As we enter a lazy Labor Day news cycle, Anne Thompson picks up on her Variety blog the press release that THINKfilm CEO Mark Urman is leaving the troubled distributor and will join Senator Entertainment as the head of its new theatrical distribution company.

Here's the press release:

Effective October 1, veteran film industry executive Mark Urman will join Marco Weber’s Senator Entertainment US as president of his newly formed distribution company. The teaming with Urman follows Weber’s recent acquisition of all shares in U.S.-based Senator Entertainment Inc. in order to focus solely on the production of English language films and to establish this U.S. based distribution entity. The company will be fully bi-coastal with main offices in both Los Angeles and New York.

Urman co-founded THINKFilm in 2001, heading the company’s theatrical division and serving, most recently, as president. Prior to that, he was co-president of Lionsgate Releasing. Urman will work side-by-side with Weber in establishing all windows of distribution for the company’s slate, allowing Weber to concentrate on the original productions the company is making with a broad spectrum of A-list actors and filmmakers.

“I believe this is the perfect time to launch a company of this shape and size,” says Urman, “and I’m thrilled to be joining Marco in this exciting new endeavor. We start with an exceptional line-up that combines commercial crossover films with classically niche-oriented ones, and we’ll have the ability to alternate wide releases-- involving hundreds of prints--with prestige titles that expand from exclusive platforms. By building a company that can be big and bold when it wants to be, but streamlined and strategic when it needs to be, we plan on being the best possible combination of a studio specialty division and a true independent.”

Weber commented, “Mark’s expertise in the independent film world is without rival. He has proven consistently that he understands how to design specific campaigns for movies that are high quality, yet challenging to release successfully. It is our good fortune to have secured him as a partner to work with us as the company prepares to release its first slate.”

In this terrible distribution environment, it's great that there is a new theatrical distributor. But what will become of THINKfilm and the filmmakers and vendors who are owed money? Will owner David Bergstein find that rumored next round of financing and hire a replacement? Or does Urman's exit signal the company's imminent demise?

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/29/2008 05:44:00 PM Comments (0)

During this election season I recommend taking a break from the cable talking heads and reviewing some of the independent media that has been produced over the last couple of years about American foreign policy. One of the best documentaries is Charles Ferguson's Academy Award-nominated No End in Sight. As Ray Pride report at Movie City Indie, Ferguson is streaming the film free on YouTube.

Pride reports:

No End in Sight is being made available free to the public to reveal the facts about the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq to voters concerned with the issues of national security and the adverse economic impact of the war when making decisions in this crucial election. NO END IN SIGHT condenses and clarifies the murky decisions made before and after the invasion and is invaluable to the public’s understanding of what went wrong. The film is both an analysis of an ill-conceived war and a plea to consider the impact of future military actions. According to the film's director, Charles Ferguson, he underwrote the exhibition of the film on YouTube because, "I wanted to make the film, and the facts about the occupation of Iraq, accessible to a larger group of people. My hope is that this will contribute to the process of making better foreign policy decisions moving forward in Iraq and elsewhere. During this election year, it’s important to examine the leadership mentality and policies that caused Iraq to descend into such a horrific state that after 4,000 American deaths, at least a quarter million Iraqis killed, 4 million refugees, and over $2 trillion spent, Iraq remains in a state of near collapse."

Beginning September 1 you can watch the entire movie on this YouTube channel.

I interviewed Ferguson a year ago for our Summer, 2007 issue. Here's my intro, and you can read the entire piece at this link.

In the current debate over the Iraq war, Charles Ferguson’s debut documentary, No End in Sight, takes what is perhaps the most troubling position of all: the war could have gone right. Largely sidestepping questions about the justness of the war and focusing on the few months leading up to and immediately following the invasion, Ferguson pinpoints the mistakes that laid the groundwork for the current conflict. And while it’s commonplace to view Iraq’s violent civil strife as being just as inevitable as the discovery of WMDs was once believed to have been, Ferguson assembles a convincing group of talking heads — including General Jay Garner and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — who assert otherwise and lay blame accordingly.

For news-aware viewers, Ferguson’s basic argument will be familiar. Insufficient troop levels, the failure to stop Iraqi postwar looting, poor advance planning and the decision to disband the Iraqi military combined to create an active, deadly insurgency that the U.S. military was unequipped to handle. What makes Ferguson’s doc revelatory and necessary, however, is his gripping and exact detailing of these failures and his giving voice to the government officials (largely from the State Department) whose realistic counsel was deliberately ignored by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

With a Ph.D. in political science from MIT, Ferguson was well versed in the arcana of foreign-policy-speak, but before beginning No End in Sight he had never made a movie. Having achieved success in the technology field — in 1996 he sold his company Vermeer Technologies to Microsoft, which incorporated Vermeer’s FrontPage into its Microsoft Office software — he self-financed his film, bringing on a talented team headed up by executive producer Alex Gibney, whose own documentary on Iraq, Taxi to the Dark Side, is being released later this year. I sat down with Ferguson at New York’s Mercer Hotel to discuss making a first doc, post–Michael Moore political filmmaking and the future of Iraq. Magnolia Pictures opens the film in late July.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/28/2008 05:05:00 PM Comments (0)

I like Aaron Sorkin, but I don't know what to make of the fact that he's so loudly publicizing the fact that he knows so little about the online world he'll be writing about in his Scott Rudin-commissioned script on Facebook. I've listened to interviews with Sorkin before in which he's talked about capturing the rhythms of intelligent speech and about how one doesn't have to know all the details of a character's profession in order to write that character. And yes, often an outsider's eye can be the best when it comes to entering into a world and finding the moments of drama that will connect with a larger audience.

But did he have to go so far as say that his dead grandmother knows more about the internet than he does?

You can visit Sorkin's Facebook group here.

Labels: net neutrality

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/28/2008 01:11:00 PM Comments (0)

Everyone's talking about small screens -- what it's like to watch movies on mobile devices like cell phones and iPods. Mark Cuban's musings about the Olympics and The Dark Knight, however, lead him in the opposite direction:

Of course it would also not be a stretch to place the biggest screens in existence in open air locations where huge gatherings and related events can take place. Would families pay 50 bucks for a day of Olympics fun outside on 100 acres? Olympicsalooza anyone ? Why should it be any different than all the events that take place SuperBowl, or NBA or MLB All Star weekends ? Make it a huge party. In 100 cities across the country.

Could you sell 20mm tickets to attend out of home Olympic events at an average of 20 bucks each ? That's 400mm minus the cut to the theaters, locations, etc of 50pct, or 200mm. Plus of course there is all the non stop advertising that will be built into all of these events. On screen, at stadium/field/farm/theater.........

NBC proved that the Olympics can still be a communal event in the USA. Dark Knight proved that if enough people get excited about the same event, if you make it a special event, they will leave their homes to see it. Sports leagues have done an amazing job of building specialty events around the main event. Could technical advances in large stadium screens be a tipping point in the economics and presentation of the Olympics ?

How big can a screen be in 2016 and at what price ? Why not a panoramic emerssive experience in the new Cowboys stadium ? Or a 10 story tall 3D presentation of Olympics Basketball in the American Airlines Arena ? 20k or 50k or 100k people screaming U-S-A and watching on a screen that makes you feel as ifyou were there, is that worth 20 bucks ?

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/27/2008 12:21:00 AM Comments (2)

A couple of weeks after organizations for the disabled attacked Tropic Thunder for an epithet used in the movie, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is objecting to the title of Alan Ball's new film, Towelhead, which opens next month. But Eric D. Snider at Cinematical argues that the film's title shouldn't be considered offensive as it can't be separated from the intentions of the film itself:

I think CAIR's objections could be remedied by simply watching the movie. Over the course of it, the girl (played amazingly by Summer Bishil) comes to feel empowered and confident in who she is. She overcomes the slurs and the harassment, and she embraces her identity as an Arab-American and as a young woman. To complain about the title is to miss the forest because you're too busy looking at the trees. I think people who have actually seen the film understand that.

Towelhead is also the name of the novel by Arab-American Alicia Ehran that the film is based on. Both she and Ball comment in this Reuters piece:

Erian, who is Arab-American, said that although the title is an ethnic slur, she "selected it to highlight one of the novel's major themes: racism."

She called CAIR's work "admirable," but said that "the solution ... is not to force the artist to alter her work, but instead to use the occasion of that work as an entry point for meaningful debate and discussion."

Ball said he felt it was important to retain the title of Erian's novel because "she so effectively dramatizes the pain inflicted by such language, something many people of non-minority descent never have to face."

Read the rest of Snider's piece and the lively comments thread that follows at the link above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/26/2008 11:03:00 PM Comments (0)

Declining box-office... shuttered indie arms... busted distribution windows... the credit crunch... bankrupt distributors... creative malaise -- they are all cited by Dade Hayes and Pamela McClintock in Variety as the reasons for indie film's "dismal year."

A key graph summarizes the debate that many in this business are engaged in right now:

The bottom line is that it's a changing world -- and it might be something cyclical, or things may have changed permanently. The matrix of different ancillaries -- which has expanded radically from the early video days to include VOD, Web downloads, airlines, music and merchandise -- puts a new spin on the still-crucial theatrical window.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/26/2008 10:54:00 PM Comments (1)

I mean, really, don't. It's one of the greatest movies ever made, and a personal top ten favorite... but here on this blog is not the way to see it.

Let me explain. I first saw Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter while visiting a friend's house for the weekend. She had it on VHS and we watched it on a pretty small TV. I thought it was really good. Later, feeling I had missed out on seeing it on the big screen I caught it during a special run at New York's Public Theater -- back when the Public Theater had both a film theater and a film program. On its decent-sized screen, the film went from being a good film to being a masterpiece. A tiny moment at the end, when the boy is given an apple by Lillian Gish, gets swallowed up on the small screen, but projected this simple gesture is transcendent.

When Simon Callow's monograph on the film was published by the BFI, I wrote about it in Filmmaker. An excerpt:

François Truffaut queasily likened The Night of the Hunter, actor Charles Laughton’s 1955 directorial debut, to a "horrifying news item retold by small children." Quoted in Simon Callow’s new British Film Institute monograph on the film, Truffaut goes on to offer a bit of middlebrow advice proving that the confluence of film criticism and box-office commentary is not solely a turn-of-the-century phenomenon: "Screenplays such as this are not the way to launch your career as a Hollywood director. The film runs counter to the rules of commercialism … it will probably be Laughton’s single experience as a director."

Indeed, Laughton’s use of an Expressionist, theatrical mise en scene and flashes of burlesque humor to adapt David Grubbs’s best-selling blend of Southern Gothic and Grimms’s fairy tales resulted in newspaper attacks on the film’s "arty" direction. The reviews weren’t all bad but enough were; depressed and unfinanceable as a director, Laughton soon abandoned his planned adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Lack of critical support on its release coupled with Laughton’s retreat from film directing resulted in The Night of the Hunter’s peripatetic status within the Great Films canon. It’s the kind of glorious one-off that falls to the footnotes of film histories, even if it’s also the sort of masterpiece that other directors spend a career working up to

.

So here's the film, courtesy of Hulu. But don't watch it here. Track down a print somewhere. Or get the DVD and watch it on the biggest set you can find. Just don't click below.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/26/2008 07:26:00 PM Comments (2)

Okay, cool mentions across the blogosphere are one thing, but a fashion spread in the Sunday Times is something else. Check out this feature to see Josh Safdie, director of The Pleasure of Being Robbed (my favorite independent film of the year), his brother Benny, actress Eleonore Hendricks and the rest of the Red Bucket Films crew wearing some of the latest Fall fashions. There's also this group of curated Red Bucket Shorts.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/24/2008 07:41:00 PM Comments (1)

There's a good edition of "The Medium," Virginia Heffernan's column in the Sunday Times Magazine this week. She tries to define what makes a web series work. In the most recent Filmmaker magazine newsletter I wrote about Max Richter's new album, 24 Frames in Full Colour, which consists of 24 short pieces that Richter says are designed to be thought of as ringtones, not songs. In the letter I wrote about the perceptual change that prompted in the listener leading to a different kind of appreciation of the album. Applying this thinking to web filmmaking, I wrote that maybe we need to "forget that we are making films and to think of them as something else." I asked, "If we sent a video message to a friend, what would it look like? What video might play in one of those digital picture frames in the sets of any one of our screenplays? If the protagonist of your screenplay had a Facebook page, what video might play on it?"

Heffernan makes a similar point, arguing that the lonelygirl15 was so much better when we didn't think of it as scripted entertainment:

Just as some people don’t like to receive their humor under the banner of “funny” — their smiles fade at comedy clubs called Chuckles Café or Laugh Lane — I don’t like to watch Web serials as serials. What I loved about “lonelygirl15,” when its status as amateur filmmaking was still unclear, was not so much that I couldn’t tell if it was real or fake but that I could never tell if there would be another one. Poor, beautiful Bree, the housebound heroine, appeared to be uploading videos whenever her home-schooling overlords would permit it. At the end of an episode, you had no idea if she’d survive to make another. This thrill is present in all Web interactions in which a Facebook friend or far-flung colleague or gchat buddy is so there, writing the long 4 a.m. communications about Russia or his cat, until he isn’t. When you kick off an exchange with someone online, you don’t know how many episodes have been ordered, what shape or course the relationship might take or how much of a commitment it requires.

In her piece, she offers a few recommendations of what's good out there -- namely Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, but ultimately looks forward to a time in which the divide between amateur and professional, entertainment and simple experience, is erased:

So where’s the true art? I’m not sure. I know I continue to prefer the strange, beautiful, comical and mysterious stuff of YouTube — the unclassifiable stuff — to the laudable efforts at nouveau serials by bona fide directors. But I still believe that, one day, another serial — not called a serial, maybe, and certainly not webisodes — will exploit the eccentricity of the virals and manage to make new and serious jokes about the truth-illusion-truth-illusion of cinéma vérité, which is what “lonelygirl15” once did. With that, the thrill of filmed “reality” will be returned to viewers, as it was in the early days of film, radio and television.

And, oh yeah, it does cost $4.99 to watch Dr. Horrible on iTunes, but Hulu also offers it for free if you'll sit through a couple of McDonald's commercials. Via the streaming site you can watch it here:



And, p.s., if you don't subscribe to our weekly newsletter, which contains editorial content not found on the blog or in the magazine, you can do so for free on the main page.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/24/2008 07:16:00 PM Comments (2)

On the one year anniversary of Mike Jones's "The Circuit" column at Variety, former AFI Fest Director Christian Gaines, who is now employed by Withoutabox, contributes a two-part discussion on festivals and our current failing indie film theatrical distribution model. Part one is titled "Do Festivals Matter?" and part two is "Things Gotta Change."

In part one, Gaines writes that festivals have become, for many films, the premiere exhibition opportunity:

In the pantheon of viable choices for getting your film seen, film festivals continue to thrive (seems there’s a new one born every minute, right?), and that’s because, putting aside economic factors for the moment, film festivals still provide the perfect environment for the cultural, communal celebration of cinema, where films can be presented in context, with optimal picture and sound, and where audiences can yield, uninterrupted, to the original experience created by the artist.

As commercial exhibition prospects for independent filmmakers diminish, the more traditional path – from festival circuit to theatrical run to DVD release to a comfy spot on the Blockbuster shelf, adorned in festival laurels – has sharply changed direction. Only the festival circuit still seems like a constant part of the equation, with thousands of filmmakers steadily submitting their films to thousands of film festivals around the world each year.

In part two, he muses on a solution and proposes that sales agents consider something he calls a "Festival Acquisition" model (and please read his pieces in their entirety to get his full argument):

In the new “Festival Acquisition” model a sales agent or producer might send a film on a six to ten month tour of sixty to eighty North American film festivals. Absent of commercial venues, if film festivals have become the ad hoc distribution infrastructure for these films - and the film in question might see 250 screenings - then a formal business proposition will emerge, one in which rights holders and film festivals each acknowledge the other’s challenges.

On the one hand, what Gaines is proposing is nothing new. Smaller distributors have always been skilled at stitching together nationwide tours that combine festival screenings with play in various non-theatrical venues. But what is a little different is that Gaines seems to be advocating that sales agents view themselves as these kind of non-theatrical distributors and use their negotiating ability to work out a more financially remunerative model for filmmakers that acknowledges that festival play is all many films will get.

There's already a little bit of a comments thread, with David Poland contributing this:

Ask Cowboy Booking about "the festival distribution circuit." Oops. Can't. Out of business. Bottom line, filmmakers on the fest circuit can only expect some free trips... which is not nothing. The more effort there is to squeeze money out of fests for screenings, the fewer fests there will be. Is that a bad thing?... The question facing all of these films -- and Cinetic is trying to address it online -- is how to grow the number of dollars in play, from fests to DVD to other ancillaries. If a film can earn $100,000 without a major distributor, great, but it isn't nearly enough to matter or to support American Indies.

Poland notes what is common in many of the new models and self-distribution schemes being discussed at the moment: the revenue potential is inherently low. The structure of the models themselves do not allow for upside potential. The question becomes, then, whether or not to accept to as a given diminished revenue and adjust production budgets accordingly, or to think about radically different new models that might bring new dollars into the system. Or, in fact, to think about work that is itself radically different in formulation -- a new kind of independent media that that might fit more comfortably into these new forms of distribution.

Obviously, to be continued...

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/24/2008 01:48:00 PM Comments (0)

I've written before about the "uncanny valley," the term used in discussion of technological attempts to simulate the human visage. It refers to the phenomenon where things intended to look human suddenly seem unrealistic as they closely approach a realistic representation of the human.

There was talk this month at SIGGRAPH about Emily, a completely animated character that promises, in the words of creator David Barton, "new levels of believability in computer animation."

From the linked piece in the Daily Mail:

To create the footage the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies made a a computer generated replica of Emily.

The actress sat inside a sphere of LED lights while she was photographed making 35 different poses.

The light patterns allowed the shine of her skin to be captured independently from her main skin tone, with hundreds of measurements taken for each millimetre.

'The CG models provide unprecedented detail of natural facial expressions - down to skin pores and fine wrinkles,' a spokesman said.

This technique has managed to avoid 'uncanny valley' - in which an animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

You decide...

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/24/2008 11:31:00 AM Comments (0)

M. Dot Strange, writer/director, 2007: Since being the only one hiding his face amongst the 25 I posted my animated feature film We Are the Strange on youtube subtitled in 17 languages where combined it has been viewed over 1.1 million times adding to my international audience. I did an animated music video for the NYC band "Mindless Self Indulgence" for the song "Animal" and it was included with the bands new album "IF" I'm currently completing the animatic for my new animated feature film Heart String Marionette. It is scheduled to be completed in January 2010 with production beginning in February 09, and is completely self funded thanks to the DVD sales of We Are the Strange. I've also been lucky enough to be flown to 7 different countries for speaking engagements since I was in the magazine, and they keep inviting me.

My advice to the new 25 faces... Do something to stand out from the crowd... don't just climb the Hollywood ladder and do the things that are "good for your career" as your agents and lawyers might tell you. Do what feels right... If you just want to be another rich director jerkface driving around L.A. in a black BMW banging talking blowup dolls then do that... but if you make films for reasons other than fame and fortune follow your heart... not the people waving the paychecks... Money talks... but it doesn't mean you have to listen. This is a new time... a new age wherein filmmakers have the opportunity to make their films their way... Will you make something completely new and unique or will you just be another brick in the wall to be forgotten and stepped by bolder filmmakers in the future? Thats the question you need to answer.


Kentucker Audley, writer/director, 2007: Kentucker Audley's first feature 'Team Picture' will be released by Benten Films August 26th 2008. He is currently editing his 2nd feature, untitled at the moment. It'll raise the question: how much of this was improvised? Attend a film festival for the answer.


Brett Ingram, writer/director, 2003: I was fortunate enough to be included in the Summer 2003 edition of "Faces" when I was working on my first feature length documentary, MONSTER ROAD, about Seattle animator Bruce Bickford.

Since then...

I completed MONSTER ROAD and...

MONSTER ROAD won Best Documentary at the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival, 2004 Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2004 Independent Film Festival of Boston, and won 13 other awards before airing on Sundance Channel for two years.

Last year, I was awarded a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in support of my second feature documentary that I'm just finishing up now. The film is entitled ROCATERRANIA and it's the story of 76-year-old scientific illustrator Renaldo Kuhler, who invented an imaginary country (you guessed it, "Rocaterrania") when he was a teenager and has secretly illustrated the nation's history in notebooks for the past six decades. As it turns out, the history of Rocaterrania is the coded story of Renaldo's own life as a troubled outsider.

I'm just beginning to submit ROCATERRANIA to festivals now, so the premiere date and location is still up in the air. Here's a link to my website with the trailer for ROCATERRANIA:

Brett Ingram
Rocaterrania clips.

This year, I also released Bruce Bickford's animated film, PROMETHEUS' GARDEN on DVD after the film lay dormant for 20 years on a shelf in Bickford's basement:

Prometheus' Garden.

On a personal note, I got married in 2004 to Dorothy Hans and we honeymooned in Annecy, France, where MONSTER ROAD was playing at the Annecy International Festival of Animation. Last year, we had our first child, a daughter, Nuala Siobhan.

That's about it.

Hope all's well in your world. I'll keep you posted on ROCATERRANIA.

Thanks for championing true independent filmmaking. Viva Filmmaker Magazine!


Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky, writer/directors, 2007: We have two projects that we are currently working on.

"Francine" is a narrative feature about an aging inmate on parole who moves to a dreary lakeside town and takes a series of jobs working with animals where she is forced to reconsider the meaning of captivity. The project is currently in development and was recently selected for Cinemart at Rotterdam.

"The Patron Saints", currently in production, is a disquieting documentary that centers around a beautician who works from the basement of a nursing home. The beautician, herself approaching old-age, narrates this episodic portrait about the present day realities of her customers, many of whom face great physical and emotional challenges, as they make the most of the time they have left. "The Patron Saints" will participate in this year's upcoming Spotlight on Docs section of Independent Film Week.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/23/2008 08:13:00 PM Comments (0)

In a Guardian piece titled "Exit Strategies," Ronald Bergan writes about a seldom-discussed part of moviegoing: walking out.

His lede:

Though life is too short, it seems to drag on interminably while one is watching a bad film. The moment during a film when I begin to question my very existence is the moment I decide to head for the exit. It is when I abandon any cool critical assessment. All I know is that my senses and intelligence are being abused by the ugly and stupid sights and sounds on the big screen.

Bergan doesn't just write about the solitary act of exiting early -- he also writes about the journalistic and business implications of such an act:

If it were in my nature, I would pity the poor critics who have been sent to review a film and are obliged to sit through it to the bitter end. Or are they? Are there ethics involved? Is it fair to review a film that one has seen only a part of? Perhaps a critic should be honest and reveal that they walked out half way, which is a defiant act of criticism in itself. Yet, you can bet that a colleague will tell you afterwards that "the second half was a vast improvement on the first". I reckon that unless it was directed by someone other than the one who directed the first half, there is no way it could have improved much.

Nevertheless, there is a protocol involved in walking out. If one has to leave a film because of a very busy schedule, which happens most often during festivals, or if there are people in the audience involved with the film in some way whom one has even met and doesn't want to insult, one walks backwards slowly up the aisle looking at the screen all the time, shaking one's head regretfully and looking at one's watch.

With Toronto coming up, Bergan's article struck a chord. I'm more likely to sit through a movie I don't like just to make it to the end but, as Bergan says, sometimes that sit is just not worth it. When one is watching a film in a professional capacity, though, one has to be extremely aware of the symbolism -- if not the practical effect -- of walking out. I sat on a film jury once and was surprised to see one of my jury members sauntering towards the exit about 20 minutes into one of the Competition films. "I just couldn't take it anymore," he told me later. "It clearly wasn't going to get any better." The thing is, it did get better. Even though the film was not very good, it was probably among the best we'd seen so far, I told him. (Fortunately, by festival's end a number of worthier films had been screened so his missing most of that one didn't turn out to be an issue.)

When one knows the filmmakers, it's virtually impossible not to sit through the whole movie. If the film is bad and tons of other people leave, in fact, it's mandated that you make a point of being visible and saying something at the end so the filmmakers know that you, in fact, stayed.

Even if a film isn't something I'll write about for Filmmaker and even if I don't know the filmmakers, the act of leaving can be stressful for me. This might be due to my pre-film gig as a curator of live performance and theater. I'd go see a lot of new work, often in very small venues that were quite difficult to inconspicuously slip out of. I remember going once out of a sense of professional duty to a performance by an artist whose work I never liked. I didn't like this new performance either -- more so when I realized it was three hours long and that the exit was directly behind the stage. But I think the anxiety prompted in me by Bergan's piece probably has more to do with having often been on the other side of the auditorium door. I remember standing with my partner Robin O'Hara at the door of one festival screening room catching it as it closed after each walk-out so it wouldn't make a huge noise and telegraph our rapidly depleting audience. (The film we were producers of wasn't designed to be an crowd-pleaser, so we weren't entirely broken up. But the experience proved one thing: people don't walk out after the first super boring part of a movie, they walk out after the second.) Another time, I was really happy to see the head of one of the studio specialty divisions -- someone I had previously worked with -- in the front row of the first screening of a Sundance Competition Film we had produced. I knew the film wasn't right for that person's company, but I thought it was great the exec had shown up. I was less thankful when that same exec then very visibly walked past a line of colleagues to exit the movie after about a half an hour. In the hothouse atmosphere of a festival, one visibly departing checkbook holder or tastemaker quickly multiplies. So, the next time you're feeling fidgety at a festival, think carefully before slinking out that door. One day you'll be on the other side, and the ego you hear breaking will be your own.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/23/2008 05:56:00 PM Comments (2)

With the Slamdance Film Festival turning 15 in 2009, the fest has announced they will be having a series of special events to celebrate. The first will be next month as they screen Steven Soderbergh and Christopher Nolan's Slamdance-debuted films, Schizopolis and Following.

From the release:
FOLLOWING, a captivating neo-noir drama centering on a writer who follows people to ignite his creativity, originally bowed at Slamdance in 1999. Screening in Los Angeles at LACMA's Bing Theater (5905 Wilshire) on Friday, September 5 at 8:00pm, $20 tickets through slamdance.com ONLY; no tickets will be available for purchase at the door. Q&A with Mr. Nolan, moderated by Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, and hosted reception for ticket holders to follow screening.

SCHIZOPOLIS, a comedic satire with confused identity, cerebral wordplay and corporate intrigue, showed at Slamdance in 1997. Playing in New York City at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue) on Wednesday, September 16 at 8:00pm, SCHIZOPOLIS tickets will be $20 and available through ifccenter.com. Q&A with Mr. Soderbergh, moderated by author Anthony Kaufman, and hosted reception for ticket holders at The Post Factory to follow screening.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 8/22/2008 02:20:00 PM Comments (0)

Announced yesterday, filmmakers Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell just released their offbeat doc 10 Yards: Fantasy Football on Ourstage.com and SnagFilms.com. A conventional nationwide DVD release will begin on Sept. 30.

According to a release about the online world premiere, Ourstage will offer a free iTunes download of the film for two weeks (as well as offer free music downloads from the soundtrack that features independent artists Luke Brindley, John Haydon, Analog Jetpack, Greenland, Family Jewlers and Santa Clara) while SnagFilms will stream it for free and allow for viral sharing via its "virtual movie theater" widgets.

Weeks and Caldwell's DIY approach on their previous film 10 MPH was highlighted in our Winter 2008 issue ("Navigating The Digital Divide").

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 8/22/2008 12:57:00 PM Comments (0)

Nick Dawson's Web Exclusive Director's Interview this week is Azazel Jacobs, whose third feature, Momma's Man, opens tomorrow. Of the movie, which details a few days in which a young, recent father, Mikey, travels home to his parents (played by Ken and Flo Jacobs, the director's real-life parents) and is not able to leave, having become entangled in the crosscurrents of nostalgia for his childhood, Dawson wrote:

...the film is particularly resonant and moving, as well as being funny and tender, and Ken and Flo Jacobs both give surprising, strong performances, despite never having acted before. But it is ultimately Jacobs' inspired writing and deft direction that make this film so remarkable, his keen eye compellingly capturing the deteriorating situation created by Mikey's inertia.

You can head over there and read Nick's conversation with Aza, but I just want to personally recommend that you go out and see this lovely movie this weekend. Momma's Man is funny, affectionate and also highly unique: it limns an emotional state of mind I've never seen captured on film before. Summoning up an odd but quite believable fear-of-adulthood, the film captures a kind of "in between" state that we can all relate to and perhaps even fantasize about. The performances are all wonderful, and Jacobs' casting of his own parents, who include famed experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, gives the film an extra layer of poetry, specificity and subtext. Set not in some suburban sprawl but in a huge yet still impossibly cluttered downtown loft, Momma's Man becomes not just a particularly idiosyncratic depiction of the 21st century man-boy but also a beautiful commentary on the passing of artistic impulse from generation to generation.

The film opens in New York at the Angelika Film Center tomorrow. Here's the trailer.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/21/2008 07:34:00 PM Comments (0)

In Summer, 2005, the filmmaker Barbara Schock wrote a spirited piece for Filmmaker about studying film with critic and artist Manny Farber, who died on Tuesday. Mirroring Farber's rapid-fire thinking, Schock makes you feel like you're in his classroom as she writes about the man, his syllabus, and his teaching style.

We've posted it in our Web Exclusives.

Here's the intro:

The phenomenal painter, teacher and film critic Manny Farber called his film class “A Hard Look at the Movies.” It was the first upper-division college class I took. I’d transferred from a small college in the Midwest to the University of California at San Diego, and I’d never seen a foreign film, unless you count the Sergio Leone westerns. We watched the following films in a 10-week period, and it turned the way I looked at movies upside down: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de…, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God, Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Werner Schroeter’s The Death of Maria Malibran, Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou and Les Carabiniers, John Boorman’s Point Blank, Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, Joseph Losey’s Accident, Robert Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang, Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle, Nagisa Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Burglar, Jean Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les Enfants terribles and several Buster Keaton films.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/19/2008 02:31:00 PM Comments (1)

A year ago Gary Hustwit came out with Helvetica, showing how the typeface became the ubiquitous graphic signifier for... just about everything in the post-'60s era. Well, everything except one thing. As this web video demonstrates, when it comes to movie marketing, a font called Trajan rules. Watch this great clip for a glimpse at how unimaginative our movie marketing has become. (Hat tip: Ted Hope.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/19/2008 02:08:00 PM Comments (0)

Far away from the world of indie film one of the most dramatic show business stories is unfolding. As Nikki Finke and Variety are both reporting, a high-stakes showdown is occurring in court as Fox is suing Warner Brothers over the release of 300 director Zach Snyder's upcoming The Watchmen.

From Dave McNary and Tatiana Siegel's piece:

A judge has denied a Warner Bros. motion to dismiss 20th Century Fox’s lawsuit over Warners’ right to make a film based on the graphic novel Watchmen.

Ruling is potentially a huge victory for Fox, which could wind up as a profit participant in the film, and could cost Warners millions considering the film’s box office prospects. However, Fox’s legal team says it isn’t looking for monetary compensation and instead wants to prevent the big-budget film from being released altogether.

Ironically, directly adjacent to Variety's story is this blurb promo'ing the Watchmen discussion on the Variety discussion boards:

Watchmen doesn't come out until March, but interest in this comic adaptation is already showing signs of being the kind of crossover phenomenon that hasn't been seen in a comics property in a long time.

For those who want to dive into the nitty gritty of this case, Nikki Finke has posted a link to a PDF download. For those who want a quick summary, I recommend reading the first of her posts linked here, which includes a detailed timeline, and then a long comment in her discussion section by a poster going by the name of "Clearing Some Stuff Up." His post is both a great primer on how optioned material passes hands in Hollywood as well as a reasonable analysis of what's going on in this specific case. He concludes with these thoughts:

I do find it odd, though, when studios go full speed at each other. Although they are competitors, there is a need to play nice if you want others to play nice with you. Each studio will need to confirm quotes from the others; they will need to protect and release titles; and they all do business with each other on co-productions to spread risks. An aggressive position such as this is fairly odd.

Here's the trailer:



And here's David Poland's take on the situation over at The Hot Blog. His piece draws on research he did for an old, unpublished piece on something similar that went down with the production of The Flintstones. Poland concludes by saying that this story won't be around for long, predicting that a Cheney-like solution will be found quickly:

The very least that Fox can expect to get out of this is their development costs, probably doubled and interest added. But Fox is playing for keeps. They will not bury a $300 million investment by a fellow studio. The blood spilt would be too red and slippery. But don’t expect them to go away for anything less than $25 million. And they will take an amount like that now… because they don’t want to gamble either. 100% of WB’s profit could be $0.

And when it comes to alternative remedies, gross points make more sense than anything else. It would be too harsh a remedy to force Paramount out and to give Fox, say, international distribution. To eat a larger percentage of the gross would be to really encroach on the investment well before any chance of recouping.

It will be interesting. And my guess? Completely silent when it happens. Sealed by agreement, settled out of court. Rumored. Lied about. And done. Soon.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/19/2008 01:35:00 PM Comments (0)

Rooftop Films' shorts from their summer festival series are now on IFC.com. A mixture of eclectic narratives, animation and documentaries, each week three new shorts will be posted to the site. On there so far is Arthur Des Pins's animated Revolution of the Crabs and Sam Fleischner's drama Cave Flower.

# posted by Laura Perez-Harris @ 8/19/2008 12:40:00 PM Comments (0)

The IFP announced today that Penelope Cruz will be presented with a Gotham Award Tribute at the 18th annual Gotham Awards on Dec. 2 at NYC's Cipriani Wall Street. Cruz can recently be seen in Elegy opposite Ben Kingsley and Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (pictured right).

Additional Tribute receipients will be named next week and nominees for this year's Gothams will be announced on Oct. 20.

To learn more about the event go to http://gotham.ifp.org.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 8/19/2008 11:05:00 AM Comments (2)

Celebrated and influential film critic Manny Farber died yesterday at the age of 91. At Movie City Indie Ray Pride has a lovely, well-linked remembrance, which opens like this:

Manny Farber, painter, brilliant writer, indelible critic and all-round original whom some aped and few grazed, died in his sleep last night at the age of 91. He had retired from writing and teacher and devoted himself to painting and drawing. To cite Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, which early Preston Sturges savant Farber would likely not frown upon, "What a life!"

Glenn Kenny also has a long piece on Farber. An excerpt:

If you've never read Farber, just stop here and get to it. His collected criticism, in a volume called Negative Space, is one of the touchstone texts of film writing—tough-minded, sharp-eyed, idiosyncratic, often wildly funny, and with a bedrock integrity and aesthetic acuity that even best best of contemporary film critics are hard-pressed to approach, let alone match. He is most often cited for coining the phrases "termite art" and "white-elephant art," two opposed categories. What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle.

GreenCine has a comprehensive round-up here, and Karina Longworth has discovered some more Farber internet resources at Spout.

Three years ago Filmmaker published Barbara Schock's piece on studying with Farber. We'll have that piece up on the website later in the week.

Labels: obituaries

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/18/2008 11:42:00 PM Comments (0)

I've posted before about Chris Anderson's dictum that everything in the digital world wants to be free. One type of merchandise that may prove Anderson's theory is independent film hits from the 1980s and '90s. Whit Stillman and Cinetic Media organized a blogosphere blitz this week with the free streaming release of his 1990 debut feature Metropolitan on Hulu.com. As Cinetic's Matt Dentler blogs, Stillman did fresh interviews with Karina Longworth at Spout, Eugene Hernandez at Indiewire, and Stephen Saito at Indiewire.

Noticing all the commotion, I emailed Dentler and asked him what prompted it. He wrote back, "Cinetic Rights Management is the digital sales agent on the film. Whit got the film back, and was happy to have us explore digital possibilities for it. So, as we were looking at outlets this summer, we felt that Hulu would be a great home for Metropolitan to find an audience. Hulu's deals are typically ad rev shares. This is the second film of ours we've brokered with them. The first, which was two weeks ago, was Hoop Dreams."

What will be interesting to see is how the Hulu availability will affect, if at all, sales of the Criterion edition of the film, which came out two years ago. I spoke with a distributor recently who releases his films both theatrically and on his company's own home video label. He told me he was embracing platforms like Hulu and, in his case, Snag Films. He feels all exposure is good exposure, and free, ad-supported internet streaming will only increase demand for the physical disks themselves. But whatever the final financial verdict is, it's clear that for indie filmmakers free streaming video is a new window that they can exploit to renew interest in their work. In the early '90s license terms for indie movies typically hovered around 12 or, often, 15 years. The distribution rights to a lot of great independent films are now reverting back to their makers, and I'll look forward to seeing who the next filmmaker to pursue this option will be.

And what about Filmmaker's interview with Stillman? Anthony Kaufman did one for us back in 2006 on the occasion of the Criterion release.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/18/2008 10:50:00 PM Comments (1)

David Byrne and Brian Eno did it right when releasing their new Everything that Happens Will Happen Today, I think. Even though 20+ years have elapsed since their last collaboration, this one was announced and then made available to fans just three weeks later -- no time for record industry leaks to pop up on the internet but enough time to score feature coverage like the piece in the Sunday New York Times. A free song was provided at the end of July in return for your email address. Today, the record's release date, an email went out reminding you to check out the site where you could find the record in three formats. There's an $8.99 all digital version, 320kbps MP3s with no DRM and a 17-page PDF lyric book. (I bought this one.) For $3.00 more you can get the digital version plus a CD version that will be mailed to you at the end of November. And if you want to drop a cool $70 you can get the digital version plus a deluxe version with four more songs and a short film about the album by Hillman Curtis. Of course, copies are probably flying across the torrent sites by now, but the range of options appealing to fans and collectors, no DRM, good file quality, and the personal touch given to the whole endeavor (you download from Byrne and Eno's site, and the email from Byrne ended with a friendly, "I hope you like the songs") made this release seem like something you want to be apart of it if you've ever liked either of these artists.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/18/2008 09:46:00 AM Comments (0)

Over on his blog These Are Those Things, Ted Hope tracks a correspondence between fishing and film that has taken 17 years to play out. In a post entitled "Rock & Roll & Film & Fishing & Tripping," Hope traces the ripple of a stone thrown in the lake by John Lurie in his cable show Fishing with John and watches it turn into an afternoon in which Caveh Zahedi and Will Oldham trip on mushrooms and then, later, yet another fishing trip, this time shared by Dean Ween and the Butthole Surfers.

Head to Ted's blog for the links and embeds.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/17/2008 08:52:00 PM Comments (0)

Alex Karpovsky, writer/director, 2006: Since being included in the list back in 2006, I teamed up with Indiepix to release my first feature, The Hole Story, on DVD. The film is now available at retail stores across the country, Netflix, and other outlets. I have also completed another feature, Woodpecker, which premiered at SXSW last March and is now bouncing along on the festival circuit. Currently, I am in post-production on my first feature-length documentary TJ and Dave, which focuses on America's most revered long-form comedy improvisers, Tj Jagadowski and Dave Pasquesi. I've also done a bit of acting recently, playing the male lead in Andrew Bujalski's new film along with the voices of several Russian gangsters in the newly released Grand Theft Auto IV. This winter I hope to shoot my next feature film. More personally, I am still prone to melancholy, take longer walks, eat less red meat, and have made significant enhancements to my morning positive visualization exercises. Though no overarching existential paradigm shift has take place in the last two years, the codification of numerous points of growth has Iead to a shinier, happier, more productive, more better me.

David Munro, writer/director, 1998: I wrote a first draft of what became my first feature, Full Grown Men, in 1998 the year I made the list and it took me until this year to get it made and in theaters. Not all of that time was devoted to FGM - I wrote other scripts on assignment and started directing commercials for a company called Kontent Films in San Francisco. I also shot a short film called Compulsory Breathing that played on PBS's Independent Lens in 2002.

But for the most part making the first feature was the story.

My creative partner (and wife) Xandra Castleton and I began raising money for FGM in 2003, shot the film in Florida in Summer 2005, premiered at Tribeca in 2006, played the fest circuit that year (AFI, Cinevegas) and won the indieWIRE: Undiscovered Gems Sundance Channel Audience Award in 2007 -- which got us a $50k P&A fund to release theatrically through Emerging Pictures and a $50k broadcast deal with the Sundance Channel. We recently opened at Cinema Village in NY and will play in a dozen or so theaters nationwide this Summer (hopefully more when it's all said and done). The film stars Matt McGrath, Judah Friedlander, Alan Cumming, Amy Sedaris, and Deborah Harry, and tells the tale of a pathologically nostalgic man who tracks down his former best friend in an attempt to relive his childhood.

I remember Holly Willis saying something about my ability to create unreal alternate worlds for my stories -- some of the reviews for FGM speak to this (our website has links to reviews and other info: www.fullgrownmenthemovie.com). We shot with Frank Demarco (Hedwig) and production designer Susan Block (Welcome To The Dollhouse) and worked hard to create a timeless Florida "snowglobe" world that our main character is trapped inside. I don't know if Holly has seen the film yet but would hope it affirms her appreciation of my shorts Bullethead and First Love Second Planet.

At the moment I'm writing a graphic novel (that I hope to adapt into a film) with NY illustrator Josh Cochran called The Inferiors. It's a dark satire about a fascist high school trying to eliminate the misfits and outcasts in order to win an excellence grant. It's very much about status and the quest for it creating monsters.

The years that 25 Faces has spanned have certainly marked a time of transition (hopefully not a post-script) in indie filmmaking, as you're well aware. It's never been easy to do what we do but I'd venture to say it has never been more challenging than now. (Though I guess in some ways, with advances in digital filmmaking technology it has never been easier to actually MAKE a movie.) No one knows where it's headed but I know film artists will keep running through walls to do what they do.

Josslyn Luckett, writer/director, 2002: It was such a thrill to be included all those moons back... me and Hollywood kind of dried up... oh well... but I'm doing cool theater. Just finished a nine month workshop at the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper here in Los Angeles...working on a solo performance piece about a woman obsessed with the Imitation of Life films...it's called Loving/Imitation. I'm also writing about jazz -- see my blog: Come Sunday: Jazz, Trouble, Hallelujah -- and curating a series of interfaith sacred jazz concerts, inspired by Duke Ellington's sacred music at a place in Culver City called "The Jazz Bakery."

David Birdsell, writer/director, 1998: I was on the "25 New Faces" list from 1998. Since that time I've been in a mysterious coma from which I just recently awoke.

No, not really. Actually I've mostly been working as an editor, including on Martin Hynes's feature The Go-Getter which had a limited release this summer. I've also directed some commercials and made a couple of short films that can be seen at David Birdsell.net. The most recent short I made was called Hairlady and it's somewhat more experimental than my other stuff. All the while I've been contemplating making a feature which has slowly been taking shape inside my head and will someday soon make it's way out.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/15/2008 05:57:00 PM Comments (1)

Here's the sixth of our catch-ups with previous "25 New Faces" filmmakers. If you've been on the list and haven't sent us an update, you can still email one to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com.


David Russo, writer/director, 2003: I'm in post (special effects & animation) on my live action feature, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle. I'd like to have it done for Sundance 2009 consideration, but I'm really taking advantage of both the Rockefeller and Creative Capital grants to make it thoroughly my own kind of vision. For me that just involves time, time & more time. The investors are chomping at the bit for me to finish, but are grudgingly allowing me to indulge my arty-farty side because it's giving the film such a unique kind of energy. This may be my only feature so why rush?

What else? Are Samsung Instinct and Glyde commercials news? I had a blast making those. Honestly, I think I'd like to make commercials more than films. Commercials as we knew them are so on the wane these days that it's sort of an open field again. In 2009 I'm hoping to devote myself fully to the commercial sphere while I train to become a dental hygienist. And no that ain't a joke.

In a nut shell, I'm happy as fuck and envy nobody (which is weird for me).

Amy Talkington, writer/director, 1998: After being named one of the "25 indie faces to watch," it took more than five years to get my first feature made. While I slogged away trying to get a feature together, I stayed busy making my living as a writer (a few studio scripts, a few pilots and a TV movie). I also continued to make short films, including the 360-degree interactive short, The New Arrival, and Our Very First Sex Tape which, with 4 million hits, has become something of an internet cult hit.

Finally in 2005, my feature The Night of the White Pants came together, starring Tom Wilkinson, Nick Stahl and Selma Blair. The movie premiered at the Tribeca FIlm Festival in 2006, did the festival circuit and is coming out on DVD on October 14th. I am currently putting cast together for my next movie, Deeply Shallow and Really Fake, which is being produced by Neal Moritz. We hope to shoot in early 2008. Meantime, I still stay busy working as a writer and making short form projects for the internet.

Ham Tram, writer/director, 2006: My name is Ham Tran, and I was in the 2006 list of filmmakers to watch, with my film Journey From the Fall premiering at Sundance. Since Sundance, this film has gone on to win 16 awards for Best Narrative Feature in film festivals world-wide. The DVD has been released, and it is available on Netflix and Blockbuster. There has even been a school curriculum that is based on the events that take place in the film. For two high school districts in Southern Calfornia (Garden Grove and Anaheim), the Viet Nam War and its after math has taken on a new meaning.

Currently, I am working on my next two films. The first is called Distant Country, and it the true life story of two illegal Vietnamese immigrants who went on a world-wind tour in their hopes to cross the borders into the United States. I've had the great privelege of meeting John Sayles, and over the course of this past year I've been updating him on my progress on the script development. I just got the official confirmation that John Sayles and Maggie Renzi have agreed to Executive Produce Distant Country.

My second feature film is one that I've been co-writing with another 25 Filmmakers to Watch alumnus, Stephane Gauger (Owl and the Sparrow). The script, tentatively titled The Storm's Wake, is centered upon the recovery of the Vietnamese community in the aftermath of Katrina, told from three character's point of view. Janet Yang (Dark Matter and The Joy Luck Club is Executive Producing this film. It's a project that the three of us have been developing for about a year now. Stephane and I will each direct one of the stories and then co-direct the third.

What's really great about these upcoming projects is that I get to work with John, Maggie, and Janet, my heroes of filmmaking! I was just an undergrad English major when I saw John Sayles The Secret of Roan Inish, and thought to myself, "If I could tell stories like this, I would love to be a filmmaker." I shook his hand at the James Bridges Theater at UCLA, when I was a grad in the UCLA film school, but never thought that one day I'd get to have dinner with him, let alone have him executive produce my film. All thanks to my great friend, Catherine Park, who invited me to a lunch she had with John and Maggie.

That's basically what I've been up to since the release of Journey From the Fall. Thank you guys so much for the support!

Damani Baker, director, 2000:

The latest:

Feature documentary: Still Bill (director)

Cinematographer for Wisdom director Andrew Zuckerman for Late Night and Weekends.

Music video for Morley

Music video for Maiysha, "Wanna Be". Coming soon

Director of "Return" and "Return Interactive"

Producer/Cinematographer for Puma Online Brand Content feat. Bill T Jones and Paulo Nutini ()

So sorry for the impersonal list. In Malawi for the past two weeks (Southern Africa) on another project, connection is slow and dying.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/15/2008 05:53:00 PM Comments (0)

Independent film is, unfortunately at times, a cyclical business. In 2002 we commissioned producer Bergen Swanson to write "Hollywood or Bust: What if Your Producer Goes Bankrupt." It was relevant then and may be relevant at now. It's in our Web Exclusives. Here's a taste:

YOU'VE DONE IT! The screenplay you've been slaving over for months has finally been optioned by an edgy production company noted for offbeat films. Or, the movie that has consumed your life for the past two years has been picked up by a noted distributor. Emptying out your savings, selling your comic book collection, sleeping on friends' couches - it's all been worth it. But then the unthinkable happens. The company that bought your film or script files for bankruptcy, and your project gets thrown into legal limbo, possibly never to see the light of day.

A far-fetched scenario? The sudden demise of companies like The Shooting Gallery and, most recently Propaganda Films, the noted commercial and film production house and home for filmmakers like Spike Jonze, reminds us all of the financial instability of independent film. And although ex-executives and lawyers are reluctant to comment on record, these companies - and the scores of lesser known ones that have been cratered during this entertainment industry recession - controlled dozens of projects, whether they be acquired books, optioned screenplays or produced or acquired films. The acquisitions or production executives, the "friends of the filmmaker," who brought those projects into their companies and have been pink-slipped away, and anxious independents have now been left to bargain with bankers and court appointed trustees in order to regain the rights to their material.

Although it can be difficult to disentangle one's work once a company has entered bankruptcy, by understanding bankruptcy and its legal workings when first negotiating his or her deal, a filmmaker can obtain some degree or protection should a production or distribution company go belly up.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/15/2008 12:18:00 AM Comments (0)

Here's the fifth of our catch-ups with previous "25 New Faces" filmmakers. If you've been on the list and haven't sent us an update, you can still email one to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com.


Don Handfield, writer/director, 2005: Life for me has changed dramatically for me since 2005, no pun intended. I am married now - to a beautiful woman named Tressa, and we had our first baby - a little girl - Robinson Dawn Handfield - just two weeks ago. She came in on the day of the recent earthquake and has been making her presence known with more little earthquakes every day since then. Wife and daughter have both been great teachers for me. My wife's emotional intelligence is off the chart, and my daughter keeps me present. She's a little Zen Buddha, in the moment at all times (when hungry, eat, when tired, sleep) and it's a pretty special gift to be reminded of that. I used to pride myself on my workaholic ways, being the lone wolf, writing late into the night, working long hours, grinding it out so to speak. That's not working for me anymore, especially not with a family. So I find myself working less from the filing cabinet (my brain) and more from the master control unit (my heart). Less time, and ultimately truer work.

As far as the feature I am directing - Jason Scott - I am set to shoot it first quarter of next year - 2009. A long road to get it made with many ups and downs in between. I connected with a great new set of producers, Mickey Barold and Stone Douglass, aka StickandStone. They put the project over the top and I am excited to finally be getting it going. I have tried to use the wait time wisely, workshopping the film over-and-over again. I've shot shorts or scene studies of my lead character in three different formats with three different actors.

I try to judge my progression in terms of personal and creative growth, rather than in business terms. But I can say that being in Filmmaker Magazine was definitely a boost for me, and led in one way or another to many great opportunities. I am currently finishing writing the romantic comedy Love Always for DreamWorks and wrapping up an adaptation of the nonfiction novel Fire on the Mountain for National Geographic Films.

The latter is an epic drama about one of the worst wildland firefighting disasters in modern history. I've put years of research into the script - on top of the half decade of intensive research and interviews done by the book's author, John MacLean. Wildland firefighting is a world we see on the news a lot lately, but most people don't really know much about it. This story gets inside it, and is really a war movie about firefighting, with a Black Hawk Down or United 93 feel to it. The Producer, Nick Osborne and I are glad it landed at the film division of National Geographic. Adam Liepzig and the people there seem to really care that the story is done right. They have research teams in D.C. that vet each draft for accuracy, which is good, because in this case, the truth is enough - no Hollywood embellishments necessary.

I went a little crazy during the writer's strike - it was against every workaholic bone in my body to sit and do nothing, but my conscience won out and I did. For weeks. Then I found out halfway through the strike that web series were legal, so I took an idea, Driver's Ed, that I had pitched a year before (that no one quite understood) and decided to just go shoot it myself as a web series. In my version, my lead character is a 60-year-old Iranian-American who owns a driving school in the Inland Empire. I say my version because when I presented the idea initially, I was told, Your lead can't be foreign." "Why not?" Because no one will watch it. "Really?" Yes. They've done studies. People want to watch themselves. Your lead has to be a white male. Thirties. Or you won't get an audience. "Really? What about Sanford & Son? Chico and the Man? And all those great shows this 30-something white male grew up watching and loving?" Old shows. Times have changed. Okay. What do I know? So I changed my pitch to have a white lead in his thirties. It didn't sell. It didn't even get interest from a studio. So I shelved it. Then Borat came out. Foreign Lead. Comedy. The same type of fish-out-of-water skewed comedic perspective I envisioned for Driver's Ed. Ugh.

It's important to listen to people. Probably the most important skill you can develop to get ahead in this town. But sometimes you need to listen to your gut. Vision is seeing what other people don't see. So don't expect to share your vision and have people go Ahhh! I get it! It's called vision because they don't see it. And sometimes the only way to communicate it is to demonstrate. So I decided, the strike is on, let me put my money where my mouth is. Literally. My wife produced, her family pitched in to help, we shot down and dirty, on HD, for no money down in San Diego County, film school style. Tiny crew. No permits. We actually got the cops called on us by some 18-year-old kid. Go figure, all the 50-something parents were cool with us shooting in their neighborhood, this kid was some kind of police-geek-in-training and reported our fake police car for not having proper signage. My cop actor almost got arrested for felony impersonating a police officer! Luckily, they ended up getting off and they let us finish our shoot. In retrospect, it was amusing to see a cop writing another cop a ticket. We had some pretty amazing luck all around on that shoot. I was gassing up a picture car that still had a camera mount on it at a gas station and some guy ran up and asked me if we needed stuntmen. I was like "Stuntmen? Dude, we can't afford PAs". He scribbled down his name and number and told me to look him up on IMDB. I was up til 4 am transferring my P2 cards to hard disk (we couldn't afford a camera assistant either) and I looked him up. He was a world class stuntman, one of the guys surfing through explosions in Apocolypse Now. Well, the next morning it rained so hard I had to change my shooting schedule and ended up with an extra DP and an empty picture car. A 1984 Caprice Classic I rented off of craigslist. I called the stunt coordinator (Kerry Rossall) who happened to be having a barbecue with a master mechanic and the Baja Rally champion at his house. They met us in a parking lot with about an hours notice and proceeded to absolutely destroy that station wagon. They made it do things I didn't think that car could do - 360s, powerslides, reverse 180s - Smoky and the Bandit moves. It was awesome. The car came back to me a rattling, smoking hulk, but the footage was unbelievable. I of course, bought the car, I couldn't return it like that. It raised the budget a little bit, but the production value we got from it was tenfold.

When the series was cut, I showed it to the Broken Lizard guys (Super Troopers, Beer Fest, Dukes of Hazzard) who responded strongly enough to take it into Lionsgate where they have a TV deal. The first and only studio we took it to made an offer and we pitch it to networks next week. So my web series hasn't seen the web yet, but it might make TV. I will keep you posted.

Anyway, I didn't mean to write a book. I don't even know if I got this in to you in time. It took me a while because I am living in Baby Town right now, Population: No Sleep. Congratulations and good luck to all the 2008 New Faces. Don't sit back and wait for people to come knocking, seize this opportunity. Publicity is currency in this town. Don't blow it on your ego, spend it on your projects and parlay, parlay, parlay.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/14/2008 04:48:00 PM Comments (0)

An interesting conversation is developing over at Anne Thompson's blog, in which she writes about some of the recent executive departures. Of course, the big news this week was Paula Wagner's leaving UA, and in a piece about that development Thompson references Bill Horberg's stepping down as head of production at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. SKE has recently downsized after producing several films, including Charlie Kaufman's ambitious and out-there Synechdoche, New York, which cost, reportedly, north of $20 million and, according to Thompson, was bought "for a song" by Sony Classics. She characterizes both Wagner and Horberg as being "ill equipped to understand the true meanings of economies of scale" when greenlighting pics like Kaufman's and Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs.

In the comments thread, producer Ted Hope has contributed a defense of Horberg, who he is producing Greg Mottola's Adventureland with. It's also a thoughtful riff on trying to produce good work in trying times. Here are three key paragraphs, but go to Anne's blog to read the rest:

Producing and determining budget amounts is a tricky pursuit -- one that is far too easy to judge in hindsight. Audiences demand production value and verisimilitude. Actors and directors need time and time is money (at least on film budgets). International sales agents long ago abandoned the by-the-bootstraps production and want high-profile quality pictures. There's tremendous pressure on all sides ,and neither a few hits or failures determine or define how well someone is negotiating the balance of what determines the correct budget. Some films will never get made simply because producers are unwilling to put in the things that give financiers confidence that the project will sell well. Returns are critical, but so is a film culture that is worthy of being seen.

I don't know a producer around who wouldn't be proud to claim Bill's track record for their own (or part thereof, as I do have particular affection for my own). Producers and executives alike seldom get a chance to initiate or even participate in movies that truly raise the bar -- and Bill does repeatedly.

Charlie Kaufman's SYNECDOCHE was one of the most original and ambitious scripts I have ever encountered (I have not seen the film yet) and Charlie may well be the most refreshing and unique filmmaker of our time. When I first read it, after recovering from the emotional wallop and imaginative tour de force that the pages held, I felt "now here's a movie you can build and drive a slate around". As John August recently captured so well on his blog, the profit a film generates go well beyond the financial side of things (collaborators profit! culture profits! companies' reputations profit!). Yet there are very few films that allow a company to profit in ways that aren't just purely financial; SYNECDOCHE has, and had from the start, that potential -- if one could enact that specific agenda -- but we will never get to see that might have been now. Hopefully, people will vote with their dollars for a world that supports such a once every twenty years vision. People gripe about now versus the 70'sin terms of the work that is supported, but when we get a truly unique vision, where are champions then?

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/14/2008 12:17:00 PM Comments (0)

The Long Now Foundation was established twelve years ago to "creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." One of its founding board members is Brian Eno, and he submitted a fascinating post to the site's blog recounting the experience he had watching a theater piece in Oberammergau, in Upper Bavaria.

From the post:

In the early seventeenth century, as plague raced across Europe, the people of this small town made a deal with God: spare us and we’ll perform a Passion play every ten years. All of us. The whole town.

True to their word, they’ve done this every decade since. The first performance was in 1634, and ever since it’s been at the turn of the decade. It’s a startling event, because everyone in the town really is involved. All the actors, the musicians, the technical staff, the director, the costumiers, the carpenters, the singers, the stagehands, the press agents, the bartenders, the ushers - are local people. In normal life they’re the hairdresser, the postman, the dentist, the notary, the teacher, the plumber, the bus driver.

The next Passion Play won't occur until 2010. Eno instead attended a staging of Stefan Zweig's Jeremias, which featured a cast of only 500.

He writes:

I won’t attempt a description of the content: my German is so rudimentary that I understood very little of what was going on. It was 3 hours long, but it didn’t matter: I was intrigued.There were at times several hundred people on the huge open-air stage (the audience sit inside, under cover, but the stage area is open to the sky, the elements and the changing light of evening): there was fire, rain, camels, sheep and horses, a 50 piece orchestra of local players and a 100 person choir of local singers…. all to a totally professional standard. There was nothing ‘local’ about the quality of any of the performances.

And he wonders:

What would it do to a community to have a tradition as long and as defining as that, to know from an early age that you were, probably throughout your life, going to be woven into this incredibly rich tapestry of time, spirituality, art and craft? What would it be like to be a child growing up there, to watch your parents and grandparents learning their lines and practising their parts and building the sets and making the clothes? It must be so rich, such a powerful social binder and foundation.

Oh - I suddenly realised. It would be like tribal life. For isn’t this exactly what growing up in Bali or Mali, with their long traditions of folk art, must be like?

Back in the world of immediacy, Eno has a new record with David Byrne. It comes out next week and the first single can be downloaded for free.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/14/2008 11:21:00 AM Comments (1)

As the neo-cons attempt to return to the glory days of the Cold War, we'll probably find fewer of them online blogging about the significance of Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight. If you read my post below, Batman Fights the Neo-Cons, there's been a back-and-forth in the blogosphere about the ideological underpinnings of the massive box-office hit.

For some people, this is all just silly -- Batman is nothing more than a character in a rubber suit. Some of the rest of us, though, get off on such cultural theory wonkery. So, if you are not a regular reader of K-Punk's blog, I'll point you to a new post in which he reprints some of the responses he got to his original piece, which I linked to in my post.

Savonarola wrote:

The relentlessness of the time-torture motif, and the laying bare of all its psychic contradictions, is quite a testament to how impacted in it is in the American mindset (and it wouldn't be too farfetched to see DK as a kind of negative-dialectical dismantling of the reassuring virility of 24 scenarios). The real political "problem" with the films (which is also a political insight) is the amorphous impotence/homogeneity of the populace, which perhaps fits in with your Straussian theme. It is a sign of the times that the people is simply a fickle opinionated multitude (or a *family*) to be pacified by the mythic trappings of the Law, saved by the scapegoat-outlaw, or on the brink of nihilist anomie (save when the individual - as in the 2 ferries, with their ethical criminal and hesitant "upright" citizen - chooses the good, AGAINST THE VOTE). The social theory of these films if very turn of the (other) century: Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, etc. (theory of crowds); Pareto, Michels, Mosca (theory of elites and oligarchies). Never a collective in sight (which is not a slight, but a testament to the present parameters of the imaginable).

And Wayne Wedge wrote:

I have had very mixed feelings about this movie since seeing it - my first reaction was that it was 'fascist' (its imagery was what 'hit' me first) but the more I think about it, the more meanings it takes on - and it was deliberately contrived to do that. Whatever our 'intellectual' vanities (or infantile geek fetishes), we are encouraged to participate in the movie as an event. It encourages repeat viewings , word of mouth buzz and those highly profitable DVD sales (I can see the holographic metal box-set alreay). Along with its hype, acclaim and the seemingly infinite discussion of it, the movie - both as pseudo-event and narrative - is a deafening, oppressive noise.

It is the perfect Hollywood machine - so much and incident it becomes incoherent and strangely plotless. Violence and power as spectacle but savvy enough about its 'demographic' to appear ambivalent. It can create flattering illusions of being left-wing, right-wing, liberal, mystical, dialectic or whatever (endless discussion boards and blogs invoking Nietszche, Milton Friedmann, Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Heidigger, George Lukacs, Aleister Crowley, Michel Lacan etc. etc. to discuss a cartoon character in a rubber suit)....

It recklessly toys with contemporary 'relevance' and social/political/sexual anxieties while hiding behind digestible pop culture posing (or the reverse in the eyes of some critics).

There are more responses at the link above as well as an excellent post on privatization and the libidinal role of government in neo-liberal societies.

UPDATE: After posting this I discovered this piece on John August's blog which takes a very sensible position regarding all this superhero parsing.

From August:

I’d argue that the thematic success of comic book characters, and comic book storylines, comes from how closely they can approach the line separating Real from Too Real, without crossing it.

For example, this summer’s The Dark Knight is set in the most realistic Gotham City yet, but its characters still speak in broad philosophical proclamations. Just listen to Batman:

Sometimes, truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.

Sometimes, dialogue should only be spoken while wearing a mask. His statement makes sense in abstract, but you wouldn’t want it applied to, say, the invasion of a sovereign nation based on false evidence. Even Commissioner Gordon seems to understand that Batman is better suited to villain-thumping than leadership. His improbable answer to his young son’s question about why Batman is running:

Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now…and so we’ll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he’s not a hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector…a dark knight.

(MUSIC RISES.)

Efforts to place TDK’s Batman on a real-world political spectrum are doomed. Sure, he’s tough on crime, but he’s also anti-gun. He holds himself outside the law, but destroys his own phone-tapping technology. Is he a Conservative? A Liberal? A Libertarian?

Nope, he’s just Batman. And as a comic book character, he’s allowed to hold simultaneous incompatible philosophies.

I think fans are responding to this latest wave of superhero movies not because they’re more realistic, but because they safely insulate us from reality, letting us address epic themes without uncomfortable details. Law versus Chaos is entertaining in TDK, but messy when you look at Iraq. The military-industrial complex is, well, less complex when Tony Stark can simply stop making weapons. And become a weapon. Or something. (The important thing is, he beat up Jeff Bridges, who was visibly evil and bald.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/14/2008 10:58:00 AM Comments (1)

Just a couple of posts below I mentioned Mike Figgis's blog on the FilmInFocus site. Over at his Movie City Indie, Ray Pride gets inspired by Figgis quotes on character and narrative in today's filmmaking.

From Figgis:

I guess I'm in a period of thinking about film and filmmaking. I made a feature last year, it's called Love Live Long but everything about [it] was far removed from the what cinema has become... I have read lots of scripts and written a couple for other people. The ones I read were not interesting and the ones I wrote all ended up in studio type confrontations. Executives who had big ideas about character and plot and particularly the 3rd act.... [T]he main thing that strikes me is this - Plot has killed script. Back in the day plot was a slightly sketchy framework for character development. The scripts I read now, the characters are there to supply the plot. It's all to do with a misguided idea that the function of cinema is somehow to be realistic. I think the function of cinema is to be poetic and magic and original.

The blog post sparked a reaction in Pride. "My revelation: I worked a couple years on a script with a New York-based director about watching," he writes before launching into a description of that script, some of its challenges, and a different way the material might be handled. He then adds a two-minute clip from the project in question. It's worth reading both posts to see the way inspiration is pinging across the Atlantic by means of the blogosphere.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/14/2008 08:59:00 AM Comments (0)

The New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting's new permit rules for filmmakers go into effect today.

From the press release:

The rules, which were published today in the City Record and will go into effect thirty days after publication on August 13, will require a permit if filmmakers use vehicles or equipment, or, in certain situations, assert exclusive use of City property. Permits will not be required for casual photographers, tourists, credentialed members of the media, or other members of the public who do not use vehicles or equipment or assert exclusive use of City property.

The complete rules and a FAQ can be found at the link above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/13/2008 10:03:00 AM Comments (5)

Director Mike Figgis has been posting excellent blog entries at FilmInFocus. Here's a piece of his latest, in which he talks about great books, the magical expression of writing, and Mad Men.

A few months back I watched an episode of MAD MEN, the American TV series that is based around the advertising industry in NY in the 60's. I was quite taken by the episode I watched, it seemed to demonstrate my feeling that the best filmmaking and writing in mainstream cinema right now is coming out of US TV. I've guest directed one episode of THE SOPRANOS and the standard of writing is high. Also HBO has a reputation for less interference than studios and networks. I also shot a TV pilot last year for a network (SONY / FOX) and found it to be (for me) unworkable. SO my girlfriend bought the 1st series of MAD MEN boxset and we sat down to watch the episodes in sequence. It's well made and interestingly cast...but there is something about the writing that I find almost surreal, and not intentional. It is character based (like Powell) but the characters do not seem at all real. It feels to me like the 60's are being observed through glass. More of a period piece than restoration comedy. Because smoking is a big deal (advertising themes) everyone smokes all the time. At first this is interesting but by episode 6 it is more like a Python sketch. So it doesn't seem modern, which is a shame because the 60's were very modern. Balzac is modern, his dialogue and characters are modern. I will ponder on this as I continue to watch. I can sense that it is post-Soprano, but I also felt that towards the end THE SOPRANOS began to lose its way because the characters began to get unglued from the frame that had been established.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/11/2008 10:55:00 AM Comments (0)

William Patry, an attorney and author specializing in intellectual property, has been keepin a blog that covers copyright issues, but, last week, he decided to shut it down. He cited two reasons. First, since transitioning to a position as Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, he's had a hard time expressing in the blog his own personal views without them being attributed elsewhere to him in his official capacity at the search giant.

But the other reason is that he is depressed.

From his post:

This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

It is profoundly depressing, after 26 years full-time in a field I love, to be a constant voice of dissent.

Patry initially decided to take down prior blog posts, but after reader outcry he is putting them back up, so you can go back and read the progression of thoughts that took him to this place.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/11/2008 01:29:00 AM Comments (0)

I just caught up with Nicholas Carr's thoughtful and resonant "Is Google Making Us Stupid" in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. His initial description of a new kind of malady will strike a chord with many who spend a good deal of time on the 'net:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

Carr's piece goes on to talk about how changes in thinking, our concept of time, and our conceptualization of ourselves are prompted by changes in information technology, from the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century to the search engine of today. Along the way he draws on Kubrick, Nietzsche, Socrates and Richard Foreman and also includes these provocative paragraphs on how the internet is transforming traditional media like newspapers, TV, and, yes, the movies.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

The entire article is recommended at the link above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/10/2008 09:15:00 PM Comments (8)

Filmmakers Amy Seimetz and Kelly Parker have created a short video for the nonprofit organization Veterans in Transition. Here's an email we received from Amy, and the video is embedded below.

Kelly Parker and I made a video for a nonprofit called The VET Foundation. It is an organization that helps soldiers returning from the war transition back into civilian life. Whether you are for the war or against it, the fact is their are men and women coming back either injured physically, suffering from a traumatic brain injury and/or coping with PTSD. The government does not have and effective transition program for these soldiers once they come back and we've already seen what not dealing with these issues leads to from Vietnam and even in recent headlines of suicide, unemployment and homelessness. The homeless rate among veterans is 1 in every 4.

The VET Foundation is a fantastic organization aimed at teaching the veterans skills needed to compete with in the civilian workforce, how to access their benefits from the government, and it also builds a support network for these men and women who are coping deep emotional wounds and feel alienated upon returning because they do not feel like they can relate to the civilian population. The VET Foundation is made up of men and women who have served either in this war or in previous wars, and so they understand what these men and women are going through. Their mission, though it seems daunting, is quite practical. It is a very action oriented solution, and not just a band aid or a feel good idealistic hope for a better time.

Please pass this on to your friends or family that may need help transitioning. And if you or someone you know may like to make a donation, visit www.vetfoundation.org.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/10/2008 06:45:00 PM Comments (0)

I was late to see Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight, only catching up to this astonishing and unexpectedly grim film this past week. It's probably the first action film I've ever seen that's exhausted me not by the intensity of its fight sequences but by its embedding of specific moral and philosophical dilemmas in all of its significant set pieces.

Because I hadn't seen the film, I avoided reading a lot about it, which means I missed the various pieces that have either celebrated (as in Andrew Klavan's Wall Street Journal piece) or decried (as in Dave Kehr's review) the film for being a celebration of the policies of George W. Bush.

Here's Klavan:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

The Dark Knight, then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

And here's Kehr:

Is the Dark Knight just George Bush with a better outfit, demanding that he be allowed all of the available “tools” to combat terrorism, even if they include torture and eavesdropping? Like Bush, Batman has his own warantless wiretapping program, but Nolan is kind enough to assure us that, once his goal is accomplished, the superhero will blow it up. Is he suggesting that we can count on the Dark President to do the same?

Now, at his blog, Mark K-Punk examines this argument not by seeing whether Bush can be compared to Batman and the Joker to Osama Bin Laden but by examining the film's articulation of notions of justice, virtue and causality and contrasting its processing of these concepts to the worldview of the neo-cons.

From the piece:

There are many symptomatically interesting things about the right wing attempts to appropriate The Dark Knight that are doing the rounds at the moment. The idea is that the Batman of the film equals Bush - a misunderstood hero prepared to make 'tough choices' in order to protect an ungrateful population from threats it is too ethically enfeebled to confront.

In a couple of intricately argued posts, Inspersal demonstrates that The Dark Knight by no means presents 'tough choices' as 'hard but necessary'; on the contrary, whenever Batman resorts to torture, it either yields nothing or is counterproductive. What neocon readings of the film must overlook is that this is exactly the same in geopolitical reality: far from being unpalatable but necessary, the Iraq misadventure, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition etc have either achieved no results or made things worse. What's interesting here is the doggedness of the neocon fantasy, which is precisely a fantasy of 'being realistic' -- astonishingly, elements of the American right appear to actually still believe that the Bush admininstration's policies are successful, and that the American public has rejected them on the grounds of highminded (liberal) ethical qualms rather than for pragmatic-utilitarian reasons (too many of our boys being killed).

... What's interesting about The Dark Knight is that is not really about Good versus Evil at all but 'good causes' versus aberrant modes of cause/ causality.

Recommended.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/09/2008 07:44:00 PM Comments (7)

Here's the fourth of our catch-ups with previous "25 New Faces" filmmakers. If you've been on the list and haven't sent us an update, you can still email one to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com.

Laura Colella, writer/director, 2000: In 2000, I was gearing up for the Sundance Directing & Screenwriting Labs with my 2nd feature project Stay Until Tomorrow. After the amazing lab experience, I spent over a year trying in vain to get a company or established producer behind the project. Amy Geller, a great young producer, signed on. We set a date, were offered many substantial donations of equipment and services through Sundance, and began trying to raise the needed funds. As the date approached, we had everything in place with the exception of any investors. Just at that time, I learned Robert Redford happened to be coming to Providence, RI, (where I live and was planning to shoot) to accept an award. I called Sundance to ask if there were any way he would consider briefly meeting with investors in my project (as a way for us to actually secure investors). They said no, he was completely booked, and gets way too many requests for a broad range of causes. But then they called right back and said he'd do it. To make a long story short, the funds we needed for this shoestring 35mm feature all came as a direct or indirect result of a meeting with Robert Redford. His generosity and commitment led him to talk about the importance of supporting regional filmmakers to a small group of our investors (and to my mother, who was so thrilled she could barely speak, and for the first time thought perhaps filmmaking wasn't such a worthless pursuit). Despite the overall good fortune, there were many desperate financial struggles in the making of Stay Until Tomorrow. The film was finished in 2004, had a good festival run, won some awards, and has a small distributor. I'm proud of the way it turned out, and also disappointed with the distribution options that were available for it.

I'm currently in the process of getting a new feature off the ground that I'm extremely excited about. It's adapted from a timely novel that's alternately darkly comic and vividly surreal, the author of which is often mentioned as a potential future Nobel prizewinner. The film is mostly live action, but incorporates a few animation sequences, and has elements that echo genres such as westerns, drug movies, and detective thrillers. I have an agent for the first time (from UTA), who is very smart, helpful and cool. I had about a dozen meetings for the project about a month ago in Los Angeles, mostly with major companies that were probably longshots for a project like this (at least from the outset). I had meeting after meeting with people who used the word "love" to describe their feelings about the script, and almost all said it was the best or most interesting script they'd read in a long time. It was a fun lovefest, but most from this first round have passed. As the last responses come in, my agent is selectively sending the script to other producers/companies who may be more appropriate, and more likely to do what they love. In the meantime, as with my last project, I'm moving forward in full preparation mode: location scouting, budgeting, storyboarding, working with others on the VFX/animation and production design components, etc. My filmmaking strategy involves dogged belief in the inevitability of a project's fruition. Any interested parties can contact me through the address on my website, www.lauracolella.com.

Larry Blackhorse Lowe, writer/director, 2004:

right now i'm traveling raising money
for a short film
which is costing 3 times what my feature 5TH WORLD cost
crazy

but its worth a small film with epic qualities
shot on black & white
Anamorphic 35mm

the struggles are all the same
finding money for movies with brown people
with no robots and no explosions
just panorama's and emotions
is extremely hard

so it goes

30 grand to finish this next one
then onto the robots and explosions
or a russ meyer remake

Neill dela Llana and Ian Gamazon, writer/directors, 2005: The Cavite Boys struggle to get their next projects off the ground. Hollywood hasn't been receptive to our ideas but we continue to write and hope to get financing for them. It's been a rough ride the past two years. We've met with every big studio, were offered really bad scripts that we turned down, fought for projects that we didn't get, got a development deal with Rogue Pictures that's now in development hell, and wrote three scripts that never got beyond our agents because they were not commercial enough. After all this we keep going because we're masochists and don't know when to quit. We will keep trying to get the next film made, even if it means we'll be in festivals with filmmakers who are half our age. We both have projects in different stages of development with the goal of getting one or both made before it's time to retire.

Todd Rohal, writer/director, 2006: Since making the 2006 25 faces list I continued to distribute my film, The Guatemalan Handshake, around the world...traveling with it as much as possible and somehow forging a living from it (actually paying my rent by working as my film's theatrical distributor). I solidified a deal, put a lot of work into a new HD video version, and released the film on a beautiful DVD through Benten Films. I finally put the film behind me after years of work (although, as I write this it is continuing to screen theatrically in Canada, show on Eastern European TV, run as a midnight film in Australia and play at art houses and festivals in various parts of the world)..

Although much of the last few years was spent working as my own distributor, I did manage to shoot a short film in Amsterdam with Danny McBride, shoot a music video for David Wingo's band Ola Podrida, created some short musical video pieces with Cory McAbee, earned a membership card into the mumblecore club by "acting" in Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes The
Stairs, and I am gearing up to again "act" in a feature film with Linas Phillips (also of the 25 Faces of 2006) called Bass Akwards.

After months of writing, my newest projects are now moving forward into the funding stages, one of which (Scoutmasters) is participating with producer Sophia Lin at the 2008 Sundance Producer's Lab and the other (The Untitled Buttock Adventure Movie) is taking part of the IFP's Emerging Narratives Program during this year's Independent Film Week.

Sameh Zoabi, writer/director, 2006: For the last couple of years I've been working on my first feature film script Man Without a Cellphone. Finally I locked the script with my Co-Writer David Rice. We will start Pre-Production this Fall 2008. Man Without a Cellphone takes a comical and political look at post-adolescent Palestinians living inside Israel. A young man confronts dating, cell phones, nosy friends, cultural tradition, an oppressive political reality, and his crazy father's battle against an Israeli cell phone company in an indifferent village. The project won the Film connection Award in the 2007 Dubai Film festival. Producers attached to the project: Amir Harel (Lama Films- Tel Aviv), Christoph Hahnheiser (Black Forest Films GmbH- Berlin), and Marie Gutmann (Meroe Films- Paris.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/09/2008 04:31:00 PM Comments (1)

...the short answer provided by Scott Kirsner at his CinemaTech blog: "It's not easy."

Still, Kirsner lays out the options in a comprehensive blog post in which he names all the various aggregators who sell content on Apple's market-leading download service, discusses their various terms, and provides contact info links. Essential.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/09/2008 10:47:00 AM Comments (6)

Over at The Circuit, Mike Jones reveals the possibility of a remake of the summer box office darling Man On Wire. According to him, Robert Zemeckis has the rights and could do a motion capture remake in the same style as The Polar Express and Beowolf.

Man On Wire is one of the most powerful films I've seen this year and James Marsh's use of archival footage, the charisma of Philippe Petit and clever recreated scenes makes the doc more than, well, a doc, but a thrill ride. I can't imagine why a remake is waranted, or how it could top Marsh's film (even with the use of visual effects).

But I guess that thinking doesn't come into account when making money is the motivating factor.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 8/08/2008 11:38:00 PM Comments (0)

I've been hooked on the free streaming video site Hulu the whole summer. And not just because I can watch episodes of The A-Team whenever I get a B.A. Baracus craving.

Since June they've launched a new movie or TV show every weekday in their Days of Summer series (it ends in a few weeks). Today they premiered The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Not one of my favorites, but for the most part I've been impressed by their taste: Lost In Translation, The Three Stooges collection, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, (and that was just the first three days of the series, talk about coming out of the box strong) Raising Arizona, Lost Highway, Casino Royale (1967), Coffee and Cigarettes, Weird Science (yes, sometimes you just need some Kelly LeBrock on a hot day), Open Your Eyes, Hoop Dreams and Groundhog Day.

If you haven't been to the site I highly recommend it. There's nothing like getting through the work day by watching Bill Murray repeat the same one.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 8/08/2008 01:23:00 PM Comments (2)

Ronnie Bronstein's Frownland opens this weekend at Facets Cinematheque in Chicaco, and Roger Ebert has written an extraordinary review in the Chicago Sun Times. After opening graphs where he describes the uncompromising nature of the film and the storyline, he ends with this:

Now why would you want to see this film? Most readers of this review probably wouldn't. I'm writing for the rest of us. It is a rebirth of the need for expression that inspired the American independent movement in the first place, 50 years ago. It was written, directed and edited by Ronald Bronstein, who had a crew of one cameraman, one soundman and one grip. It has not been picked up for distribution; he is distributing it himself at shrines to outsider cinema.

Yet the film has gained a foothold. It won a special jury prize at the important SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas. It won a Gotham Award from the Independent Feature Project in New York. To give you an idea of the challenge it presents, the New York Times praised it, but it was hated by Film Threat, "Hollywood's Indie Voice."

Such reactions are inspired by Dore Mann's performance, which in intensity equals Peter Greene's work in Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven (1993). Indeed, Kerrigan is one of the champions of the film. What Mann does is not caricature, not "performance," not contrived. It is full throttle all the way with insecurity, needfulness, loneliness, mistrust, desperation, self-hate, apology and despair.

Frownland has been described as a test for audiences. There will be walkouts. But it doesn't set out to alienate its viewers; its only purpose is to do justice to Keith by showing him as he is. I will not forget him.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/08/2008 11:41:00 AM Comments (0)

Directors Bradley Rust Grey and So Yong Kim just directed a short film for the Museum of Chinese in America Chinatown Film Project. Grey also acted as d.p. and shot the film on the new Red camera -- the same camera Steven Soderbergh used to shoot his recent CHE. Grey plans to use the Red to shoot his next feature, which should begin this fall, and was kind enough to send us this entry for the blog in which he quickly summarizes his impressions of the experience.

I haven't written a blog before. So I'm just sort of thinking of this as an email to someone I don't know who might be interested... is that a blog?

RE: RED

We just shot a short film in Chinatown with the REDOne camera for a project called CHINATOWN FILM PROJECT produced by Karin Chien. The film was also meant to be a test-shoot for a feature, THE EXPLODING GIRL, that we are currently preparing. The camera was provided by MBS Productions, who are also overseeing the post-production workflow. I'm writing this to give my impressions of the camera from a layman's point of view as I'm not really a DP.

WEIGHT AND SIZE

First of all, the camera is much larger than I envisioned after seeing a photo of it on the Red website. It's more the size of a shoebox, rather than say a hot dog bun. It's also heavy. Imagine filling a shoebox with sand and putting it on your shoulder and then adding lenses, rods, etc. But, I'm a small guy, so maybe others wouldn't think so much of it.

HAND HELD

The camera comes with a small shoulder pad plate which attaches very precariously. So precariously that the camera wobbles when you slide it on. Not to mention that it's not very comfortable. Fortunately, our first AC, Alva Holmes, had worked with the Red before and he knew a guy in the city (Steve from DuAll) who had designed a special shoulder rig just for the Red. We rented that for a nominal fee and it helped solve two problems. 1) It was more comfortable and stable, and 2) It had a standard plate attachment which meant we could switch between hand held and sticks quickly.

EASE OF USE

The camera has a very easy to follow visual exposure meter for all three color fields. We put our light meter away and just used this to adjust exposure. There are also the standard zebra pattern stripes for hot spot over exposures. As well, there is a bizarre switch which can help you see exposure by changing all of the colors in the image to some sort of "Predator-vision" experience. I'm sure it's a great feature, but i didn't have time to deal with it, so we just went with the regular exposure meter. Apparently, there's another setting which graphically shows if you're in focus... and again, it was explained to me by the first, but I didn't see the benefit of it.

We didn't have an eyepiece so we used the small monitor which comes with the camera. One advantage of this is when you're checking focus by eye you have a bigger image to look at. As well, by pressing a button on the side of the camera you can "pop/zoom" into the image to check focus and then pop back out. This "pop" feature doesn't work while you're shooting, however -- only when the camera is in standby mode.

I guess I should mention we were using "Build 15," which is the software update level. Currently, they are in "Build 16 Beta" mode which is supposed to help with shooting in low light situations. I was told it re-interprets the way the camera displays "noise" or "grain" in the blacks. One of the amazing things about the Red is that as people are using it, they can request new features which can then be downloaded directly into the camera in new build updates. For example, apparently they're working on a new feature which will record 5 seconds before you press the record button as well as save 5 seconds of footage after you stop. It's like a constant recycling memory drive. Anyway, if enough people wanted to be able to "pop/zoom" into the image while in record mode, they could email the Red technicians and request that feature to be added to future build updates.

That said, the menu which takes one through the camera features is not designed by Apple. I wouldn't have been able to figure it out, but our 1st seemed to have the hang of it, so we were in good shape.

SHOOTING SPEED

The camera is rated at 320ASA. You can adjust the speed, but one should think of the base as 320. For example, I wanted to rate the camera at 100ASA for our first shot, but we made some phone calls and were told this wasn't recommended. Because when you over expose anything at that level, you have no additional room for error. You'll be at the end of what the camera can handle. Meaning, if you could ND the shot down, or stop it down and rate the shot at 320ASA and you overexpose, you still might be able to pull some image out of the whites. I haven't seen the footage color corrected yet, so I don't know the results of this, but we followed that advice.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, near the end of our shoot I tried a shot in light which was at least two stops below our exposure to see what we'd get. I couldn't see anything in the viewfinder when our characters went into the shadows, and guessed at the focus. So, I basically just assumed this shot was lost and we reset in a brighter location. (We tried to do the shoot from 5pm through magic hour into the night using only available light to see what we'd get.) However, when we looked at the footage on our computer there was an image. I'm really interested to see this on a studio monitor, as we only have a 32 inch HD apple display at home.

RED HARD DRIVE

We shot onto one of the Red 320Gig drives. This attaches onto the camera in a slot which holds the hard drive and the battery. This giant block of heavy plastic can then be attached to the camera anywhere you want it... but it remains heavy. Something we learned is that the hard drive is quite sensitive to shaking. We shot on the Manhattan bridge looking down into China town and whenever a train came by we started dropping frames. We knew we were dropping frames because there's a handy graphic which shows you if you drop frames during a shot. If we were hand held this wouldn't have happened, but the vibrations carried through the sticks to the camera were more than the hard drive could handle. The solution was to have our friend who owns the Red and loaned it for our shoot, Jason Diamond, hold the hard drive. I'm curious about car mounts though, and I wonder if recording onto the smaller cards would be able to solve this vibration problem.

DOWNLOADING

Transferring the footage was a breeze. You firewire800 it to your computer and just drag the files onto the hard drive. No software is necessary. Looking at the footage requires an Intel processor on the Mac I'm told. We have an Intel based Mac so we didn't have any problems with this. Each Red file comes in a folder with 4 Quicktime "wrappings." I'm not sure about this terminology. Basically, you can look at the footage in full resolution or compressed by selecting the different QT files. They're not full QT movies, they really just reference the original Red file. I'm sure there's a lot more information on this on the Red website, but for me it was easy to get the footage into Final Cut to look at it. One just drops the "M" file into Final Cut and then it plays right away. The EDL will then reference back to the original files when we online. I'm assuming, fingers crossed.

IMAGE QUALITY

Unbelievable. Basically, we're editing using the smallest QT "wrapping" they have. However, you're welcome to open the larger one if you wish, I just don't think our computer could handle editing that file size. We have a 32 inch HD Apple Monitor. When you open the full size file it doesn't fit on the screen by a long shot. It's probably 3-4 times larger than our screen. Unbelievable.

We shot our first feature on a Sony PD100 and a small one-chip Sony. We then did a 4k blow up in Warsaw. When you watch the film on 35mm you're basically seeing giant squares move around the screen, especially on the 1-chip sections.

We shot our second feature on the 24p Panasonic Mini-DV camera and did an HD blow up. This I think looked amazing when it was projected.

We then shot So's most recent feature on super-16mm and did a DI with "grain reduction" to 35mm blow up. Obviously, film carries light in a special way and you can really see it when projected. But, in terms of detail you still feel the grain of the film.

Looking at this Red footage is totally different than any of our other experiences. It's like looking at high quality digital stills. The amazing thing is that it has the depth of field of a 35mm camera because of the lenses and digital aperture built into the camera. The only reason to shoot on 35mm would be to get the feel of the light that only film can handle. But, in terms of tonal range I think this is really close.

Basically, I've been waiting a very long time to shoot on 35mm and we have a feature lined up to do on 35mm next year. This is the first time I've actually began to think about doing it on the Red. It's really really amazing.

LAST THOUGHTS

So Yong and I were talking about the shoot last night after seeing the footage for the first time and we began to get into a conversation about of the "language" of film and how our we've approached our films based on the technology we've been using.

Up to this point, I'd say all of our films have been quite "subjective" because they are primarily composed of close-ups of the protagonist, and the protagonist's POV's. Part of this comes from our approach to the films, but also from the fact that if you shoot really wide shots in 16mm or mini-dv you get a sort of unintentional distracting blurriness. Not because the image is falling out of focus, but because there's not enough information on the recording material.

In the new film we our currently prepping for, I have a feeling I want it to be more "objective" in terms of some of the storytelling. Using this camera is a way for me to help see the world with a different eye and open those new options. Because when you watch this footage, it feels like you're standing on the location looking at the characters in the world as you would see it normally, not as if it was compressed into a small video file. I think overall, we try to make films which feel like you've stepped into someone's world and you have to absorb their life by watching it. Using the Red I think will hopefully just make that world seem more real.

Labels: cinematography

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/07/2008 01:43:00 PM Comments (1)

First you announce that you're done teasing us and have begun the remake of The Inglorious Bastards, now you dangle a Faster, Pussy Cat! Kill! Kill! update... with Britney Spears attached!!!

Well, that's the rumor on Ann Thompson's blog and the blogsphere has been salivating about it since.

Whether this is a calculated PR move by the Britney camp to actually get a project off the ground or just another one of QT's chances to go nuts and remake every Grindhouse title that's on his shelf, if I can be serious of a second, I do think this would really test the fabric of Tarantino's pull with audiences. Though the hype of Kill Bill and Grindhouse were huge, box office was low for both. Were they too niche? Does having Brad Pitt attached to Bastards lock the film as a money-maker and give Tarantino the capital to make the B-movie of all B-movies?

I know, I'm thinking way too deep into this (what can I say, it's a slow news day), but I am curious to see if there would be a Tarantino backlash (or has it already begun?).

But, Quentin, if you do it. Go all out. Cast Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton as the other strippers. Russ Meyer would have wanted it that way...

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 8/07/2008 10:50:00 AM Comments (4)

After seeing Christopher Nolan's dark and philosophically nimble The Dark Knight, I went back to our Winter, 2001 issue and read again Chuck Stephens' cover interview with Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan on the eve of the release of their breakthrough film, Memento. I was struck by how some of the same issues that elevate the latest Batman movie -- its cinematic capturing of everyday dread, its interrogation of the role of the hero, and its clever use of film noir tropes -- are discussed within the context of this earlier film. If you are a Nolan fan, check it out. Here's an excerpt:

FILMMAKER: Both of your films use very inventive and unnerving formal structures, yet their stories are firmly grounded in one of the most familiar of genres, the film noir. How and why do they fit together?

CHRIS NOLAN: For me, film noir is one of the only genres where the concept of point of view is accepted as a fairly important notion in the storytelling, and where it’s totally accepted that you can flashback and flashforward and change points of view. The best film noir always involves a continuous reassessment of things, especially in terms of "Who’s the good guy?" and "Who’s the bad guy?" You want the double cross, you want the surprise, and you want to keep the audience mindful of the fact that they don't know the full story, and that they can’t trust all the characters. So when Jonah told me the story he had for Memento, the idea of relating the condition this guy has – his inability to keep memories fixed in his head – in terms of a revenge scenario, it seemed like the most interesting thing to do would be to take the film-noir approach, and to tell the story almost entirely from that character’s point of view. His psychological condition and his point of view are crucial to why the structure is there: it’s an attempt to put the audience inside his head, and to make them think about the characters around him and the situations he's in in the same way that he does.

FILMMAKER: So many independent films borrow material from film noir and crime fiction, and there has been, for many years now, a very definite sense of diminishing returns in that approach. One of the most interesting things about Memento is that you’ve deranged the narrative line so thoroughly that the viewer gets so caught up in putting the story together and the familiar pulpiness of the ingredients almost disappears.

C. NOLAN: If that’s true, that’s great, because I really wanted to use the structure of the movie as a way of reawakening some of the things that used to be so valued in the genre: the paranoia and exaggeration in our everyday insecurities. But the genre's been used so many times, you have to try very hard to find new ways to energize it. If the audience goes into Memento expecting just another film noir, I think they’re going to be kind of disappointed, because it's about more than that. Fortunately for us, our European distributors did an excellent job of not trying to sell the film that way.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/06/2008 11:26:00 PM Comments (0)

Announced today, IFP's 30th annual Independent Film Week (formerly the IFP Market) will include Kevin Smith, filmmaker/activist Robert Greenwald and SnagFilms CEO Rich Allen as the headliners for this year's festivities. Read full release below.


KEVIN SMITH, ROBERT GREENWALD AND RICK ALLEN

TO HEADLINE IFP'S 30th ANNUAL

INDEPENDENT FILM WEEK SEPT. 14-19

Film Screenings, Panel Discussions, and Networking Highlight Six-Day Event

www.independentfilmweek.com

New York, NY (August 5, 2008) – IFP announced today that IFP alumnus
Kevin Smith (Clerks), filmmaker and activist Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed:
Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism), and SnagFilms.com CEO Rick Allen will
headline public events during the 30th Annual Independent Film Week,
September 14-19. For the first time, Independent Film Week will be held at
Chelsea's Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.).

Formerly known as the IFP Market, Independent Film Week is the leading
forum in the U.S. dedicated to discovering, showcasing, and supporting new
independent film projects and talent. The six-day event consists of: the
Independent Filmmaker Conference; free screenings of films by IFP alumni and
emerging short filmmakers; and the Project Forum, a showcase for over 150
works-in-progress. It is presented by IFP, the nation's oldest and largest
organization of independent filmmakers.

Smith will kick off the daily "Conversations With" series during the
Independent Filmmaker Conference on September 14th with a discussion on
making a first feature. His classic 1994 debut feature, Clerks, got its start as
a work-in-progress at IFP in 1993. His new film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno
stars Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks and is scheduled for release by The
Weinstein Company on Halloween. Greenwald will discuss the power of film to
spur social change on September 18th, while Allen, who recently launched
SnagFilms.com with AOL Vice-Chairman Ted Leonsis and AOL founder Steve
Case, will explore the future of film distribution on September 17th.

In addition to the "Conversations With" series, the conference showcases a
range of panels on the art and business of independent film. Each day's
panels are structured around a specific theme: Making Your First Feature,
Filmmaking 2.0, The Global Marketplace, Alternative Distribution, The Truth
About Non-Fiction, and Film and Philanthropy. The full schedule of panels can
be found at www.filmmakerconference.com.

For the second year, in partnership with Rooftop Films, Independent Film
Week will also showcase two free public screenings of films by IFP alumni.
New this year is NextGenNYC, a short film showcase featuring the work of
City University of New York (CUNY) graduates.

Screenings include:

* Trinidad (86 min.) directed by PJ Raval and Jay Hodges, alumni of IFP's
2006 Independent Filmmaker Lab. Premiering at the 2008 Los Angeles Film
Festival in June, the documentary provides a fascinating look at Trinidad,
Colorado's transformation from Wild West outpost to "sex change capital of
the world. (September 16th, 8:30pm, Hudson River Park, 10th Avenue
between 14th and 15th. FREE and open to the public.)

* IFP's Independent Filmmaker Lab "Sneak Preview" Showcase (120 min.) –
Be the first to see previews of films poised to make it big on the festival
circuit in the coming year. This screening features excerpts from the 20
works-in-progress – both documentaries and narratives – which participated
in the IFP's Labs, a mentorship program for works-in-progress. Previous IFP
Lab films already garnering awards on the film festival circuit include this
year's Slamdance Grand Jury Prize Winner The New Parade and GenArt Grand
Jury Prize Winner Half-Life. (September 17th, 8:30pm, Hudson River Park,
10th Avenue between 14th and 15th. FREE and open to the public.)

* IFP's NextGenNYC Short Film Showcases (90 min. each) - Documentary
and narrative short films by CUNY graduates. NextGenNYC is a new program
initiated by IFP and the New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre &
Broadcasting and is designed to provide a spotlight on New York City's
emerging talent from four colleges within the City University, including:
Brooklyn College, City College of New York, the College of Staten Island and
Hunter College. (Narrative Showcase, September 16th, 1:30pm, Chelsea
Cinemas, 260 West 23rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues; Documentary
Showcase, September 17th, 2pm, Chelsea Cinemas) There is complimentary
access with a ticket or pass to the Independent Filmmaker Conference.

The full schedule of film screenings open to the public during Independent
Film Week can be found at: www.independentfilmweek.com.

"The annual state of the union on independent film began 30 years ago with
IFP's founding event, now known as Independent Film Week," says Michelle
Byrd, Executive Director of IFP. "Since then we've expanded our mandate to
give the public a greater opportunity to experience the films we nurture
through our programs and meet the innovators who are shaping the future of
independent film."

Tickets and passes for IFP's Independent Filmmaker Conference range from
$20 for single events to a variety of passes ranging from $70 per day to $320
for the week including all 35 panels, workshops and case studies. Tickets can
be purchased at www.filmmakerconference.com.

Sponsors of Independent Film Week include: Premiere sponsors Eastman
Kodak Company and HBO; and Gold Sponsors A&E IndieFilms, Panasonic, and
SAGIndie.



About IFP
Founded as a satellite program of the 1979 New York Film Festival, the
nonprofit IFP has evolved into the nation's oldest and largest organization of
independent filmmakers, and also the premier advocate for them. Since its
start, IFP has supported the production of 7,000 films and provided resources
to more than 20,000 filmmakers--voices that otherwise might not have been
heard. IFP believes that independent films enrich the universal language of
cinema, seeding the global culture with new ideas, kindling awareness, and
fostering activism. The organization has fostered early work by leading
filmmakers including Charles Burnett, Edward Burns, Jim Jarmusch, Barbara
Kopple, Michael Moore, Mira Nair and Kevin Smith.
For more information: www.ifp.org.

About Independent Film Week
While the Independent Filmmaker Conference and special screenings are open
to the general public, the centerpiece of Independent Film Week is
the "Project Forum," a showcase for over 150 new works in development. The
Forum is divided into three sections: Emerging Narrative, for writers and
writer/directors seeking producers; No Borders International Co-Production
Market, for experienced producers seeking financing partners; and Spotlight
on Documentaries, for projects in production and post-production that are
currently seeking financing partners and festival invitations. IFP expects to
arrange more than 2,000 one-on-one pitch meetings between filmmakers and
executives from production companies, distributors, exhibitors, broadcasters,
and film festivals. For information: www.independentfilmweek.com.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 8/06/2008 01:04:00 PM Comments (1)

Producer Noah Harlan of 2.1 Films just came back from the Sundance Producer's Lab and forwarded these comments about some of the topics discussed there. Like every producer, Harlan is trying to figure out what the new digital distribution landscape will look like for independents. I particularly responded here to his attempt to parse the revenue possibilities for the streaming and ad-supported models -- a topic you've read about on this blog previously. For now, though, here's Harlan.


I just got back from the Sundance Producer's Conference and had a few thoughts that I wanted to share with some of you. There was, not surprisingly, a lot of time given towards online distribution, self distribution and new media revenue models given the presence of folks like Ted Sarandos (Netflix), Rick Allen (Snag Films), John Sloss (Cinetic Rights Management) and others. There were a lot of different views and ideas getting kicked around but I have the following thoughts and questions.

1) As people thrash about looking for a revenue model that works the notion of ad-paid content is rising. A stunning statistic came up at one point which no one followed up on and it has to do with Hulu's ad-generated model. Hulu places 4-6 ads on your content for a feature film and you get paid 50/50 with them at $40-$60 CPM per ad that is viewed (ie: if the viewer doesn't watch the whole movie you don't get paid for all the ads, only those that are watched). That means, assuming everyone watches your film all the way through, and you are getting the most number of ads at the highest pay rate, the absolute maximum that 100,000 views of your film will pay you is only $18,000. If you take the case where 100,000 people watch your movie all the way through but it's only 4 ads at $40 per ad then you're making only $8,000. Let's say you are making cheap independent features then you're probably spending, when it's all said & done, somewhere between $150,000 and $600,000 minimum to make your film. In an ad-based model you would need a minimum of at least 800,000 viewers and possibly as many as 3.3 million just to break even.

2) We refer to these systems (Snag, Hulu, youtube, etc...) as online distributors but in fact they are not. They are online exhibitors (portals as Rick Allen was saying). Some are destination sites like youtube, some send the content to you (Netflix's box) and some allow you to move the movies around (Snag) but at the end of the day they are exhibitors. The consequence of that is that you, as the producer/filmmaker, are now the distributor. If you are the distributor then you are now responsible for residuals to SAG and the outcome of the negotiation with the AMPTP is going to mean some form of streaming and download residuals. SAG generally requires a residuals bond of some sort and now that responsibility is going to fall you the filmmaker. I imagine we will see SAG taking the cast shooting bond and just rolling it right over into the residuals bond and you will never see that cash released (or at least not for a long time). This means that the films that most need these self-distribution models (small movies) are going to have an additional cash burden placed on them at the time of production. This is an obstacle to the small filmmaker really making it in the new revenue marketplace. Add to the bond issue the fact that you will also be giving up a few percentage points of your revenue and you're going to see the numbers from point 1 (above) come down even further.

So what does this mean for the independent filmmaker:

1) I think there is a real future out there but it's going to be a couple years at least until the industry coalesces enough to provide reliable revenue which can be shown to investors. This means that between the lack of data in the new models, the low revenue from the streams, the paucity of viewers in each portal, and the global credit situation we are going to see a tough road in the near-to-mid-term for indie financing, particularly the private equity model.

2) Powerful players are going to be securing the major exhibition models with huge companies like AOL (Snag), Netflix, Apple, Amazon (Reframe) and GE (Hulu) staking hard to replicate claims on territory. There will be some room for small niche players (Jaman?) but generally we'll all be on the big-boys' formats and we'll likely be on more than one of them at a time. This means that the real play for those looking to stake a claim in online distribution is in the marketing space. The people who learn best how to market on the web, drive eyeballs to films and get them to tune in, rent or buy are going to be the new distributors. The Weinsteins (of the 90's) for the 2010's will be people who are great at crawling the internet to find communities and putting video in front of them in the audience's chosen format.

3) The mid-term mistake of Cinetic Rights Management and other similar ventures is that they are going to be eclipsed in value by the companies that bring the marketing muscle (read: dollars) and savvy to the table. Figuring out what platform you should be on is akin to figuring out what theater to program a film into. It is a good skill but one that is of marginal use if no one shows up at the theater. What really matters is the company that can get it to the right theater and then market it. This means that we will see something that will look a lot like what was before. Companies like Strand, New Yorker and Criterion will flourish if they can secure their libraries and make the leap to marketing digitally since they will no longer be saddled with prohibitive print costs and market-by-market advertising. If they don't make the leap then they will be eclipsed by a new breed with a purely digital focus.

4) Michael Barker made the point (while sitting across from Mark Gill of course) that the sky is really not falling. Or if it is, it is no different from all the times it has fallen before. We are in for a few tough years but out the other side are more eyeballs and the possibility of making real revenue in a global marketplace. When the home video was introduced the wholesale price was high and the units that moved were low. When DVD came along the wholesale price plummeted but the units moved skyrocketed and it wound up being far more valuable than the video market distributors were clinging to. The same will happen here. We'll have more viewers but we'll get less for each ($.18 a piece for Hulu apparently right now). That's good. The question is who is going to find those viewers for us.

Just my $.02.

Noah Harlan
2.1 Films
New York

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/05/2008 05:46:00 PM Comments (24)

Since stories about declining staff opportunities for professional film critics seem to appearing all over, I thought I'd post this notice from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation announcing grants ranging up to $50,000 to arts writers. Although the focus is on the visual arts, the site says, "By 'contemporary visual art,' we mean visual art made since World War II. We will also consider projects on post-War work in adjacent fields - architecture, design, film, theater/performance, sound, etc.- if they significantly engage the discourses and concerns of contemporary visual art." Take special note: this round of proposals specifically excludes book projects but includes "blogs and new/alternative media."

Here's the release:

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program announces its third round of grants as part of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Initiative.

The online application form will open on Monday, August 4, 2008 and the deadline for completed applications is Monday, September 22, 2008.

The Arts Writers Grant Program recognizes and supports individual writers working on contemporary visual art through project-based grants ranging from $3,000 – $50,000. Writers who meet the program’s eligibility requirements are invited to apply for grants in the following categories: articles, short-form writing, and blogs/new and alternative media. (Please note that the program also funds book projects; however, the deadline for applications to this category has already passed.)

For guidelines and eligibility requirements, please visit www.artswriters.org .

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/04/2008 01:09:00 PM Comments (0)

The analysts over at Tech Ticker have posted a short video conversation about the current state and future direction of internet video and the ad market. The discussion is kicked off by a mention of Disney's recent earnings statement and the profitability of its fairly conservative and unsexy online video division. The Tech Ticker guys go on to talking about Hulu and YouTube, particularly how the latter is struggling for the moment to sell advertising against user-generated video. The analysts say that, with the exception of entertainment companies, which will advertise on user-generated spots, most mainstream advertisers don't want to be associated with "that dog on the skateboard." They also say that while Hulu's numbers are so far small, the site has demonstrated to the industry that there is demand by tv audiences to see their favorite shows whenever they want. The problem for the networks is that far fewer ads can be placed on a show that's streamed online before viewers revolt. And, so far, while "overlay" ads are gaining in popularity, there's not really a solution to his disparity in ad revenue possibilities.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/04/2008 09:58:00 AM Comments (0)

Short End Magazine uses the occasion of our "25 New Faces" list to recap three conversations between Noralil Ryan Fores and filmmakers from this year's edition. You can read an interview with the Zellner Brothers and also this interview with My Olympic Summer's Daniel Robin, an excerpt of which is below.

SM: Given four words to describe your style and four words to describe the purpose of your work, which eight words total do you chose?

DR: You're killing me. Style: personal, atmospheric, rhythm, process. Purpose: cathartic, engage, communicate, new cinema.

SM: Why?

DR: Well, I think for a film to be successful, and I don't mean monetarily, it must establish and be consistent with its own unique atmosphere. Ultimately the film should become a special cinematic universe that engages on its own terms.

Finally, here's a section from the discussion with Medicine for Melancholy director Barry Jenkins about directing actors:

SM: I’ve never crewed one of your films…How do you work with actors on set? How do you work with your crew?

BJ: The one thing I do, which I didn’t even realize I did until we made this film, is I always like to let the actor go first. I very rarely direct the first take, and that’s what I began to tell Tracey and Wyatt more and more. I was like, “Do the first take. Do what you feel. Then we’ll see what you have, and we’ll work from there.” I think that worked really well on this film because I always had an idea of what I wanted, but every now and then if I didn’t tell them what my idea was, they would come up with something that was much, much, much better.

It’s hard for me directing actors because I feel that I was so insecure physically with filmmaking when I got to film school, like the nuts and bolts—I didn’t know you needed a light to expose film; that’s why I took a year off, to learn those things. I almost feel like I overcompensate by having a film that technically proficient. So, it’s a danger with me with actors that sometimes I’m not paying enough attention because I’m worried about how this shot will cut with that shot, or this frame with that frame.

It was really scary to direct a feature film because I’d never shot anything that required more than a three day shoot, but I think that working on Their Eyes Were Watching God with Darnell Martin—who definitely is a mentor of mine; she is great with actors, absolutely amazing; box office, Oscar awards, all that means nothing. There are people like Darnell Martin who work primarily in television, who haven’t made these really huge films, who are amazing, amazing with actors. I’ve never seen anyone direct actors as well as Darnell Martin. I was able to take a little bit of what Darnell does—because she is way more intense than I am—and apply it to making this film.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/03/2008 11:17:00 PM Comments (0)

Over at The Workbook Project Lisa Salem has launched a new section of the site entitled "How to Build and Audience and Keep it." It's a multi-faceted section, containing both a blog as well as more organized content areas covering different aspects of audience-building and retention.

Here, in a Preamble, she explains what led her to this area of specialization:

I speak from a particular form of experience. In 2005 I set out to walk the whole of Los Angeles - I’d lived there for most of ten years. I pushed a baby-stroller with a video camera attached to the end of it, facing inwards. When people approached me, I invited them to walk with me while I videoed our conversations.

My ultimate goal was to create an authentic portrait of the city – a film based on my experience of it on my walk. I wanted to see Los Angeles ‘anew, with clear eyes, at a human pace, as if for the first time.’ At that point, video blogs were just gaining momentum and I realised that was the missing link in my project. I decided I’d post videos of my walks with people and other experiences from on the road, mix them with writing and photographs and start an open conversation on what it means to live in a metropolis – and especially Los Angeles - in today’s world. A project that would be a part of my film but also independent of it. I had no idea what I was setting in motion.

Check out the site -- in addition to reading Salem's posts on the page, you can subscribe in a RSS reader and also receive email updates.

The latest blog posts reports on last week's DIY Days event in L.A. and links to this embed of the panel discussion.

The future of independent film is not in content aggregation, which is quickly becoming commoditized, but in audience aggregation. Sustainability for filmmakers lies directly in the hands of the audience. Direct to audience models have shaken the core of the music industry. But the power of Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” seems good in theory but where do you start? What are the steps to building an audience around your work and most importantly how do you keep the conversation going? Discussion Leader: Saskia Wilson-Brown (Current TV) - Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) - Micki Krimmel (expert in social media and online community) - Alex Johnson (digital media strategist / filmmaker) - Lance Weiler (The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma)

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DIY DAYS LA - When the Audience Takes Control - panel

fund, create, distribute and sustain

Hat tip: Chuck Tryon/Chutry Experiment.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/03/2008 11:44:00 AM Comments (4)

Here's the third of our catch-ups with previous "25 New Faces" filmmakers. If you've been on the list and haven't sent us an update, you can still email one to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com.


Marshall Curry, director, 2005: Since releasing Street Fight, I have been working on two docs-- one about the radical environmental group, the Earth Liberation Front, and the other about three 12-year old kids who aspire to be NASCAR drivers (they race gokarts that go 60 mph in a nationally competitive circuit that's sort of the little leagues for NASCAR.)

Both films are in post now, and the experience in producing them has been completely different. The NASCAR film was fully funded on the spot by the first people I pitched it to (Reason Pictures in L.A); the ELF film required debt and passion to get through filming, though now that it's shot, broadcasters have become interested.

I had a daughter who was born at the same time I was birthing Street Fight, and now I have a son too.

Congratulations to the new 25!


Kyle Henry, writer/director, 2006: Since my feature directorial debut Room (2005) appeared at Sundance and Cannes, I never stopped working ... as an editor -- eight flicks in three years! Like fellow Austinite PJ Raval, another alumnus of 25 New Faces, who I just finished collaborating with as editor for his feature doc Trinidad (2008), I live a bifurcated existence. Worked for three years with partner Carlos Trevino on a script about a commune that comes under suspicion of terrorism entitled A.O.K. that was recently optioned by The 7th Floor. Also, I will go into production this winter on my next feature At Home with Dick, a documentary-musical about the trials and tribulations of an adult son coping with his father's slow and painful death from Alzheimer's disease. Produced by Megan Gilbride and written by regular Dr. Demento radio show jingle contributor Dick Price, I can guarantee you that our progressively degenerative cabaret will be like nothing you have ever seen. Since I can always earn a living editing, I really think it's my job to wait and throw myself into the fire for something that is really worth existing in the world. With over 11 million Alzheimer's patients in the US and EU, many of whom will live for years after their diagnosis, Dick's journey is the journey of more than 25 million families worldwide who will spend a decade of their lives caring for loved-one suffering from Alzheimer's. It's the real deal, warped through the lens of fantasy and song, but dead accurate in detailing and honoring the long slog of all Alzheimer's care givers.

Michael Tully, writer/director, 2006: It was a completely unexpected honor to have been selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" back in 2006. While it didn't catapult me to superstardom, it did provide me with a miniature thrill when I walked into a Barnes & Noble one afternoon, opened up that issue, and read about myself as if I were a legitimate filmmaker. So what have I been up to since then? In 2007, I made a documentary with Matthew Robison called Silver Jew, which played many film festivals around the world and which Drag City is releasing on DVD on September 23, 2008. Currently, I am the main writer and editor for Hammer to Nail, a website devoted to championing the most ambitious, invigorating, original, and inspiring independent cinema being produced. As for filmmaking, I am trying to muster up the courage and strength (and money) to shoot my dream project in the summer of 2009.

Rayya Elias, writer/director, 2004: I've been pretty busy since the Filmmaker 25/2004. I wrote and directed another short called The Lunchroom which Lucy Sexton and Lori E. Seid produced. Also wrote a wonderful feature called Guy on the Couch. I'm now in Bali, Indonesia for the summer and will be starting as an Artist in Residence in September for 9 months. Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, is sponsoring me as her first long term artist in residence. It will be in an old Yankee church that has been converted into a house in Little York, N.J. right by the Delaware river. I'm really excited that I'll have nine months to pop out this baby/a book and then take it from there.


Jessica Sharzer, writer/director, 2003: I am currently writing a dance movie for MTV and attached to direct a dark comedy called Cruddy -- based on the cult novel by Lynda Barry and written by Matt Nix. Since 2002, I've written a pilots for CBS and Fox, a memoir adaptation for HBO Films and a biopic for Universal. I also got married and had a baby boy a year ago.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8/02/2008 09:52:00 AM Comments (0)