white immediately makes things seem remote. Since the story concerns a cleaning woman and takes place in very average middle-class houses, I wanted to make it both beautiful and remote so that the viewer might notice what a strange place this average world can be.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?
With my three previous short films I had to reconstruct the story almost entirely in the editing room. This was not the case with ANECDOTE – this one actually matched the script. Here, the challenge was the sound. I had to do lots of ADR (not in a studio, but in my parents' basement) and foley hundreds of sounds.
Is this your first time on the festival circuit with a short?
Yes.
Any other projects in the pipeline?
Of course. A feature called THE BLIND. It's the story of the doomed relationship of a young couple and their inevitable descent into marriage. I'm currently seeking funding.
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR/WRITER INTERVIEWS: STEVEN GOLDMANN TIMOTHY DOLAN, TRAILER PARK OF TERROR
Mon, Jan 21st, 10:45pm
Based on the popular comic series from Imperium Comics, six troubled teens and their optimistic youth ministries pastor are returning from a character building retreat when their van is crippled during a raging storm and they find themselves hopelessly stranded in the middle of a remote southern legend: the Trucker’s Triangle.
Timothy Dolan
Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?
I was actually in the middle of writing for my current project and I got a call from the Producer, Jonathan Bogner, telling me that Trailer Park of Terror had been accepted into Slamdance. I was totally pumped. Selected by one of the biggest film festivals in the country? Shut up. I stopped writing and started celebrating. Then that annoying little voice in the back of my head began to chide me, saying, "Why aren't you writing, Tim?", so I put down the glass and started writing again.
How were you able to find financing for the project?
If I was lost in the Mojave I would want Jonathan Bogner there with me. I mean, if he can find water the way he finds money to finance films, I'd set up camp. The guy is amazing.
Why trailer parks?
Mainly because the film is based on the comic book series of the same name. So thanks to the comic book's creators, Chris March and James Dracoules for having the trailer park inspiration. The story also utilizes a bit of the rich tradition of trailer parks that are situated along truckers' routes whose denizens advertise and provide various services for the long haulers. Also, this is a trailer park that's long ago gone to seed and, like any building or location that's been deconstructed by nature and other forces it has become inherently creepy. Not to mention this particular trailer park's history of evil. The name sort of gives it away: Tophet Meadows.
What debt does the film owe to the tradition of schlocky horror cinema? What film or filmmakers provided some influence?
I think to the extent that all horror cinema has established certain indelible and iconic images and expectations in the public and popular psyche, TPOT owes a tremendous debt. I suppose it's a carrying the torch sort of thing. Also, the pastor's name is Gordon Lewis. That ought to tell you something.
What are the most difficult aspects of making a high concept, effects laden movie with little money?
The script started out on more of a grand scale (don't they all?). But, as the realities of budget came into play, the challenge writing-wise became creating scenes and situations that were scary, compelling, and exciting that could be realistically filmed within the financial boundaries imposed. It also was very important throughout all of the script iterations to stay true to the characters: Norma, Marv, Roach, Larlene, Stank, and the whole ghostly crew. In retrospect, I think it all worked toward making Trailer Park of Terror a better movie.
Any other projects in the pipeline?
Hell Phone. And a whole bunch of other stories from here to Timbuktu I want to write. Not enough hours in the day right now.
Steven Goldmann
Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?
I was at home - I think I was watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann! I think I had forgotten that the producer had submitted us - so I was both surprised and shocked. I kept telling him how perfect a festival is was for us - that our film fit - we are an in your face movie and Slamdance is THE in your face fest!!
How were you able to find financing for the project?
Mr. Bogner has the knack jack. He goes out a works it. I've never seen anyone work as hard - maybe the word is tenacious, but he just does not quit and does not take no for an answer. This film is totally put together with indie money.
Why trailer parks?
Well Jonathan and his friend David Tischman discovered the comic books at Comic Con and Bogner gave me and Tim Dolan about 13 or so of the comic books and we came back with our ideas for a movie. So we couldn't get away from trailer parks.
What debt does the film owe to the tradition of schlocky horror cinema? What film or filmmakers provided some influence?
Well I would like to believe that horror fans will feel that I have warn my influences very clearly on my sleeve. I call out Hershel Gordon Lewis in the first thirty seconds of the film so true fans will be set for the throwback journey I wanted to go on. Some of the more obvious ones are Stuart Gordon, Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi as well. Yes there is a real bit of 70s grindhouse here - but a deeper look I hope would find that this a bit of hybrid - the rawness and violence of many current films, and the redneck Southern horror splatter film mixed with the rules of good old fashion Universal Pictures Horror film of the 30s, 40s and 50s. What I mean by that is that this film is an origins story and monster movie where the stars are the monsters and they are what draw you in, and if I did my job well enough you might even care for them and want see them again..and again.
What are the most difficult aspects of making a high concept, effects laden movie with little money?
Time. never enough of it. So you are always flying by the seat of your pants, writing and rewriting on set and praying you got it in the can. We had 18 days. I'm still not sure how we pulled it off.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?
Funny - post was pretty smooth. The picture fell together nicely - but I wish there was stuff I could re-shoot, stuff I wish we had shot... the filmmakers lament. But all in all it was mostly an underlying anxiety that maybe I'd made a film that was a little too hard to pigeon hole with in the constructs of the modern Horror film genres. It seems to be it's own thing to me.
Any other projects in the pipeline?
Yes, a couple. I am returning to the hills of Appalachia to shoot a gritty crime drama in the vain of Boston based films like Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone called THE MOUNTAIN. The film takes place in the brutal and bloody world of organized crime in the coal mining towns of Kentucky where drugs and guns are the number one export and grass is the number one cash crop. After that I hope it's THE HUMAN FLY - a true story about a forgotten, yet larger then life stuntman/con man who back in 76 and 77 stood on the back of DC9 while it flew some 300 miles and hour. His moments in the sun were fast and furious - Marvel put out 20 comic books about his adventure with the tagline: The Wildest Super Hero Ever Because He's REAL! The script has the kind of adventurous period tone of a BOOGIE NIGHTS and an ALMOST FAMOUS.
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: JEFFERY SCHWARTZ, SPINE TINGLER: THE WILLIAM CASTLE STORY
Tues, Jan 22nd, 10:45pm
Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story chronicles the American showman and filmmaker William Castle, who became a brand name in movie horror with his outrageous audience participation gimmicks. In the 1950s and 60s, Castle treated delighted moviegoers to buzzing seats, flying skeletons, luminescent ghosts and life insurance policies.
Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?
I was at my office in Koreatown separating legit emails from Viagra spamwhen I found out that SPINE TINGLER! THE WILLIAM CASTLE STORY had been accapted into Slamdance. The Slamdance attitude and the William Castle DIY ethos match perfectly and I'm thrilled to be part of the festival. William Castle would have been 94 this year, and if he were alive right now I'm sure he'd be in Park City spinning tales of his illustrious career. This movie will have to spin those tales for him.
What fascinates you about William Castle? When did you first learn about him?
I didn¹t become fully aware of Castle until I read John Waters' tribute article "Whatever Happened to Showmanship?" in the 80s. It was a revelation. Luckily, this interest coincided with the first revivals of Castle¹s gimmicks in New York City in 80s. The theater rigged up their version of Percepto and when Vincent Price announced that the Tingler was loose in the theater and the buzzers went off, a bunch of jaded New Yorkers started screaming for their lives. I was hooked forever.
I was drawn to William Castle because his life is profoundly American. I was fascinated by how this charismatic and ambitious director reinvented himself as a larger than life showman. He knew that in order to attract people to his films, he needed to create a character that was essentially a brand name, and that going to see one of his films would be an experience like no other. William Castle's life is a rags to riches story that is a perfect illustration of the American Dream.
In your research and hunt for archival footage, which sources were most helpful?
Aside from the usual sources of archival material from photo and stock houses, I found the most amazing stuff in the Castle family vault, aka daughter Terry Castle's attic. She kept all of her dad's files, screenplays with notes scribbled all over them, photos, telegrams, etc. I even found the actual Lloyd's of London life insurance certificate for "Macarbe," which proves that this was no joke. He actually insured the audience against death by fright!
You won an audience award at last year's AFI Fest for the film. How do you anticipate audiences reacting in Park City?
William Castle teaches us that you can trump budget with ingenuity and showmanship. It doesn¹t matter how much money you have for a film. If you can give the audience something they¹ve never experienced before, and make them remember your name, you've got a shot at creating a loyal following. That's what indie filmmakers do every day, and an environment like Park City that celebrates this kind of filmmaking is the perfect place to unspool the film again. I hope audiences who think they know William Castle will learn more about the man behind the myth, and those who don't know him will fall in love with the guy like I did.
Was William Castle's family involved in the film? Have they seen it?
Yes, the Castle family was hugely helpful in making this film. Bill's daughter Terry Castle has been patiently waiting for me to finish the film after like 7 years or so. She worships her dad and really put her trust in me to make a definitive portrait that would portray him as he really was. Thankfully, the family loves the film. In fact, Terry and her husband Tom's kids Kyle and Will are getting to know the grandfather they never knew through the film. They want to be movie directors, of course.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?
The biggest challenge in post-production was trying to keep Bill's emotional thruline alive. It's not enough to just chronicle his accomplishments. We have to understand what kept him going. I was surprised to discover just how filled with anxiety and self-doubt the man was. For someone so larger than life and full of bravado, it was touching to find out that he had insecurities and fears that were well hidden from the public.
Any other projects in the pipeline?
I'm finishing up my next documentary called WRANGLER: ANATOMY OF AN ICON about 1970s porn superstar Jack Wrangler. He was the biggest gay porn star of the 70s who became the biggest straight porn star of the 70s. It's a romp - a gay BOOGIE NIGHTS with a happy ending. Like SPINE TINGLER!, it's a story of a man who turned himself into a brand name, albeit in a very different manner.
Sean McGinly’s debut feature The Great Buck Howard is a curious, small-scale relationship comedy/drama about an over-the-hill entertainer and his young, directionless-in-life assistant. Colin Hanks stars as the assistant, Troy, who signs up for the gig after impulsively bolting law school and the career track his dad, played by Hanks’s real-life dad Tom, is pushing him towards. A wiggy John Malkovich is the entertainer – specifically, a mentalist, whose claim to fame is having appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 61 times (but never in the last ten years of the show, he ruefully admits as one point). Hanks gives a relaxed, low-key performance, but it’s hard for an audience to invest much in his underdeveloped character. Malkovich goes the opposite way, energetically turning his “Buck Howard” into a show-biz cartoon, a caricature of an impossible-to-please has-been who travels with his show through the flyover states while the larger entertainment culture passes him by. Emily Blunt adds a much-needed spark as a seen-it-all celebrity publicist. The Great Buck Howard’s slender storyline deals with Howard attempting to stage a comeback by staging a new “effect” – a mass hypnosis – in Akron that will attract the attention of the new round of Vegas and late-night-talk bookers.
One of the film’s problems is its failure to come up with engaging ways to turn the relationship between Howard and Troy into anything resembling a real story. Troy is Howard’s assistant and tour manager, but, in terms of dramatic action, he’s given nothing to do that affects Howard’s act in any way. We expect him to get drawn into both Howard’s life and the methodology of his effects, but he is never much more than a bemused observer of this show-biz “fossil” he’s randomly hooked up with. The film’s dramatic heavy lifting is handled, unfortunately, by a cloying voiceover in which Troy contextualizes the whole tale as a necessary pit stop on his way to accumulating the life experience he needs to become… a TV writer. As for the comedy, most of it revolves around Howard's eccentricities -- his penchant for playing "What the World Needs Now" mid-show and his professed love for Star Trek's George Takei -- and supporting turns by Steve Zahn and Debra Monk as the well-meaning bumpkins who host Howard during his Akron stay.
In the last few years, there have been a few movies set within the world of magic and illusion. The best of these, like Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, makes the craft of the film’s magician character integral to the story. The Great Buck Howard deals with magic’s sister art of mentalism, which, due to the work of performers like Derren Brown, is experiencing something of a revival these days. Howard’s character seems clearly based on The Amazing Kreskin, who was a regular on TV in the ‘70s, and the film tips its hat to today’s magic scene by casting Ricky Jay as Howard’s manager and, in a brief cameo, David Blaine as himself. But The Great Buck Howard doesn’t have any insights into the art, and, considering that mentalism deals with issues of psychology, personality and influence, the film’s inability to use this subject matter to create more dramatic situations for its characters is pretty disappointing.
Here's Stone discussing the project and the screenplay, which is written by Nixon co-scripter Stanley Weiser:
"It's a behind-the-scenes approach, similar to 'Nixon,' to give a sense of what it's like to be in his skin," Stone told Daily Variety. "But if 'Nixon' was a symphony, this is more like a chamber piece, and not as dark in tone. People have turned my political ideas into a cliche, but that is superficial. I'm a dramatist who is interested in people, and I have empathy for Bush as a human being, much the same as I did for Castro, Nixon, Jim Morrison, Jim Garrison and Alexander the Great."
Stone declined to give his personal opinion of the president.
"I can't give you that, because the filmmaker has to hide in the work," Stone said. "Here, I'm the referee, and I want a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world? It's like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I'll also cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from. It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own with the stunning, preemptive attack on Iraq. It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors."
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/20/2008 09:11:00 PM
Comments (0)
SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES CREATIVE PRODUCING INITIATIVE
At a lunch here at the Kimball Art Center at the base of Main Street, the Sundance Institute announced their new "Creative Producing Initiative" today. "To work effectively with filmmakers, producers need an opportunity to develop their own skills and voices. The Creative Producing Initiative is designed to develop a producer's creative instincts in the scripting and editing stages and to evolve their communication and problem-solving skills at all stages of realizing a project," said Michelle Satter, Director, Sundance Institute Feature Film Program. Producer Paul Mezey (Sugar, Maria Full of Grace) gave the keynote speech, and he pledged his support as a mentor to the to-be-selected candidate.
Along with this new program is a Sundance Creative Producing Lab, which will take place in July. The deadline for applying to the Creative Producing Initiative is March 1, 2008, and guidelines are up on the Sundance website.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/20/2008 05:09:00 PM
Comments (0)
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: DANIEL SCHECHTER, GOODBYE BABY
Tues, Jan 22nd, 8:30pm Wed, Jan 23rd, 3:30pm
When Melissa Brooks discovers she can't afford college, she moves to New York City and gets a job as a waitress at a comedy club. Soon, Melissa finds herself testing her talent and her material in front of the toughest crowds in the country
Where were you when you heard you had been accepted to Slamdance and how did it make you feel?
It's funny, a film I edited called The Project (dir. Ryan Piotrowicz) got in first, into the narrative competition, so I had sort of given up all hope of getting accepted. Then about a week later our producer, Tim Duff, called me into his office. He thought it would be really funny to pretend he had bad news (by looking and acting incredibly somber) and then reveal he had the good news that we got into Slamdance. Needless to say, I was relieved (albeit not amused by his performance). We got accepted into this Special Screening series, which only has three films. Then when I saw the other two films (Just Add Water and Real Time), I felt like I was in really great company. The more I experience with Slamdance, the happier I am to be there. I feel really lucky.
What drew you to the world of comedy clubs as the setting for this feminine coming of age tale?
First, definitely the 2002 Christian Charles doc Comedian about Jerry Seinfeld. Its a great flick and really nails the comedy and drama of devoting your life to being a comic (and the type of person who does that). Then, I wanted to try and adapt an Elmore Leornard novel called Pagan Babies which features a very interesting, female comic character who was in her mid-30's. When I realized I was broke and nobody, I figured I was going to have to create my own story, so I created Melissa Brooks. She's a popular and great looking teenager who has this latent interest in stand up, but sort of keeps it to herself. In a way, it seemed like a great fantasy character; like what if one of the best looking girls I went to High School with was killing at a comedy club years later and I never even knew she was funny. Then the fun of the film for me was making the journey as realistic, difficult and embarrassing for her as possible.
How did you put together the cast and financing?
I was very blessed to have the money before the cast, which is rare in indie filmmaking. I think this helped us land some of our better known actors because we could offer them roles and they knew the film was going to happen. This was all because of my producer Tim Duff, who well, makes things happen. He believed in this script and managed to convince our investor to believe in me. I think some of that also had to do with the fact that this wasn't really my first feature (I had produced and written a film a year earlier called The Big Bad Swim), but mostly ithad to do with Tim. As far as casting our lead goes, it came down to a "name" and the best actor for the role (who, not surprisingly, were not the same person). It was a very obvious creative decision, but a difficult financial decision for myself and the producers to make. In the end, everyone believed so strongly that Christine Evangelista was such an undeniable star, we took a gamble on her and it paid off in spades.
What experiences from your first feature film informed how you approached your second?
Every experience. I learned how to write for and speak to actors. How to create a film within a rational budget. How to cover a scene with my cinematographer. How to anticipate editing. Narratively, even though both films have a large amount of speaking roles, I knew I wanted this film to focus on a main protagonist (as opposed to Swim's ensemble). This meant I never had to worry about certain portions/characters in the film holding an audience's attention more or less than others. While it may sound like I put all my eggs in one basket, I felt that taking the time to focus on our lead is what makes this film feel so intimate. However, the story still manages to feel like a strong ensemble, with so many supporting roles (giving me the opportunity to work with so many great actors). Also, on every film, you learn you who to work with and who not to work with, but that's another story.
Was the film inspired by any other film or filmmakers whom you admire or find to be lasting influences?
I really look at this film in the same genre as movies like Mike Nichols'Working Girl, Howard Zeiff'sPrivate Benjamin and even Karyn Kusama's Sundance fave Girl Fight. All these films seem to be about female protagonists struggling in various, male-dominated arenas (in this case, stand up comedy). To a certain point, they're feminist, but in a general sense they're about underdogs and that always seems to work on film for me. Also, Bob Fosse'sLenny was a gigantic inspiration as perhaps the most artful way you can portray stand up on film, while perfectly mixing the drama and the comedy. As far as filmmakers go, there's always Woody Allen for me. I thought a lot about his film Alice as I made this.
What was the biggest challenge when constructing the film in post production?
I think the biggest challenge for me was probably the challenge most filmmaker's face in post: cutting out the stuff you love. There were several really strong scenes from supporting characters that, in the flow of the film, somehow disrupted the pacing and focus. Losing those scenes was difficult for me, because I become very close with my actors and hate cutting their performances. Also, in some cases I think those lost scenes might make me (and my collaborators) look like better filmmakers, when seen individually. I definitely learned that once you cut these kind of moments it can be unbelievably liberating. The best analogy I can make is the feeling of losing a tremendous amount of weight and your film is leaner and more enjoyable as a result.
Any other projects down the pipeline?
I am currently developing ideas for television, although it looks like I may be revisiting an old script of mine, an independent film, to shoot in 2008 first. The script was something I wrote and intended to make in 2005, until I realized I couldn't raise nearly as much money as the script required, so I wrote The Big Bad Swim as a cheaper alternative. The film has so many fun roles, story-lines and scenes that it just seems like a tremendous opportunity to re-team with some great actors and work with some new talent. It's a real actor's vehicle and that's what it's all about for me. Also, it just seems like the next step up. We'll see what happens...
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: RYAN PIOTROWICZ, THE PROJECT
Mon, Jan 21st, 12:30pm Wed, Jan 23rd, 7pm
Three first-time filmmakers, Justin, Dana and John, set out to make a documentary about the hardships of inner-city Brooklyn. As filming progresses, violence and emotion get in the way of the trio’s objectivity and what was once an ambitious idea deteriorates as stories merge, relationships corrode and the filmmakers become participants in the inner city world they set out to document.
How do you feel about playing Slamdance? When and where did you hear you had been accepted?
Very excited. There are a lot of great films that have been accepted in the festival's past, so I'm honored to be recognized by an establishment I respect. My producer Tim Duff interrupted me while editing with what I assumed was a complaint of some kind, but he instead told me about theacceptance to the festival. We followed up the good news with a few drinks.
What gave you the impetus to make a film about a set of novice filmmakers who get in over their heads?
When I moved to New York I wanted to make a movie about inner-city life. When I would try to talk to different people about race, class and media, I was often met with the "who the fuck do you think you are" kind of look. After multiple threats and a gun in my face I realized I had been living what I was trying to write about.
How did you put together the cast and financing?
When I first set out to make The Project I knew I would have to keep a small budget in mind, because significant financing is hard to come by. At the time I was working as a locations manager on the film Goodbye Baby (dir Daniel Schechter), where I met Tim Duff, the producer of my film. Based on past experience I knew that a solid business plan is vital to get someone to provide financial backing for a film. One thing I wanted to avoid was the long drawn out process of putting offers out to name actors in hopes that they would be in the film. I have seen other filmmakers struggle through this process and have to make last minute casting decisions. One thing that always seemed like a catch twenty two in regards to independent film is that filmmakers need actors to get financing and actors often won¹t sign on unless the money is in place. I avoided this headache all-together by casting a rap artist (Juelz Santana) with a rabid fan base. His presence alone would garner more attention and return on investment then most "name" actors could ever do. By attaching the film to the Diplomats brand, (a Harlem based rap super-group with an extensive and loyal following) I gave an investor a viable case that a return of his investment could and would be made if we kept the production costs down.
Once the funding was established one of the first things we did was hire casting director, Erica Palgon. Erica worked tirelessly to find the best actors for each role; she loved the script and believed in the film from the onset so I was very fortunate to have found such a great casting director. The best thing about not going for "name" actors is that we were able to cast based solely on talent and the irony of that is we wound up casting Michael Stahl-David as and he got cast in Cloverfield after we wrapped The Project.
You've worked with a number of your collaborators since your days at Emerson College. How have those relationships shaped your approach to filmmaking?
I often read about other filmmakers that say film school isn't necessary for success in the film industry. I disagree. For me, keeping in touch with college alumni has been an integral part in my active participation in the industry. But it's also more than that for me. I'm fortunate enough to be able to work with people I respect and trust. One person can't make a film alone so why not do it with people that you know have your back.
Was the film inspired by any other films dealing with the filmmaking process?
I couldn't say that there was anything that was a direct inspiration but one film that I enjoyed and often used as a reference point is Mail Order Wife. It¹s this great indeed that¹s makes documentaries feel fresh and really influenced my shooting style because; it maintained the ability to have an extremely realistic tone throughout.
What was the biggest challenge when constructing the film in post production?
The most difficult part of post production was constantly re-evaluating the viewer's perspective the tighter the editing became. I was so inside the film that I often need to step away for a while and gain a better perspective on the overall structure. Test audiences help, but in the end of the day it was a process that needed to come full circle and the only I was really able to do that is by making sure that I stayed true to the themes that inspired me to write the script in the first place.
Any other projects down the pipeline?
I am currently writing my new screenplay while still working with Renart Films. I am looking forward to producing Renart's next.
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: GREG KOHS, SONG SUNG BLUE
Sun, Jan 20th, 9:30pm Thurs, Jan 24th, 4:30pm
Song Sung Blue is a portrait of Mike an Claire Sardina, who as ‘Lightning & Thunder’, a homegrown Milwaukee husband & wife singing duo who pay tribute to the music of Neil Diamond in their nightly act.
Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?
When I received the call from Slamdance programmer Sarah Diamond, I was writing a check to the gas & electric company. At first, I thought it might be a friend screwing with me, Sarah "Diamond"? Yeah right. Fortunately, I went with it, and as a result I am heading to Park City. I was, and am still - psyched!
What drew you to the Lightning and Thunder initially?
I was initially drawn to Lightning & Thunder for the same reason everyone else has been for almost 20 years - the great music of Neil Diamond. But while Diamond's music captured my interest, it was Lighting & Thunder's uninhibited passion, persistence and honesty that captured my heart - enough to keep me filming their amazing story for nearly ten years.
How have your experiences working on "NFL Films Presents" informed your style as a documentarian? Was working in a more cinema verite style challenging for you?
My "captured not contrived" approach to filmmaking was born out of 10 years making films with Steve Sabol at NFL Films. Downloading & loading 5 - 400ft ARRI M mags in -20 degrees at Lambeau Field during a 13 minute halftime and then putting the camera on my shoulder to shoot the 2nd half in a blizzard is as "captured" as it gets. Every season, Sabol awarded one filmmaker w/ an all expensed paid trip to the Super Bowl for having the "Most Spectacular Failure" of the year. I never won the award but it did result in a few emmys. Some view "verite" ask risky. I'm fueled by it. To me, verite is a balance between trust and risk. In the case of Song Sung Blue, I risked the mortgage and trusted my gut.
Is Neil Diamond aware of the film? Are there any plans for him to see it?
I know his "people" are aware of my project. I am not aware if Neil has seen it.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?
Proximity. The first 11 months of editing was long-distance. I remained in NJ and my talented editor, Nick Kleczewski worked from his home in Virginia. The results were sensational, but there came a point, where the proximity created a barrier to progress. The last 8 months of cutting became less challenging as I finished the film from my home in New Jersey.
Any other projects in the pipeline?
I am a huge fan of Pee Wee's Big Adventure and would love to direct his comeback film. I also have two projects in the works but please don't tell my wife. One centers around an important historical event that took place in the Midwest in 1913. The other, is a doc that features an important American rock band from Milwaukee, WI.
SLAMDANCE FIRESIDE CHATS - ALTERNATIVE FUNDING METHODS
Yesterday, Slamdance presented Fireside Chat 2: Alternative Funding Methods for Indies. The panel started out reviewing some examples of methods that recent films have used to raise money, including house parties, sponsorships and advance DVD sales. Later, the discussion became more technical, addressing more advanced questions that arise from new, experimental funding models. Video excerpts of the panel follow below.
Get Creative Rubin and Dotson share some ideas for raising the value of a film by exploiting assets other than the feature itself. What these ideas all have in common is that they extend the experience of a film beyond the theater or DVD player, giving the audience more ways to interact with a film and more ways to pay for it. In many cases, it can be done without unreasonable increased costs. Planning for these additional sources of income when seeking funding can lower the risk and raise the potential value, making a film more attractive to an investor.
Rubin mentions a film that was funded by a sponsorship from an Italian jeans company. That film is Lives of Saints, as reported by the BBC.
Crowdsourced Funding Filmmakers with limited resources may turn to crowdsourcing, enlisting large groups of fans to each do a small bit of work to help the film. Recently launched sites like IndieGogo and Film Riot attempt to help filmmakers crowdsource funding. However, the Securities Exchange Commission enforces regulation of stock offerings, which presents a challenge to those wishing to raise money from many people.
One of the main goals of the SEC is to protect investors from corporate abuses. The regulations are intended to ensure that investors are informed of the risks of investment and receive accurate reporting of accounts. Public companies are required to follow strict accounting principles and regularly file statements with the SEC. Other companies, such as hedge funds, carry much greater risk and less reporting, but are limited to accredited investors, high net worth individuals who are assumed to be aware of the risks. Most others are limited to a small number of investors.
In the following video, panelists explain how IndieGoGo and FilmRiot attempt to raise money within the law.
# posted by Brian Chirls @ 1/20/2008 02:35:00 AM
Comments (1)
THE GOOD BUZZ...
Before arriving at Sundance, if people asked what I thought the business climate was going to be, I told them that if they had a film with name cast and genre hooks enabling it to be sold as something other than a speciality film that the bidding would be strong. Traditional "small" speciality films might have a harder time given the poor theatrical performance of last year's Sundance titles.
So far, I don't think my prediction is far off, although it's too early to tell how strong the bidding will be for the larger titles. One industry vet told me tonight that "everything that should sell will sell," meaning that all of the decently budgeted films with star casting will walk away from here with deals. These films include The Wackness, Sunshine Cleaning, and What Just Happened, among others. So far I've yet to hear much business talk about the smaller films, although it's still early in the festival -- usually the acquisition announcements start picking up steam on Monday.
In terms of the buzz, Marina Zenovitch's Roman Polanski doc is well liked and sold to the Weinstein Company for international. The word is that a domestic deal is imminent; Nanette Burstein's American Teen has great word of mouth and heavy distributor interest. Although some early reports cited mixed response for Jonathan Levine's The Wackness, it played well at the press and industry screening today, and I've heard that there is distributor interest on this one as well. There's great buzz on the Spanish sci-fi thriller Time Crimes, the remake rights of which have been bought by United Artists. Courtney Hunt's Frozen River has its fans (including me). It's a strong character-based regional drama, the type Sundance has been known for, but it is also has well balanced thriller elements and particularly resonant political themes. Of the unscreened titles, there seems to be a lot of anticipation for Andrew Fleming's comedy Hamlet 2, which is written by Fleming and South Park's Pam Brady.
More later....
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/20/2008 01:42:00 AM
Comments (0)
I'm going to meditate on his tip number three -- "Don't Get All Stress Out Over the Parties" -- rather than stewing over the invites I didn't get.
From Zobel:
If you haven't heard, the nightly parties at Sundance are real hard to get into. Even the fancy/rich/important have to stand in line sometimes. (For, like, two minutes. But still.) Let me go ahead and tell you what you are missing. A chocolate fondue fountain that has white chocolate on one side and dark chocolate on the other. Big whoop. You'll have more fun getting your friends and bringing a bottle of Jack back to the condo's hot tub. (Oh, yeah, all condos seem to have hot tubs up there, by the way.) Actually, it's cold in Park City... what you ought to do is go to the grocery and get some mulling spices, and make your pals some hot mulled wine to drink in the hot tub. This will give you the bonus of being able to say the words "mulling" and "mulled" a lot, which is fun. I feel woozy and dehydrated just thinking about it.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/19/2008 07:58:00 PM
Comments (0)
THE BUDDY SYSTEM
Filmmakers Joe Swanberg and Ronnie Bronstein are videoblogging Sundance for Spout. Here's episode four, in which they wonder where all the filmmakers are.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/19/2008 07:43:00 PM
Comments (0)
BLUNT FORCE
I ran into producer Mike Ryan, whose Choke is screening here at Sundance, and he told me about a new website he's involved with. Hammer to Nail has just launched, with Ryan and, soon, Mike Tully filing film reviews from Sundance -- reviews that are intended to be provocative conversation-starters that eschew the niceties that sometimes inhibit writing from not only the MSM but also the blogosphere. (Last year, Ryan forwarded me at Sundance his politically-outraged comments about Grace is Gone, which I posted on the blog.) He launches the new site with a review of the Sundance doc The Recruiter (American Soldier) that takes the film to task for its embrace of what Ryan calls "Centerism", which "holds as its main principals that in order for a message or position to be relevent and effective it needs to not be seen as coming from one side or the other." The question he poses in the review: "What is the value of making a film which could be used as a US Army promotional industrial recruiting tool?" Read the whole thing at the link above.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/19/2008 07:17:00 PM
Comments (0)
SLAMDANCE DISPATCH #1
Slamdance officially got underway last night with the underwhelming Real Time, which despite containing the best dramatic performance of Randy Quaid's career, left something to be desired in the originality category. Randall Cole's debut feature, produced in part by Canadian mega producer Robert Lantos (along with his son Ari), hits the typical genre beats in its brisk tale of an Australian hitman sent to kill a dead beat gambler who owes his bosses $68,000, only to give the man an hour and a half to come to terms with his impending doom. That his mark is played by Jay Baruchel in a twitchy, largely unlikable performance makes the humanity this brutal killer extends to him a bit of a stretch for the audience, who can easily picture why Hamilton, Ontario might not be that worse off without this guy. Shot smoothly on Super 16mm, the pic looks very good and has some genuinely interesting passages, but we've seen this 'old mentor sacrifices himself for the wayword son' bit before and as the film ventures further from plausibility and deeper into contrived, undermotivated genre territory, it looses its way.
The real find of day one of screenings was Shorts Block 2, coined the "sex block" by Slamdance shorts programmer Paul Sbrizzi, which included the magnificent shorts At Night, Small Apartment and Las Historias Mas Sexy Del Mundo! No. 2, an expert pastiche on the aesthetics of late 60s European porn. At Night, from directors Philip Aceto and Max Landes, riffs in Lynch territory on an unhappy couple watching a Psychoesque murder scene that sparks a series of escalating, unarticulated desires within them. Nearly without words, built for maximum glide, a marvel of precise camera placement, tracking shots and sound design, the film is starkly beautiful and deeply unsettling.
Small Apartment, from director Andrew Betzer, feels like a campanion piece to Daniel Malloy'sDad, a short which played Sundance last year. Both films deal, in fairly naturalistic terms, with the sexual malaise of a lonely individual who lives in close proximity to a more fuffilled couple. In Malloy's film, it's a thirtysomething driven to the brink by his parents sexual hijinks which he flits away watching porn; In Betzer's picture, its a father, sharing an apartment with his son, who films his son having sex with his girlfriend. After a brief, wordless lunch with the couple, they leave and he masturbates to the tape, only to stop, blinking at tears. The film, despite what I just described, is deeply funny and quite moving, shot by DP Sean Williams with some of the low-fi immediacy he brought to Ronnie Bronstein'sFrownland, a favorite on these pages.
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: VIRGINIA WILLIAMS, FRONTRUNNER
Mon, Jan 21st, 10am Tues, Jan 24th, 8:30pm
Frontrunner tells the story of this Dr. Massounda Jalal, an Afghani medical doctor and mother of three, who ran for the Presidency of Afghanistan. As a children's advocate, she defied the murderous Taliban regime, and amidst death threats and bomb attacks, continues to work for progressive political policy in the troubled state.
Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?
Strangely enough, I was in Hawaii where I was screening the work-in-progress of the film at 'Girlfest' in Honolulu. I was thrilled to be accepted to Slamdance, as I knew this would likely be our World Premiere, and to be in the hands of accomplished fellow-filmmakers is a real honor.
What initially interested you Massouda Jalal? When did you first learn about her?
I traveled to Afghanistan in June 2002 to scout a film about Afghan women's rights activists, and they were holding an Emergency Election Caucus to elect a transitional president. 6 months after the fall of the Taliban and this one woman stood up and nominated herself---one of just two people, man or woman who had the courage to do that. She wasn't allowed to walk down the street without a burka a few months prior. At that point my camera made a quick swish pan in her direction and didn't move for 4 years.
How did you find financing for the project?
Ah financing. The bane of every indie filmmaker's existence. Initially I got a small research grant from ITVS to do the scout, then the MacArthur Foundation came through with big enough chunk to get me through the first shoot. We also got some money from the Tides Foundation and Afghan Women Leaders Connect. For whatever reason I couldn't raise any $ for the actual election shoot, and I know I wouldn't have a film if I didn't shoot it, so Bank of America (loan) and my own $ ended up pulling me through the last one. We basically made a 500K film for $175, so I'm hoping to recoup some of that obviously. We got to Slamdance on fumes!
I produce documentaries and series for cable television and it's ridiculous how EASY it is to get a couple hundred thou to make a doc that's going to be shown a couple times and do virtually nothing for the good of society. It just shouldn't be so hard in my opinion-- I think the US could learn a lot from the Danes, Canadians and Aussies as far as how to provide real money for filmmakers. Stepping down from the soapbox now...
Has the political situation improved or regressed because of American involvement in Afghanistan?
I think initially the political situation improved, there was a real sense of hope you sensed from the Afghan people once the Taliban were initially run out. Unfortunately all the money that was promised for reconstruction was not delivered, and Afghans were left holding the ball, deflated and useless. Now the resurgence of the Taliban and other extremists groups threaten peace and security, and human rights abuses are on the increase. Given the fate of Benizar Bhutto it makes me very fearful for Massouda if she decides to run again next year.
In your research and hunt for archival footage, which sources were most helpful? I made friends with the archival arm of the new orgs, as some of the footage was not that easy to find online and they had to help me. CNN and ABC Video Source I think had most of what we needed, most of it from the first election in 2002 that I was unable to shoot a lot of.
Has Dr. Jalal seen the film? If so, how did she react. If not, are their plans to screen it for her?
It was important to me that Massouda see the film before the premiere, and I sent it to her over a month ago. Unfortunately I think it's held up with the "content police" so I may have to get it to her another way. She has been nothing but supportive of us in making this film, and fearless in her desire to get her message of tolerance out to the Afghan people. Given her consent, we'll premiere the film in Afghanistan after our international premiere, then show it via mobile cinemas to Afghans all over the country. She'll come to the the US in February for the East Coast premiere of FRONTRUNNER at the Miami International Film Festival.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?
The biggest challenge was to construct a cinema verité film out from over 200 hours of footage, in three different languages. Sometimes it was like opening a present when you got the stuff translated--'so that's what they were saying,' kinda thing. Getting the film to have a real narrative feel, constructed from scenes rather than soundbites was something that our story consultant, Fernanda Rossi, helped us with immensely. I also had a great editor, Steve Armstrong, who tackled every scene like it was his last. Diana Logreira, our final editor, spit-polished the result. I keep saying the next film will be local, a short, and in English.
Any other projects in the pipeline?
We're investigating developing a fictional feature of Massouda's life. There are many dramatic events that couldn't be told in our film, from her days working as a medical doctor during the Taliban to her run for president. In the 'new media' realm, I'm developing an online leadership toolkit for girls called "Be a Frontrunner!" It's sort of "Myspace with a conscience," where girls can go and create and contribute media for social causes. (www.womenrule.tv) We need VC money for that though. I'm hoping it will be easier than raising money for a film!
# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/19/2008 11:35:00 AM
Comments (0)
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: PHIL MUCCI, FAR OUT
Sat, Jan 19th, 8:30pm Wed, Jan 23rd, 10am
In 1972, a flamboyant producer's Hollywood party takes a strange turn when an uninvited guest comes for more than sex and drugs. This is Phil Mucci’s follow up to The Listening Dead, which wowed audiences at Slamdance 2007.
Tell us about the premise of Far Out? What informs it and when did you conceive of it?
The premise is very much like one of Z-Man's parties in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. A fabulous Hollywood producer is throwing an outrageous house party full of sex and drugs. When Fresno arrives, he brings an uninvited, uninitiated guest, Carmilla. She seems quiet and shy at first, but soon makes herself right at home!
In many ways FAR OUT was my own creative reaction to the somber black and white gothic fable of my first short film, THE LISTENING DEAD. I wanted to make something as different as I could, something more colorful with a lot more camera movement, and a much more overt sense of humor.
I first came up with the idea while I was thinking up concepts to promote the Erie Horror Film Festival. They wanted something much shorter, but the idea eventually grew to over 4 and a half minutes in length. I decided to just make it for myself as a counterpoint to THE LISTENING DEAD. This was in July of 2006...
What we're the biggest challenges in creating the period look and filmic texture? It really sells the conceit very well immediately.
The challenges was getting modern, 16mm film to look like the old, chunky, grainy film of the period! The emulsions we're using now are gorgeous, with lots of sharp details and very fine grain. I think modern super 16mm can look as good as 35mm from the early 70's, no question about it. To get it as close as we could, we shot on 500 speed film, pushed one stop. Then in the color-timing session at Technicolor, we really worked on lightening the blacks, and adding red to them, to create a sense that the film had faded over time. We also de-saturated the colors, which were very vivid originally. Later, in After Effects, I added even MORE grain, and some softening filters.
How does the process begin for you of conceptualizing film generally and what debt does Far Out owe to 70s genre cinema?
I'm really a film "fan" first and foremost. When I'm developing a film, I first think about the kind of movie I would want to see as an audience. Of course, I'm also thinking about what I want to shoot as a director, techniques I want to try, or styles I want to explore. Having been a photographer for 11 years, every project is like film school for me!
FAR OUT is a kind of a tribute to the low-budget independent drive-in flicks of the late sixties and early seventies. From the US, I was inspired by some of the Roger Corman produced flicks like THE TRIP and PSYCH-OUT, but mostly BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, directed by Russ Meyer. I was also influenced by European directors working around the same time, especially Mario Bava and Jess Franco. Of all of these, FAR OUT owes a debt to BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, and Mario Bava's 5 DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON the most.
The Listening Dead was hit and award winner at Slamdance last year after a long niche festival run on the sci-fi/horror circuit. How has your perspective on film festivals been altered by these experiences?
I really enjoy traveling on the film festival circuit, but I think experience has taught me to be much more selective when deciding which festivals to actually attend personally. It gets very expensive very quickly, especially in the US. Most European festivals beyond a certain size or age will pay for your hotel and meals, even if you've only got a short film in the festival. This is unheard of in the US. With THE LISTENING DEAD, I went to a lot of the festivals . Some I loved, others, not so much. With FAR OUT I decided to be much more selective.
The best part of the film festival world is meeting all of your fellow filmmakers and die-hard cinema journalists. I've forged great relationships with people from all over the world. The worst part of the festival circuit, beyond the expense, is when you realize the festival you've attended is more or less a marketing campaign for the people who run it, and that they don't really care about the filmmakers at all. There are more of these types of festivals than you would probably believe, and that's too bad.
What are the biggest challenges that you face as a short filmmaker in a world that prioritizes and commercializes feature filmmaking in ways that shorts aren't?
I don't really consider myself a "short filmmaker", just a filmmaker. The medium of shorts allows you to work on a film without outside involvement. I financed both of my short films with my own money. When you're paying the bill, you get to call all the shots. Of course, it also helps if you're the writer, director, and editor, but you get my point. It's about having the freedom to express your ideas without compromise. That's the draw of short films for me.
And I think they are becoming more and more commercialized. I have sold both short films to various outlets, though not for much money. FAR OUT was purchased by The Sundance Channel after it's very first screening. I think as technology advances, more and more people will have portable video players that can stream live from the web. Broadband broadcasting outlets will make more and more money, and we're going to see a huge increase in demand for video content 5 minutes and under. It's already happening.
What draws you to kitchy, morbid, ironic subject matter?
I love the look of certain time periods. I think as time has worn on, a lot styles have begun to merge, and a boring homogeny has been the sad result. I like seeing different things, from different times, because they reflect different attitudes and social mores. I think when you approach these time periods with your modern sensibilities, you end up commenting on our own time as much as the past. The way we look back at our past, in many ways, says more about our present than anything else. As far as where the morbid sensibility comes from, I guess it's because when I was a kid I watched monster movies every Saturday morning instead of cartoons. Let that be a lesson to all you parents out there!
Can we expect more of the same, or do you plan to work in other genres and forms?
I love genre films, so I can safely say "yes" to the first part of your question. I'd like to explore some science-fiction as well as more horror/fantasy ideas. I tend to get bored doing the same thing over andover again, so who knows. I can't imagine I'll ever shoot a romantic comedy, a bio-pic, or a bible film, but never say never!
What projects are down the pipeline?
I'm currently in negotiations to direct my first feature film, a horror /comedy. If all goes well, I should be shooting that this summer. After Slamdance, I will be directing a music video for The Black Keys. Should be a blast!
# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/19/2008 11:25:00 AM
Comments (0)
Friday, January 18, 2008
DECONSTRUCTING THE DGA DEAL
The Directors Guild of America has reached a tentative deal with the AMPTP, and now its time to weigh in on it. However, coming as it did on the eve of Sundance, much of the working film industry press is a bit distracted. Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes have a solid article in today's New York Times, in which they outline how the DGA's different negotiating philosophy and lengthy pre-negotiation back channel conversations led to a quick deal.
Over at the Working Life blog, labor activist and former Senatorial candidate Jonathan Tasini is doing the math, reviewing the deal point by point and offering his thoughts. At first glance he seems pretty mixed on the deal's merits for workers, particularly objecting to its qualifications on new media jurisdiction. Click on the link above for his detailed comments.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/18/2008 08:54:00 PM
Comments (2)
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER INTERVIEWS: STEVE CLARK, MIKE LANDRY, AND CARLOS VELASQUEZ, FROST
Sat, Jan 19th, 8:30pm Wed, Jan 23rd, 10am
Interview by Brandon Harris
Jack Frost’s playboy lifestyle in New York City is rocked by the news that his childhood love is engaged. Jack plunges into whiskey and self-destruction. until his eleven-year-old neighbor, Sophie, an unlikely mother figure, leads Jack back into himself, and out of the nostalgia and excess that consumed him.
Interview with Steve Clark
Where were you when you heard you'd been accepted to Slamdance and how did you react? I was in my apartment in NYC about to take a shower, when I picked up the phone, and one of our producers told me, "Congrats, I think we got into Slamdance." I said, "Great . . . but what does that mean: you think? Did we get in?" And he said, "Well, I'll forward you the email," which was not the introductory congratulatory email, but a request for all these materials. We all read it a few times. I called up Slamdance and they said they had spoken to one of our producers and told him we'd been accepted, but that producer assured us he hadn't spoken to anyone. We thought maybe we'd been confused with another film . . . but after a few more sheepish calls to Sarah Diamond, we understood we'd been accepted. Then there was much jumping around.
Tell us about the genesis of the script? What drew you to the story? I wrote the script with my friend Thomas Moffett who worked with me for years at The Paris Review. We wanted to write a script about a guy who seemed to have everything, but really didn't. To start in what many perceive as a superficial world, and to find the glowing real thing underneath. More than anything it was the human way the people in the script connected to each other that made this interesting.
How were you able to find financing for the project? The producers begged, borrowed and stole.
What debt does the film owe to other films or filmmakers provided some influence? The film probably owes more to other films and filmmakers than I could list here. But we were not trying to emulate a style or anyone in particular. We wanted to tell an authentic story that combined breathing room - that European slowness – with a few of those American comic spikes. We wanted to see that combination.
What relevance does the Jack Frost tale have for us today? It may or may not have relevance. That depends on who is watching and how they feel about it. If it moves them or is something that they remember in the next day or the next year, then it will have had some relevance for them.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production? Getting the movie to move at the beginning. That had mostly to do with fiddling with the order of the scenes in the editing room.
Any other projects in the pipeline? Well, I've written five other screenplays . . . And after Slamdance, I am turning off my phone and writing another one right away . . . So yes, I hope so . . .
Interview with Mike Landry and Carlos Velasquez
Where were you when you heard you'd been accepted to Slamdance and how did you react? We were in the production office of our new film, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead. It was like crazy time in pre production when you are trying to keep it together by answering 20 phone calls, 20 emails and 20 texts all at the same time and one of them was from Slamdance. We were pretty stoked to have our first feature in such a badass festival.
Tell us about the genesis of the script? What drew you to the story? We were excited about doing a film about an international playboy in Manhattan and all that lifestyle entails. Sure, we thought it would be fun with the women and the nightclubs but the dark side of the character really sealed the deal. Sometimes you want to see the guy who has everything trying to figure out how his life got so fucked up and Jack's life is nothing if not that.
How were you able to find financing for the project? Mainly begging. Just kidding. Steve, Carlos and I went out and raised the money ourselves because we didn't want to have to compromise the film by caving into investors who like to extract their pound of flesh for their investment.
What debt does the film owe to other films or filmmakers provided some influence? Frost owes a debt to the seminal films of the seventies like Manhattan that are beautiful, funny and sad at the same time. Steve was adamant about it not being to heavily edited and really into letting the actors and the scenes breathe and I think it shows in the well crafted performances which we hope will be a hallmark of CPlus Pictures productions.
What relevance does the Jack Frost tale have for us today? The tale of Jack Frost is about a guy who will do anything not to grow up. It's about letting go of those childhood fantasies when they become debilitating. Some of us are still working out this kind of stuff.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production? It was really tough to put the script down and reshuffle things to make a better film. The script was awesome, but it was tough introducing all of the insane characters in Jack's life in a clear, concise manner without losing the soul of the thing.
Any other projects in the pipeline? Look out for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead starring Jake Hoffman, Devon Aoki, Johnny Ventimiglia with Ralph Macchio and Jeremy Sisto. It's a surreal take on Hamlet, vampires and the Holy Grail that was shot on the red camera and looks awesome. We have a couple other scripts in various stages of development that we will be producing by casting actors in roles you don't normally see them in. That's our thing...and making sure everyone has a great time doing it.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/18/2008 11:34:00 AM
Comments (0)
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: EVA WEBER, CITY OF CRANES
Fri, Jan 18th 4:30pm Tues, Jan 22nd, 7pm
Interview by Brandon Harris
Eva Weber's doc short City of Cranes takes you on a journey high up in the sky, to look at London’s ever-changing landscape through the eyes and words of crane drivers. It is a glimpse into a world unnoticed by most of us, yet fundamental to our lives.
What initially drew you to the world of cranes? I started making this film as I was fascinated by the fact that there is almost another world above London; yet most of us never look up to notice cranes or their drivers. Cranes dominate our cityscape; and once you notice them, you can see them literally everywhere; yet the men who operate these giant structures are often overlooked as they almost merge with their machines. Spending most of their time up in the crane, they become invisible to the people on the site and passers-by. They in turn can see everything going on around them, yet their only way to connect with the world below is by watching it from a distance. In many ways, the film builds and expand on themes touched upon in my last film ‘The Intimacy of Strangers’ - the conflict between being intimate yet distant; and how our lives are shaped by our urban environment.
The film has a companion piece, The Solitary Life of Cranes. Could you explain the relationship between the two? City of Cranes is divided into four chapters, each highlighting a different aspect of what it means to be a crane driver: "The City Above," "The Last Topman," "Ballet of Cranes" and "Solitary." The four chapters work together to give the viewer a fascinating insight into a world unnoticed by most of us, yet fundamental to our lives. The Solitary LIfe of Cranes, on the other hand, is more of a city symphony seen through the eyes of the drivers. Within the loose structure of a day, starting with the drivers climbing up at dawn and ending with them coming down after a nightshift, the film observes the city as it awakens with a bustle of activity, through the action of midday, until it calms down again deep into the night. Throughout, the drivers share their thoughts and reflections on London and life in general.
How did you go about meeting crane drivers and other individuals to detail the impact of the machines, both on their personal lives and the public at large? When I started researching the film, I went to one of the biggest construction sites in London which happens to be near my home in East London. I asked whether I could talk to some of the crane drivers working on the site, and the drivers there were incredibly friendly and forthcoming. Unfortunately, I was never able to film at this particular site; however, I did interview some of the drivers for the film. I subsequently spent many days traveling round London, visiting other sites and talking to drivers. I quickly found out that the world of cranes is quite a small one: Word of mouth travelled very quickly, and by the time, I approached other sites, the drivers there had already heard about my project. I also met many other people working on construction sites or working with cranes, from banksmen, who direct the drivers from the ground, to the crane erectors, who erect and take cranes down.
Over the course of the project, I learned to navigate around London in the same way as crane drivers do. Rather than looking for street names, I would look for a crane in the skyline which I knew was near the place I wanted to go to. It actually made me look at London in a new way, as I learned to appreciate how close some places are to each other, and how small the City of London itself is.
You work on the borderline of documentary and narrative production. Which do you prefer and why? What are the unique pleasures of each? For me, filmmaking is about telling stories from surprising angles, whether they are fictional or documentary-based. Whilst I started out making fiction shorts, my last three films have been documentaries. I have found that working across the two areas actually helps me in my filmmaking: Whilst short films have taught me about storytelling, dialogue and casting; I have found documentaries a great training ground to learn about human behaviour. I love observing people closely, so I can bring these insights to working with actors, to help them to create credible characters.
What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production? As I had decided to only do audio interviews with the drivers, the main challenge in editing the film was to combine their words and the visuals in such a way to compel the viewer into the world of the drivers. We probably spent most of the time working out the structure, first by just editing the audio interviews without any vision, before joining this up with the images. Once we had found the best structure, the rest of the editing went very quickly.
Any other projects in the pipeline? For the last year, I have been developing a feature-length documentary project, entitled La Storage, through the Discovery Campus Masterschool. Humorous, romantic and surprising, La Storage is the story of the winners and losers of self storage auctions and their dreams and hopes for happiness. I have also just been commissioned to make another short documentary for the Scottish Documentary Institute, which is due to be completed in April. Later this year, I am hoping to travel to China to research my first fiction feature which is based there.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/18/2008 11:07:00 AM
Comments (0)
SLAMDANCE DIRECTOR INTERVIEW: CYNTHIA LESTER, MY MOTHER'S GARDEN
Interview by Brandon Harris
As Sundance begins this weekend, the world of independent cinema once again turns its attention to this snowy resort town thirty miles outside of Salt Lake. Yet, since 1995, Sundance hasn’t been the only act in town. The 2008 Slamdance Film Festival begins today at Park City’s Treasure Mountain Inn, opening with Randall Cole’s Real Time, a brisk indie comedy starring Randy Quaid. As a brief snapshot of some of the 29 features and 67 shorts that Slamdance will screen in the next nine days, I caught up with thirteen Slamdance Filmmakers to discuss their films with us.
My Mother’s Garden
Directed by Cynthia Lester Sat, Jan 19th, 3:30pm Sun, Jan 22nd, 4:30pm
The story of Eugenia Lester, a woman afflicted with hoarding disorder, and her three children, who struggle with the devastating consequences of her disease. Born in Poland in 1944 and raised in an austere communist society by an Auschwitz survivor, she moved to the consumer driven disposable society of America in 1974 and was overwhelmed by a culture of excess.
Where were you when you heard you were accepted to Slamdance and how did it make you feel? I was at work, I work full time at a crisis center, G.E.M.S, www.gems-girls.org which helps girls on the street get a better change at life, so I had to run outside and scream, YES! Thank you! It really is a dream come true, I first came to Slamdance/Sundance when I was a teenager, I went to a performing arts school in the center of Pacoima. I think it was a program designed to help kids stay in school, we sold candy bars to pay for our trip. And now I have come full circle, I'm living the dream. Now, I know it taks a whole lifetime of hard work to get here. I can't believe I'm actually at this point in my life. It wasn't an easy road but I just had to keep thinking to myself you have to finish this film, and now we're here!
When and why did it first occur to you to make a film about your mother's illness? I've always been trying to understand my mom. I first started making films about her in college, so this is kind of a continuation of that. I didn't realize the house had gotten that bad after I moved to NY. I kept wondering how we were going to help her and I would become paralyzed by fear of the unimaginable task in front of us. Finally my brothers and I sat down and said we have to do something now before the city comes in to take her house away. That's when I decided I would document the process as sort of a way to help me deal with the situation and create some sort of separation between the emotional toll this would take on me as a daughter and the responsibility I had as a caretaker to help her out of this. The first was to work together and figure out how we were going to get my mom to part with her "precious treasures" she had been collecting, making the film took a back seat sometimes, but I was able to put together a story that shows you a significant time in our life.
Did you initially see it a means to heal some of the wounds leftover from the childhood the film describes? I guess so, I wanted so bad to have a relationship with my mother and sometimes having the camera there reminded us to be civil with one another and take a step back and observe how we are treating each other, sometimes it helped us move past our own hang-ups to really observe how the other person is feeling in the situation. I think I have healed because I don't think I could be happy living my life knowing that someone in my family is suffering and this film gave me a chance to devote the last three years of my life to searching for answers that could hopefully create a better situation for my mom which in turn put me at ease. I don't think I will ever get back the fact that my childhood wasn't the best but I know that I have a strong family and even though we were poor and had a lot of difficult situations to get through which put strain on our relationships, it doesn't mean that we can't be a source of strength for other families. I always looked up to the "perfect" families next door, but from making this film, I guess I learned the true meaning of family. Even with my mother's illness, she is someone I can talk to and she won't judge me.
Has your mother seen the film? How does she feel about it? Yes, my mother has been a part of the filmmaking process. She even started directing me what to shoot and what story to tell after a while, ha! Which I encouraged because I want it to be very much her story and our story. She disagrees with the fact that she has hoarding disorder she is still very much in denial about her illness, I think its her strong sense of pride, which is an asset I wouldn't want her to lose, so parts of it inside the house are hard for her to deal with but she feels that this could hopefully help other families struggling with this illness and therefore supports the film.
Without clinical diagnostic criteria, do you think it is difficult for people to understand just how destructive obsessive hoarding can be? We included a few clips of interviews with doctors about this disorder in the film but we didn't use too much because it really wasn't working since this is such a personal story, it felt foreign to suddenly have a talking head tell you about the disorder. I tried developing other creative ways to get this information across but that too felt jarring since the footage is very cinema verite and I didn't want to break the focus of the story, which is about a family in crisis. I think this story has just as much to do with poverty and being an immigrant, single mother as it has to do with hoarding disorder. I feel there are so many factors that go into hoarding disorder and each case is so individualized depending on that persons psychological, socio-economic, and trauma background that it was more important for me to share my mother's personal story, rather than generalize about hoarding disorder. Besides, I also feel like its so dehumanizing to just categorize someone as mentally ill and therefore they have such and such symptoms and that is who they are. No, that is only a small part of who they are, they could be a talented musician or have other strength that need to be taken into context. I think the film shows for itself how destructive it can be when you remove someone from their security…by showing how traumatic it was for my mother. But, the film follows our journey into learning about hoarding disorder, I didn't even know it existed when I first started making this film and didn't think my mom had it until I really started to observe her everyday life. So I felt it was more about the discovery about the illness than making a film about this topic.
What were the biggest challenges in constructing the film? Did you deliberate how certain editorial decisions would reflect on your mother? Yes, we were very conscious of being sensitive to how we portrayed my mother and brothers. I wanted to make sure the audience had a chance to meet my mom as a vibrant woman who has an amazing philosophy on life and cared about saving the environment and has a lot of strong morals we should all be concerned about as a community. I held back from focusing too much on the condition of the house because my mother was hesitent at first to letting us inside so I wanted to be true to the story and refrain from letting us inside. It was also a careful balance how much of the story was mine vs. my mother's, so I held back my personal story to let her story shine. I also incorporated some editorial decisions my mother requested, for example, getting to know her side of the story before we hear from the neighbors. I wanted to give her the upper hand in most situations and let her voice be heard.
Are any other projects in the pipeline? I would like to possibly develop a fictional version of my life, from when I left home on. Also, maybe developing another doc about the subject matter I deal with at the crisis center G.E.M.S, commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking. There was a film by David Schisgal last year about our girls in particular, "Very Young Girls", but even David encouraged further exploration on the subject matter and said I should definitely give my shot at it since I have some personal experience from the time I left home.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/18/2008 10:57:00 AM
Comments (2)
Thursday, January 17, 2008
SUNDANCE: AN AIRBORNE PREVIEW
As I type this I’m on my way to the Sundance Film Festival, where the Filmmaker team will be filing coverage all week. I’ll be blogging along with Jason Guerrasio and Justin Lowe; Jamie Stuart will be shooting video – creating one of his own typically personal and idiosyncratic portraits of festival life as well as filming interviews with directors and actors which you’ll see in the months ahead; if all goes well, Brian Chirls will be shooting and posting video from the fest’s panels and programs; and, Brandon Harris will be covering Slamdance, blogging news and reviews from the other Park City film festival.
Check out our pre-Sundance and Slamdance coverage by clicking through to the blog we’ve set up for our “Playing the Percentages” feature, in which we asked Sundance’s feature directors to tell us what they wished they had 10% more of when they made their feature. They've been going up daily, and by tomorrow all of the responses will be posted. For Slamdance, check this blog for Brandon Harris's reports from the fest, and for a series of interviews by Harris with Slamdance directors, check the "Web Exclusives" section tomorrow. And if you are attending Sundance and want to forward us any news, tips or opinions of your own, you can email me at filmmakermageditor at gmail.com with “Sundance” in the subject line.
So, before the festival kicks off, what am I looking forward to? With the catalog on my lap, here are some quick thoughts:
American Son: Neil Abramson made an interesting, visually striking and somewhat experimental independent film called Without Air back in 1997. His new film stars Nick Cannon and the always great Melonie Diaz along with Tom Sizemore in a supporting role. Shooting Sizemore was unforgettable television and after watching Sizemore plough through a schlocky horror film in that reality series I’m happy to see him here in something that should be a lot better.
Choke: This Chuck Palahniuk adaptation has top-flight talent up and down the line, including d.p. Tim Orr and editor Joel Klotz.
Downloading Nancy: This is one of those script’s that’s been around. I remember reading it years ago, and the only reason it’s taken a long time to get made is because of its truly dark subject matter -- it's about a woman who finds a man who agrees to kill her over the internet. At one point Holly Hunter and Stellan Skarsgaard were set; now it’s Maria Bello and Jason Patric. And the director? The fantastic video director Johan Renck in his feature debut. I’m really looking forward to this one.
Phoebe in Wonderland (pictured): Fantastic script by this year’s 25 New Face Daniel Barnz. I also read this one as well years ago and thought the script was great. Again, great talent up and down the line, and after her small but very moving moments in Reservation Road, I have no doubt that Elle Fanning will shine.
Pretty Bird: Paul Schneider has appeared in David Gordon Green’s films, including playing the lead in All the Real Girls. I always loved his in-person idiosyncratic humor and am excited to see what his directorial sensibility is like.
Sleep Dealer: Another provocative script that’s made the rounds. We selected writer/director Alex Rivera for the 25 New Faces back in 2002. And, this is one project that I predict will have been well served by the passing of time. Its themes – immigration, outsourcing, globalism, and technology – are way more relevant now than when Rivera started. Sensibility wise, the script reminded me a bit of Verhoeven in its sly sci-fi satire.
Sugar: Half Nelson writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck make their return to Sundance with a film about a Dominican baseball player trying to make it in the U.S. minor leagues. I really admire these guys for not getting mired in development hell and making another film fairly quickly after Half Nelson. And I hope Sundance turns out happily for them; reportedly, due to the HBO/Picturehouse split, the film has no theatrical distributor and will be placed on the market at the festival.
Sunshine Cleaning. Megan Holley's script, about two sisters who open a crime scene cleaning service was fantastic when I read it years ago. Since then, when it was a intriguing indie dramedy, the film has scaled up considerably with director Christine Jeffs taking the reins. It stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in the lead roles. Very high hopes for this one.
The Wackness: The buzz is really good on Jonathan Levine’s comedy, and I will annoyingly point out that it stars another 25 New Face, Olivia Thirlby.
A Complete History of My Sexual Failures: Know nothing about it, but I like the concept, a sort of doc version of Broken Flowers.
Be Kind Rewind: Okay, I’m not really looking forward to it because I’ve already seen it, but I do love Michel Gondry’s wonderful celebration of DIY artmaking. For those who’ve only seen the trailers: the film is a lot better and has a lot more substance to it.
Death in Love: I’ve liked Boaz Yakin’s features, particularly Fresh, and I was really taken by his heart-felt answer to our “10%” question, in which he wished that the financiers who bailed on his film had 10% more faith in him. Yakin says he has put everything he owns into this film, so I will be rooting for it.
The Great Buck Howard: After two magic-themed movies in recent years –- The Illusionist and The Prestige –- Sean McGinley brings us a film set within the world of mentalism, which is enjoying something of a resurgence now thanks to innovative performers like Derren Brown. I’m quite interested in this one.
The Guitar: Amos Poe’s script has been around for a while -- he wrote the first draft in 1994 -- and Poe has always been a fascinating writer (and director). Amy Redford directed this and Saffron Burrows, who I’ve always thought was pretty underrated, stars. Very eager to see this.
Henry Poole is Here: I’ve always liked Mark Pellington and am eager to see what is reportedly a very personal film from him.
Baghead: I read this script by the Duplasse Brothers shortly after seeing their film The Puffy Chair and thought it was great. It’s a comedy/horror hybrid about a group of actors who decide to jumpstart their careers by going to the woods and making an indie film. But soon someone – one of them? – starts terrorizing them by appearing, menacingly, wearing a bag over his (or her) head. The thing about the script was that this silly concept actually felt quite scary.
Birds of America: Read this script too and thought it definitely transcended its potentially too-quirky dysfunctional family relationship comedy. This film went through something of a whirlwind pre-production, signing on director Craig Lucas while the film was in prep.
Goliath: Long-awaited debut feature from Austin’s best-kept not-so-secret comedy geniuses the Zellner Brothers.
Momma's Man: Liked this script by 25 New Face Azazel Jacobs, but really liked it after seeing his previous feature, The Good Times Kid. I think he’s ferociously talented and it will be interesting to see his dad, experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, on screen as an actor.
Adventures of Power: I’m sounding like a broken record, I know, but I loved Ari Gold’s amazing short “Helicopter” back when we put him in our 25 New Faces” of 2004. Read this script too and thought it was smart and funny.
Half-Life: Saw early cuts of Jennifer Phang’s feature when we selected it for the IFP Rough Cuts Lab. Programmed in the Frontier section, this is one of those films that draws a real psychic bead on what life is like in this country right now.
Reversion: I was a big fan of Mia Trachinger’s previous film, Bunny. I know next to nothing about this but there was enough promise in Trachinger's previous film to make me excited about this one.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Marina Zenovitch's film looks to be something of a confrontational meditation on the live and times of the great director.
Nerakhoon: Directorial debut from genius d.p. Ellen Kuras is a documentary about a Laotian family who emigrate to the U.S. after the communist takeover in 1975. The film's principal subject is also its editor, and Kuras based this film on not only the family's history but also her friendship with them over 20 years.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/17/2008 11:32:00 PM
Comments (0)
LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST AXIUM
The Axium saga continues, now appearing that Defamer’s headline, “Axuim: The Enron of the Payroll Services World,” was less of an overstatement than it initially appeared. (Props to Defamer for continuing to cover a story that has resulted in hardship for thousands of entertainment industry employees and which has been relatively underplayed by the trades.)
Axium’s financier, Golden Tree Asset Management, has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit in California court against Axium principals John Visconti and Ronald Garber; their subsidiary companies, and their wives and ex-wives. I will try to have the full PDF of the lawsuit posted for your download soon (until then, Defamer has it on their page along with pictures of SI swimsuit model and "soft core porn actress" Amber Smith. Read below and you'll know why).
In the meantime, here are the suit’s “background facts.”
This is a case involving, among other things, massive fraud, theft, self-dealing and the looting of assets of the now-bankrupt Axium International, Inc., one of the entertainment industry’s leading payroll services firms, and all of the subsidiaries of Axium Holdings, Inc. (collectively, “Axium”). Defendants John Visconti and Garber, in connection with and through their investment vehicles, UAF and JVE, and their respective wives or ex-wives, Defendants Maya Visconti and Susan Cruz, and their servant, agent or employee, Christy Futak, perpetrated a multi-year scheme to create fictitious profit by filing false returns that understated Axium’s employment tax liabilities by tens (and perhaps hundreds) of millions of dollars, and by diverting untold millions of dollars in cash and other assets from Axium to secret bank accounts and otherwise to their own personal uses. Defendants further used Axium’s concocted and false financial condition to induce Golden Tree and certain other lenders to extend $130 million in financing between 2004 and 2007, which loans were secured by substantially all of Axium’s assets. Then, in violation of numerous loan covenants, Defendants diverted those assets out of Axium, using Axium as their own personal piggy bank to finance their extravagant lifestyles. While Defendants John Visconti and Garber in particular gorged themselves on the fruits of deception and fraud, Axium, its clients and roughly 550 employees suffered, ultimately, with the loss of their jobs. When the IRS recently began to unearth Defendant’s fraudulent scheme, Defendants John Visconti and Garber directed Axium to pay to the IRS tens of millions of dollars in previously undisclosed past-due tax liabilities and unnecessary interest and penalties, in the hopes of preventing the IRS from asserting personal liability against them. Defendants’ pattern of fraud, theft and gross mismanagement and waste resulted in each of 40 Axium entities seeking bankruptcy protection on January 8, 2008, by the filing of Chapter 7 petitions in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California.
The filing totals 36 pages. Here are some of its other allegations:
1. John Visconti has gone by multiple names (Bijan Manoocherhri and John Manocheri) and has been issued two social security numbers and is linked to two other social security numbers.
2. Visconti’s ex-wife was given the use of company-financed Bentley that was later given to her in divorce proceedings.
3. Axium Amex cards were used to charge “large personal expenses,” including $40,000 at Tiffany’s for Valentine’s Day purposes, and not repaid.
4. Axium funds were used to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in both Garber and Visconti’s divorce proceedings.
5. “Model and actress” Amber Smith lived in a corporate apartment financed by Axium, and she was the recipient of “numerous large payments” as a “consultant” to the company.
6. Axium’s payment to the IRS of $31 million in delinquent tax charges in September, 2007 created a “significant tax drain” on the company, threatening the preservation of its business and its repayment responsibilities to Golden Tree.
7. Following this payment it was estimated that there was an additional $70 million to $100 million tax liability, which the lawsuit speculates arose from a scheme by the defendants to intentionally alter payroll dates to cover up the late deposit of payroll taxes.
8. Golden Tree put Axium and a sister company, Axium ECG, up for sale in November 2007. But in December Axium ECG reforecast its EFITDA from $9 million to $4 million, thus shaving almost $100 millon off its value. This reduction in value was key to Axium’s inability to generate additional capital.
9. According to the history in the lawsuit, Golden Tree still participated in efforts to borrow additional funds to keep Axium alive but these plans fell apart when Viscoti and Garber demanded a “waiver and release from all personal liability… In other words, Defendants John Visconti and Garber ‘tanked’ Axium because they could not extract personal protection against claims by Axium’s lenders.”
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/17/2008 04:51:00 PM
Comments (0)
Monday, January 14, 2008
MANN ON WIRE
Seith Mann's short film five deep breaths is one of the best we've seen in recent years, and it got the New York filmmaker selected to our 25 New Faces list -- in 2003. And now that Mann has made a name for himself directing episodes of HBO's hit The Wire, his short has surfaced again, this time via Bilge Ebiri at New York Magazine. Click here to both read about and see the film.
Here's Ebiri on Mann and his work:
The tale of two friends who get in too deep when they decide to help out a battered female friend, five deep breaths takes a small story of loyalty and turns it into something greater, a subtle and mournful meditation on African-American manhood. A model of economy and character development, it features two sterling lead performances. (Hector's co-star, Anslem Richardson, has appeared on As the World Turns and will be starring in the upcoming indie sci-fi feature 2k3.) The short screened at Sundance and won Best Narrative Short at the Los Angeles and Chicago Film Festivals. Mann has since also directed episodes of Grey's Anatomy, Friday Night Lights, and Entourage. He is currently at work on his debut feature. If it's as good as this short, we'll be very, very impressed.
After you finish watching it, click over to the site for 2k3, Gray Miller's forthcoming indie film which also stars Anslem Richardson and which was a participant in the IFP Rough Cuts Lab.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/14/2008 08:26:00 PM
Comments (1)
WINTER ISSUE AND SUNDANCE AROUND THE CORNER
For those who just read the blog, check out the main page all this week as we'll be highlighting the responses we got from many of the filmmakers with features at this year's Sundance Film Festival as they answer the question: if you had 10 percent more of anything, what would it be and why?
The responses are also in our Winter issue, which will premiere at Sundance (hits newsstands a week later) and also includes interviews with Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will Be Blood, Alex Gibney talks about his latest doc Taxi To The Dark Side and author Jonathan Safran Foer interviews Michel Gondry about Be Kind Rewind (which will screen in the Premieres section at Sundance). A selection of stories from the issue will appear on the site tomorrow.
Also on the site there's my wrap up piece on the Dubai International Film Festival as well as Nick Dawson's chat with the directors of The Band's Visit and Beaufort, two of the most successful Israeli films in what was a year of great films from that country (Beaufort opens this weekend). Dawson talks to Joseph Cedar (Beaufort) and Eran Kolirin (The Band's Visit) about the controversial decision to have Beaufort be Israel's submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar over The Band's Visit as well as the current state of Israeli cinema.
Enjoy. And see everyone in Park City.
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/14/2008 03:55:00 PM
Comments (0)
STRANGER IN A STRANGE AWARDS CEREMONY
With the Golden Globes having seemed to have been beamed in from some alternate universe, the timing is right for Jamie Stuart's latest short, in which a friendly space alien tries to grok that red-carpeted human ritual known as the awards show.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/14/2008 01:04:00 AM
Comments (0)
Sunday, January 13, 2008
WEEKEND BLOG ROUND-UP
Here are some posts that have caught my eye this week.
Jon Taplin, probably the only professor at the Annenberg School for Communication who can also lay claim to producing one of the seminal films of the '70s (Mean Streets), has a great blog that mixes his commentary on politics, economics and the film business. (Hat tip: Ted Hope.) The former Dylan tour manager and Merrill Lynch v.p. has written a two-parter entitled "Memo to Hollywood: Stop Making Movies." He compares Hollywood's battle for market share to players locked in the classic example of game theory, The Prisoner's Dilemma.
From the piece:
It would be in the financial and security self interest of both India and Pakistan to not spend billions on nuclear weapons, but because they don’t trust each-other, they continue to do so, instead of feeding their poor. Hollywood moguls, caught up in the useless notion of “Market share”, don’t trust each-other to not make more movies to grab greater share. The notion of market share of the box office never entered Hollywood’s lexicon until the Coca Cola company bought Columbia Pictures in 1982, bringing their supermarket shelf space POV to the movie business. Market share with a commodity product like sugar water is a fine notion. Market share with a one-off variable cost product like a movie is financial suicide.
At his DIY Filmmaker blog, Sujewa Ekanayake interviews director Pete Middleton, whose Driftwood was reportedly made for $200. As Middleton says that his film took three years to finish, in addition to figuring out low-cost production techniques he has also apparently created a new foodstuff that will end the problem of world hunger.
Tom Quinn, whose New Year's Parade is premiering in competition at Slamdance and was a participant in this year's IFP Rough Cuts Lab, is blogging about his road to Park City at The Workbook Project. In the current post he talks about a last minute picture change:
In the final hours before picture lock I managed to work in some footage I’ve been wrestling with a long time: the implosion of Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia. The implosion took place while we were still in the casting process, but I had managed to gain some high quality footage from a local videographer. Because of what it meant to the city and where it fell in the year, it always seemed like the perfect end of Act I, but I could never find the right lead in. This week it finally all clicked into place through a mix of the existing footage and a DVD of implosion coverage from South Philadelphia String Band member Harry Dougherty, who had family that lived next door to the stadium. He had shot amazing home video from their roof and I once had dreams of acquiring hours of camcorder footage of the event to build a South Philly Greek Chorus like the invasion of Prague in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But that was a whole other film in itself. However, I’m thrilled with how it turned out! It’s a great punctuation point to the family breakdown.
In addition to the CES event in Las Vegas this past week, one of the largest group of independent film producers -- the adult film industry -- had their annual gathering as well. In the past, the porn industry has been a bellwether for the movie business at large, having in the '80s been a prime mover in the nascent home video industry. This time, reports CNBC, the porn producers are just as confused as the rest of us.
In the site's "Panic in Pornville," the CNBC reporter discusses how the industry has been caught on the wrong side of the "HD vs. Blu-Ray" debate (porn producers committed to HD discs because of their cheaper production costs and lower license fees) as well within an uncertain business model in which volume of production, piracy, the internet and replicating costs are taking their toll.
Hustler could always turn to an Asian Blu-ray replicator, most of which charge less than their US counterparts, Rosenfeld says. But to do so could mean putting movie master copies straight into the hands of pirates who would illegally copy and distribute the movies themselves.
[Hustler Creative Director Drew] Rosenfeld says—tentatively—that he sees Blu-ray winning out over HD DVD in the end, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good business move to abandon the HD DVD format just yet.
"HD DVD is still a viable product, because there are a million players out there,” says Rosenfeld. “Why would all those people throw those new machines away?"
Jeff Snyder of KBeech Content, which produces about 16 movies a month, says market saturation has made it hard to make money with standard-definition discs, much less high-def. Basically anybody can make a movie and distribute it online with very little up-front money.
"It's hard to know where the market will go," Snyder says. "The question now is: Do you want to go HD at all? It's hard to get your money back these days. It's hard to move 1,000 (discs). It's not like it used to be. We used to move 5,000 pieces no problem."
Most adult filmmakers aren't abandoning hard copies just yet, though. Some online distributors are even expanding toward discs.
I'm a fan of Mike Kitchell's Esotika Erotica Psychotica blog, which extensively covers that fertile meeting place between international art cinema and exploitation film. It's a site where you will find Jacques Rivette rubbing shoulders with Jean Rollin. Today Kitchell has launched a larger home site that collects his reviews and essays, has a great links page, and offers a new discussion forum for talk about all manner of genre, Eurotrash, and avant-garde filmmaking. The framing on the site makes it difficult to link to individual articles, so I simply urge you to check it out.
Finally, I'm not sure what to make of B=X, a blog by David Geertz that chronicles his attempts to create a new film financing model. I'm reminded of that long New Yorker article from a couple of years back that discussed a company that "crunched the numbers" relating to genre, storyline and character, attempting to predict what films would be successful in the marketplace.
Geertz talks here about the title of his blog:
As for the title of the blog: B=X...well B stands for Biracy which is a new community of user financed content that I am developing at the soon to be www.biracy.com website, and X stands for the dividend that each user stands to make for supporting projects through this effort.
In the current post, he puts out a call for script readers:
B=X is looking for Script Coverage Writers to help conduct an experiment in motion picture funding. To help us with the Beta of our latest film funding model we need writers who have had experience in covering feature film scripts.
We are conducting an experiment to determine if aggregating script coverage that is given a numerical value can be used in cooperation with other empirical data to predict a films chance for success. Other groups have tried this in the past, some with writers involved without other data and some basing it merely on the writers comments. We feel that as film is a collaborative process there needs to be a combination of all values that go into the equation. Our problem is: What is the weight of each variable?
In a previous post, Geertz talks about the nature of his current work:
After continuing my own research on the ability to predetermine whether a film has an increased probability of ROI after it has been crunched from a series of data sets pertaining to the films content, producers, locations and about 47 other variables...I now know that very soon I should be able to deliver the first method of motion picture development that starts and ends with crunching data. Not to say that there are intuitive bits that are then converted into data to create a balanced approach to the overall equation, but the majority of the results thus far are beginning to look like they stem from empirical data sets.
Hmmm... I'll look forward to checking in on B=X from time to time to read about the company's discoveries.
One final note: I wrote a lot this week about the Axium bankruptcy, which I think is a huge and underreported story. If you or your production were affected by the Axium closure and would like to comment for an upcoming piece, please email me at filmmakermageditor at gmail.com.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/13/2008 10:51:00 AM
Comments (2)
At least three start-ups, each with a different business approach, are unveiling their corporate monikers and the names of their founders as they intensify the search for venture capital and top management. With names such as Hollywood Disrupted and Virtual Artists Inc., these new ventures have lured investors such as the Oscar-winning writer of "Rain Man" and the Emmy-winning scribe behind "Homicide," along with prominent software developers and technology executives....
"We should show the studios some gratitude for getting us together," said "Rain Man" coauthor Ron Bass, a member of the WGA's negotiating committee and an investor and director of Virtual Artists. "This is not just an Internet play, but the beginning of what the future is going to look like."
About 20 entertainment and software writers are investing an average of $10,000 for a chunk of Virtual Artists. Co-founded by Aaron Mendelsohn, a screenwriter who created "Air Bud," Virtual Artists plans to fund projects as varied as shorts and feature-length movies. Its other investors include star television writer Tom Fontana of "Homicide" and "Oz"; "Hotel Rwanda" co-writer and director Terry George; "Chicken Run" screenplay author Karey Kirkpatrick; and John Logan, writer of "Sweeney Todd" and "The Aviator." Susannah Grant, who wrote "Erin Brockovich," and Warren Leight, who runs the TV show "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," also have agreed to invest.
Later in the article Menn discusses the business plans of Hollywood Disrupted ("...a marketplace for the creative community as well as a launching pad for completed work") and Founders Media Group, which plans to "form a series of companies with writers and other creators. Each venture would zero in on a particular niche audience on the Web."
Mendelsohn has his elevator pitch down cold: “We are a coalition of top film and television writers and top tech innovators who are dedicated to creating and delivering professionally made content directly to the end user, and who believe in the model of freedom and inclusiveness over the model of control that has been employed by the big media conglomerates for the past 100 years,” he told NewTeeVee this week.
The strike, Mendelsohn said, has been crucial to the project’s inspiration in more ways than one: “Otherwise we’re all just too damn busy rowing the boat.”
Virtual Artists will offer professional writers deals to develop and produce films, TV shows and shorts for a reduced fee but a larger ownership stake. It will also look to acquire content. Mendelsohn said he was primarily targeting the 12,000 members of the WGA, “But if there’s a great movie that’s created by some kid in Iowa or Beirut who has a real gift for storytelling, we’re definitely going to be looking for the gems out there.”
Prized possession: I have a mystery box from Tannen's Magic in New York. It's a cardboard box with a question mark printed on it. It's one of those things you buy for $15 and they advertise that it has at least $20 worth of stuff inside. I've never opened it. I love the fact that it has this mysterious value as long as I don't open it.
"It's a mess," said writer-producer Jody Savin, who with her writer-director husband, Randall Miller, had "tens of thousands" of dollars frozen in an Axium payroll account for their upcoming feature film, "Bottle Shock."
Still, they consider themselves better off than some other Axium clients who were required to deposit a percentage of payroll amounts to be processed by the Los Angeles company.
"We have a friend who had just wired them $500,000 to do payroll when they went down," Savin said. "For a small movie, that's crippling."
When might Savin and others see their money again?
The short answer is "not in the immediate future," said Howard Ehrenberg, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who now oversees Axium's finances.
He said Axium's largest creditor, Golden Tree Asset Management, a New York investment firm, seized $22 million from company accounts that had secured a $140-million loan on which Axium defaulted.
"Those were funds that belonged to all of the customers of Axium as well as Axium's own funds," Ehrenberg said of the seized cash.
Golden Tree declined to comment Wednesday.
Ehrenberg said he was now trying to sell company assets, including a proprietary software program known as RightsMax, to recoup money for creditors. Among the largest, apparently, is the Internal Revenue Service.
"I understand that the IRS is owed tens of millions of dollars in unpaid payroll taxes," he said.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/10/2008 10:07:00 AM
Comments (0)
SIGHTS SKYWARD
Filmmaker Lance Weiler, whose Workbook Project has, in a short while, become an indispensable source of information on independent film production and marketing, is launching a new event that employs his expertise in online distribution to help emerging filmmakers. Entitled "From Here to Awesome," it is a multi-exhibition-platform film festival created in collaboration with two other filmmakers well known to the Filmmaker audience: Arin Crumley and M dot Strange.
Here is more information about the festival from the press release, and look forward to news of its progress on the blog in coming weeks.
NEW DISCOVERY AND DISTRIBUTION FESTIVAL "FROM HERE TO AWESOME" ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS STARTING JAN 10th.
Have you made a film you think the world should see? FROM HERE TO AWESOME is a discovery and distribution festival that might be the perfect system to get your film blasted to audiences in theaters, living rooms, online and via mobile phones.
All filmmakers are welcome to be a part of the festival. There are NO submission fees, and filmmakers retain their rights while receiving revenue directly from the distribution outlets. A wide range of major promotional partners and distribution platforms are on board. All we need now is your film. Please submit ASAP to give the festival¹s audience time to vote your film into the April Showcase.
FHTA was founded by DIY filmmaking pioneers Lance Weiler (The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma), Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) and M dot Strange (We Are The Strange).
For filmmakers it is the best of times and worst of times. The tools are more accessible but the market has become saturated. Less and less films are getting traditional distribution deals. From Here to Awesome is an attempt to answer some of the largest issues facing filmmakers today - discovery, distribution and sustainability." says festival co-founder Lance Weiler.
Incidentally, Lance has written a long article on the ways in which independent filmmakers can see their work distributed, either by themselves or through existing distributors, on the 'net. It appears in the next issue ofFilmmaker, which hits the stands in about two weeks.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/10/2008 01:18:00 AM
Comments (1)
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
THE AXIUM PAYROLL STORY UNFOLDS...
In my initial post on the sudden bankruptcy filing of Axium Payroll Services, I commented on the potentially huge effect it would have on independent films currently in production and using Axium for their payroll. Typically, a small film will have posted some kind of payroll bond or advance that payroll monies are being drawn down against. Now, news is coming in from the production community about all of this.
I received this email from NYC production accountant Joe Lombardi, currently working on a production affected by Axium's shutdown, which I am reprinting with his permission:
I have to say it was chaotic yesterday, everyone calling all day, wanting to know what's going on. It was funny how many different rumors start flying around. The two things that anger me the most about all of this [relate to] the small shows that have deposits over there. A good friend of mine finished a small show and had a deposit that the editing and looping was to be drawn down from. Now he has lost that deposit. You know how tough it will be for them to find a way to get more money and finish this show now. Another show I am with not only loses it's deposit, but now they may have checks from last week's payroll bounce and they will have to redo the checks from another venue. Because they have already paid Axium's invoice they cannot recoup that money and the new checks being done will be paying that cost a second time. Not only will the deposit be a contingency hit, but all of the cost of these checks being re-done will be as well. Cast & Crew & Entertainment Partners I heard have been great. I called Cast & Crew Monday night when I found out, and they called me first thing in the morning. Scott Perry went over all of the ways we could transition to C&C, they really made it easy and we should be able to get payroll checks this week. I have heard from other payroll people that EP has been getting the same requests and have been accomodating as well.
Among the various outlets reporting on Axium today is the New York Post, which headlines their story "Payroll Company is Casualty of Writers Strike." I was asked about this last night. I don't think the WGA strike can be labelled the prime reason, although, if the company was overextended, the production slowdown currently being caused by the strike would have been a contributing factor. (In the body of its story, the Post clarifies this a bit, quoting a source "close to the company" who said that the WGA strike was "the tipping point."
The Post also has this detail, which corresponds with what I have heard as well:
Axium, which is based in Los Angeles but has offices in New York, London, Toronto and Vancouver, BC, closed shop after lenders refused to extend its credit line, sources said.
The company's biggest secured lender, Golden Tree Asset Management, a $14 billion New York hedge fund, made the decision to pull the plug, sources said, adding that Golden Tree is the first in line to be repaid when Axium sells its assets.
The Daily Beery Blog has a post up entitled "What to Do if Your Payroll Company Suddenly Closes." The post points out the particularly disastrous tax season timing of Axium's closure. As it is shut down, Axium presumably will not be able to send out W2s to the employees of all the productions it has handled this year. Furthermore, given the circumstances, cast and crew employed by Axium in 2007 may want to make sure that their withholding taxes were properly filed by Axium to the IRS. The site links to EFTPS Online, the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System, which allows workers to do this.
Other comments on the Axium story submitted by readers of this blog can be found in the comments section of yesterday's original blog post.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/09/2008 10:19:00 AM
Comments (0)
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
VARIETY REPORTS ON AXIUM BANKRUPTCY
Variety has posted its story on the Axium bankruptcy, which we wrote about in the blog post below. Their story has a couple of quotes from affected parties -- a director, Charles Matthau, who says he is owed $75,000 of his director's fee on an indie film, and a production executive who comments on the loss of the long-term accounting and record-keeping functions of Axium's software.
Earlier in the day I talked with an indie distributor who used Axium to pay SAG and DGA residuals on the company's DVD releases. The DGA had called him and told him to cancel any checks he had recently written to the payroll company. He was hoping the SAG residuals he had just paid through Axium had reached the guild and wondered what would happen if they had not.
A SAG rep talks to Variety and gives the answer:
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG's deputy national exec director and general counsel, said in a statement, "Screen Actors Guild is investigating the situation and will take every action possible to protect the interests of our members. While we are closely following the status of Axium, it is important to bear in mind that payment to talent is ultimately the responsibility of the employers and not the payroll companies they choose to engage."
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/08/2008 11:32:00 PM
Comments (1)
BREAKING NEWS: AXIUM PAYROLL SHUTS DOWN
In a sudden and stunning piece of news that's just breaking within the film production comunity, Axium, one of the industry's largest payroll services and a leader in the administration of state tax incentives for independent producers, is closing and will be filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In a Chapter 7 corporate bankruptcy, a company ceases its operations and its assets are liquidated to its creditors and investors by a court-appointed trustee. We will try to have more details, including news of what will happen to current productions that have their payroll with Axium, soon.
UPDATE, 7:00PM: News on Axium's closing is beginning to appear in other media outlets. The Hollywood Reporter is currently headlining it on their site in a story written by Borys Kit and Carolyn Giardina.
From the piece:
Axium International, the industry's largest payroll services providers as well as a source for production and gap financing, has closed its doors indefinitely.
The company's home office on Wilshire Boulevard as well offices in Burbank, New York, Vancouver, Toronto and London are quiet, with employees told via e-mail not to show up to work starting Tuesday.
Sources said that company president Ruben Rodriguez was no longer with the firm.
The Hollywood Reporter also reports that one of its sources claims that the IRS was involved in the shutdown, although the IRS would not comment.
Defamer has more, printing an email sent by an L.A. producer to an email chain of colleagues.
From that email:
All the Axium offices worldwide (LA, NY, CHI, London, Mexico City, Canada) are shut down permanently, and the accounts have been frozen. It does not appear that the Axium employees are going to be paid for their last week of work or any sort of severance, as it is indeed a bankruptcy.
For working film producers, there is a sad story. Axium has been a part of the film community, a contributor to independent film non-profits and, through its various businesses, has handheld many productions through the different state tax rebate programs. Film producers working right now, however, might be in an especially tough spot if Axium's accounts are indeed frozen and the company is holding payroll bonds intended to guarantee and finally cover their production payrolls. We'll update as soon as we have more information.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/08/2008 02:07:00 PM
Comments (40)
HONORING NONFICTION
If you read our blog often you've seen us link to filmmaker AJ Schnack's great blog All These Wonderful Things from time to time to get the real and honest take of what nonfiction filmmakers have to go through to get their films shown, and the hurdles they jump to get recognized for the major awards. Well, Schnack is going a step further now by co-chairing a new award for nonfiction filmmakers that will champion the best docs of the year. Set for March 18 at the IFC Center in New York, the inaugural ceremony will recognize all the different aspects of doc making including cinematography and editing and will be sponsored and presented by the Internet distribution company IndiePix. Nominees in the eight categories will be announced Jan. 20 in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival.
But a short list by a nominating committee of 12 programmers from the top North American film festivals for the category of Outstand Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking has already been released. The films are:
Billy The Kid Deep Water The Devil Came on Horseback Ghosts of Cite Soleil In The Shadow of the Moon Into Great Silence Lake of Fire Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) Manufactured Landscapes The Monastery - Mr. Vig and the Nun No End in Sight Sicko Taxi to the Dark Side The Unforeseen Zoo
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/08/2008 12:20:00 PM
Comments (0)
Monday, January 07, 2008
GLOBES SCRAPPED
According to a report by Variety moments ago, the Hollywood Foreign Press has announced the Golden Globes' traditional dinner ceremony will be replaced with a 6 p.m. PST news conference to announce the winners this Sunday.
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/07/2008 07:48:00 PM
Comments (0)
DAVID LYNCH ON THE iPHONE
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/07/2008 10:15:00 AM
Comments (1)
A WHOLE LOT OF GREEN
Filmmaker, performer and musician Brent Green, one of Filmmaker's 2005 25 New Faces of Independent Film, sent an email with all of the exhibitions and performances he's planned for the next couple of months. If you haven't seen his intense and theatrical live performances, in which he collaborates with musicians for a live score and, in the process, comes up with a different model of independent film exhibition, I highly recommend you check one of them out. A recent performance clip is embedded below, and here's the email:
On Jan. 11th I'll be screening all of my films with live narrations and soundtracks at DiverseWorks in Houston. The band will be Jim Becker (Califone), Andy Coppinger and myself. It'll be frenetic and beautiful. The show is to celebrate the opening of DiverseWorks' animation show Flicker Fusion, which includes Hadacol Christmas.
Jan. 18th, 19th and 21st I'll be screening all of my films with live narrations and improvised soundtracks by myself and Califone at Sundance. It's part of their New Frontiers program. I love Califone. These shows will be unreal. The shows will be around an hour long with a little Q&A at the end- all of them at 6PM at the New Frontiers on Main MicroCinema building. It's called "God Builds Like Frank Lloyd Wright: Califone and the animated films of Brent Green."
"Carlin" is screening at Sundance, too! As part of their Documentary Spotlight program. There's a film Isabella Rossilini made about the sex life of bugs screening in there, too. Sundance runs from Jan. 17th- Jan. 28th- the Documentary Spotlight runs five times in there somewhere.
On Feb. 8th, Tim Rutili (Califone) and I will be performing live soundtracks and narrations to all of my films and a couple of films Tim has cooked up recently at Montalvo Artspace in Califone- somewhere outside of San Francisco.
On Feb. 13th, The Kitchen will be hauling Jim Becker (Califone), Fred Lonberg-Holm (Valentine Trio, Lightbox Orchestra, cellist for Wilco, Califone, Freakwater, Ken Vandermark and all kinds of other folks) and Brendan Canty (Fugazi) to New York City. Cello, violin, musical saw, guitars, piano and drums- this is going to be a beautiful show.
My first solo museum show, at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland will be running through Jan. 5th, too. If you're around Cleveland, that's a pretty rad show- all of my film sets and hand-made wooden props. I also made a woodcut-print of Virginia Woolf for the Sculpture Center, which is available on their website somewhere, I think.
More information on Green can be found at his website, Nervous Films.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/07/2008 09:25:00 AM
Comments (0)
STRIKE SEQUEL-ITIS
Thom Taylor's opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times about the possible lasting effects of the WGA strike is worth a read, even if he's perhaps a bit more optimistic than I'd be about the ease by which striking writers are going to slot into new entreprenenial positions as web content creators. But his historical recap of the previous strike and his foreshadowing of media marketplace churn feels right.
From the piece:
The transition to making money from the new paradigm will naturally take time. Right now, anybody with a computer connection can create an overnight sensation on YouTube -- but that's not enough to quit your day job. Yet the Internet is on its way to becoming the public's preferred mass distribution system -- and that means Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and telephone companies will compete with traditional networks by piping broadband content into home theaters. This sea change has the potential to turn the studios as we know them on their heads.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/07/2008 08:00:00 AM
Comments (0)
Sunday, January 06, 2008
L.A. DEPARTED
The tour de force blog posting of the day is playwright and television creator Jon Robin Baitz's second half of his "Leaving Los Angeles" essay on the Huffington Post. This part two deals with Baitz's final feelings about the city he's worked in the past few years (he compares L.A. to Johannesburg in the '70s), his romantic life, youth culture, the WGA strike, identifying oneself as an artist while working in TV, and the struggle to create a show that reflects and not obfuscates the realities of life in America right now. (Part one, which details some of the details leading to Baitz being "ousted" from Brothers and Sisters, the show he created, is here.)
Here is a brief excerpt of Baitz's long piece, which picks up after he discusses leaving his show:
But I am no longer the SOURCE for any of it, no longer the instigator of plot, and no longer the voice of the thing. It is no longer in my dreams. I do not wake up and make notes about future episodes. I can no longer argue for tone and can only watch as the demographic demands that have turned America into an ageist and youth-obsessed nation drives the storylines younger and younger, whiter and whiter, and with less and less reflection of the real America, which is made up, to the sorrow of the research departments, of people over 35 years of age and of many ethnicities and incomes. Then again, I will never again have to do a notes call wherein the fear and sea-sickness of the creative execs always prevails over taking a risk, resulting more often than not in muddy and flattening or treacly-sweet compromises after a stolid and pointless series of writerly objections. (And note to execs on my next show: you won't wanna be giving me too many of them. Sorry, I shan't roll over ever again.)
This leads rather well to what I did pick up under the palms: knowing how to fight. Fighting was something I DID learn at Brothers & Sisters. I was not good at it before I got there. I demurred, deferred, moped. Not anymore. Doesn't work in TV. So I learned. Fighting to build something that gives people jobs is worth it. Hundreds of people, at that. Crews. Writers. Actors. Directors. Ask anybody who has created something from scratch, a Barry Diller or a David Geffen, to use people I know personally and admire for their fortitude (and bellicosity). They never give up. They fought and fought until they had built something irrefutable. Grand. Making TV taught me: Die trying. Try harder. And never, ever stop. Do not be the reason it fails. Be the last man standing, until the building is UP, the lights are on, and people are in it, working.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/06/2008 10:58:00 AM
Comments (1)
Saturday, January 05, 2008
POULTRY POWER
The below was posted on Filmmaker's Facebook page by John Fiege, director of the documentary Mississippi Chicken, which was one of our five "Best Film Not Playing Near You" Gotham Award nominees this year. As it's a general call for support, I'm taking the liberty of posting it here.
It’s the holiday season, and in the spirit of Christmas a major poultry company fired one of MPOWER’s board members in what appears to be a retaliatory action for his active involvement in fighting several cases of race discrimination at the plant.
MPOWER is the workers’ center that was in the early stages of formation during the production of Mississippi Chicken, and it has developed over the last few years into a vibrant center, fighting for workers’ rights and led by a board of current and former poultry workers. But MPOWER’s struggle for workers’ rights is an uphill battle against wealthy and ruthless poultry companies that do not hesitate to intimidate workers who stand up for their rights or the rights of their co-workers.
The MPOWER board member who was just fired took a leading role in fighting several cases of racial discrimination in his plant. In one instance, over a dozen African Americans who applied for a promotion were told that they failed a company-written aptitude test while other white co-workers passed the test and were given the promotion. In another instance, an African American worker was fired for failing to lock out a machine that he was working on while other white workers are not even written up for similar practices. Additionally, just this fall, the company paid back wages to a group of African American workers after it was revealed that their white co-workers in the same department were making significantly more than they were.
Like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, the company appears to be making an example out of the MPOWER board member for daring to speak out against these abuses. So in the spirit of the holidays, we need you to donate to MPOWER to help support these workers. Your support will send a message to the multibillion-dollar poultry companies that they will not get away with these tactics of discrimination, intimidation and harassment.
MPOWER’s goal is to raise $50,000 by the end of January in order to hire a fulltime organizer to work with poultry workers facing harassment and to create an Emergency Assistance Fund for poultry worker leaders who are victims of retaliatory firing and workplace injuries or who experience unforeseen family emergencies.
Please go to www.mpowercenter.org today to make a donation and help MPOWER reach this goal!
Happy Holidays from the Mississippi Chicken team!
To become a fan of Filmmaker on Facebook, click here.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/05/2008 06:16:00 PM
Comments (0)
BINARY CODE
Over at the Invisible Cinema blog, Jennifer MacMillan starts the new year with a list challenging the binary oppositions that too often inappropriately frame the relationship between narrative film and experimental film. And, um, I guess with that last sentence I fell into the sloppy thinking she critiques. Witness point number four: "To say that an experimental video is 'non-narrative' is like saying that Henry Ford's invention of the T-model automobile was a non-horse & carriage buggy! Or it's like saying that Rimbaud wrote non-novels. Grouping all short films together is misunderstanding cinema."
And here's #2, on the year-phenomenon of "10 Best" lists:
2. form and content Your top ten lists? Go ahead with placing the mystery of cinema into a concise numerical form if it makes you happy. Seriously, I love awesome writers, and I do not care how you label yourselves. But let's look a bit closer. Your IndieWire list for example, that's all narrative cinema. Cinema differentiated ONLY by CONTENT. Experimental cinema radically changes FORM. Experimental cinema has exquisitely evolved into a complex system of formats! Here are a few highlights:
live video performance, enhanced by the invention of new softwares, i.e. Module8 and Jitter, used by artists such as Luke Dubois, Chika, Nisi Jacobs, Zach Layton, Andy Graydon, and Zach Layton.
applied materials: hand painting, collage, sewing on the film strip, polarized light experiments used by Courtney Hoskins, Jennifer Reeves, Lewis Klahr . . .
animation: Martha Colburn, Tim Reardon, Xander Marrow
single frame films: Joel Schlemowitz
pioneering video inventions: Cori Archangel, Ken Jacobs
experimentation with film loops and non-camera filmmaking: Bruce McClure, Luis Recorder, and Sandra Gibson
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/05/2008 03:10:00 PM
Comments (1)
Thursday, January 03, 2008
POLITICS AND THE END OF THE WORLD
Last year, I blogged about political mash-up master Rx whose songs and videos have been a regular treat for Youtubers. With the election season officially underway with the Iowa caucuses, it seems the right time to post Rx's latest offering, a new interpretation of R.E.M.'s "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." Though I suspect that he is a staunch Democrat, the continuing success of a certain Republican candidate presents the mouthwatering prospect of Rx possibly reworking another Youtube favorite. We can but hope.
# posted by Nick Dawson @ 1/03/2008 11:40:00 PM
Comments (0)
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
MICHAEL MOORE COMMENTS ON IOWA
If you're a Democrat in Iowa -- or if you're just a Democrat who, like many, are still trying to make a decision about who to support in '08 -- Michael Moore has collected his thoughts in a letter posted on his blog. He's not endorsing anyone yet, but he does offer some cogent commentary on current candidates.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/02/2008 11:37:00 AM
Comments (1)
CONNECTION TO HER FANS
The new issue of Filmmaker, which we just sent to the printer, has author Jonathan Safran Foer interviewing Michel Gondry about his new feature, Be Kind Rewind. They talk a lot about invention, DIY artmaking, and artists who gaze horizontally at their audiences... all of which are echoed in Gondry's new Bjork video, just released today, for her single "Declare Independence." Check it out below.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/02/2008 11:16:00 AM
Comments (3)
When college kids make mashups of Hollywood movies, are they violating the law? Not necessarily, according to the latest study on copyright and creativity from the Center and American University’s Washington College of Law.
The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.
Fair use is the part of copyright law that permits new makers, in some situations, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying the owners. The courts tell us that fair use should be “transformative”—adding value to what they take and using it for a purpose different from the original work. So when makers mash up several works—say, The Ten Commandments , Ben-Hur and 10 Things I Hate about You , making Ten Things I Hate about Commandments —they aren’t necessarily stealing. They are quoting in order to make a new commentary on popular culture, and creating a new piece of popular culture.
Unfortunately, this emerging, participatory media culture is at risk, with new industry practices to control piracy. Large content holders such as NBC Universal and Viacom, and online platforms such as MySpace and Veoh are already crafting agreements on removing copyrighted material from the online sites. Legal as well as illegal copying could all too easily disappear. Worse still, a new generation of media makers could grow up with a deformed and truncated notion of their rights as creators.
The report goes on to recommend a "blue-ribbon panel of scholars, makers and lawyers" to determine a set of "best practices" that can guide filmmakers in what should be legal and what probably is not when incorporating copywritten material in new original works. The entire study can be downloaded as a PDF from the web page linked above. And, also on this page: the "top five" online videos in each of the nine categories ("Personal Reportage/Diaries," "Satire and Parody," etc.) the center has come up with to classify web video. So, in addition to learning something about intellectual property law, you can check out clips like 7 Minute Sopranos and The Ten Most Ridiculous Things about the Beyonce Experience while you're doing it.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/02/2008 10:38:00 AM
Comments (0)
THE ORCHESTRA AS GUITAR
To make it two Radiohead-related posts in a row, I'll note Mark Pytlik's review at Pitchfork of Jonny Greenwood's There Will be Blood soundtrack, which succinctly nails where Greenwood is coming from in his work for orchestra.
The lede:
The first hint that Jonny Greenwood might make a gifted composer came in 1997, when, bored with the syrupy, provincial strings that dominated the tail-end of Britpop, he channeled Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki for the arrangement on OK Computer's "Climbing Up The Walls". Essentially a wall of quarter notes played against each other, that noisy squall stood out in dramatic opposition to the "Bittersweet Symphony"s of the world. Where the traditional rock approach had always been to use strings to amplify melody and opulence, Greenwood was using them to create discord and ambience; in other words, he was playing orchestras like he played his guitar.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/02/2008 09:14:00 AM
Comments (0)
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
SCOTCH MISTING IN THE NEW YEAR
My first act of cultural consumption in the New Year was watching "Scotch Mist," Radiohead's webcast/live session/fans-New-Year's present, on one of the late, post-midnight Current TV rebroadcasts before falling asleep. A really great hour of TV with the five band members playing in their small studio shot with locked off webcams, some odd off-kilter interstitials and spastic animations, a slow-mo music video for "Nude," and a stunning version of "Faust Arp" with just Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood singing/playing at magic hour in the outdoor hills. The complete show is embedded below. All the cuts are recommended, particularly, my favorite, "Reckoner," and a great, extended, trance-like take on "Videotape."
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/01/2008 01:32:00 PM
Comments (0)
