The Canadian Film Centre and SHORTSNONSTOP Mobile Festival announced this week that this quarter's best short film is Mexican filmmaker Karen Weiss's Bad Head Day. Weiss will be awarded a $1500 cash prize.

Launched in 2007, SHORTSNONSTOP is in its second year and awards a $1500 cash prize each quarter to the best short film selected by an international jury. Learn more on how to submit your film, here. Next deadline is Jan. 15.

Weiss's Bad Head Day can be found here.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/31/2008 03:54:00 PM

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You may recall Scott's "Midwestern Rhapsody" post in mid Oct. about Todd Sklar and the other filmmakers who are doing a DIY tour with their film. Here's another video diary from the guys.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/30/2008 02:42:00 PM

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IFP announced today that The Daily Show With Jon Stewart's correspondent Aasif Mandvi will be hosting this year's Gotham Independent Film Awards on Dec. 2.

Named one of our 25 New Faces of Independent Film this year for his upcoming project, 7 to the Palace, which he stars and co-wrote, Mandvi was recently in the Ricky Gervais-starrer Ghost Town and appeared in episodes of The Sopranos and Sex and the City.

But he's best known for his witty fake reporting on The Daily Show and will certainly have a lot of material to play with come Dec. 2. Interesting sidenote: fellow Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac stars in Medicine for Melancholy, which is up for the Breakthrough Director award that evening.

IFP also announced the first batch of confirmed presenters at the awards: Amy Adams, Marisa Tomei, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Clarkson, Mira Nair, Richard Jenkins and Melissa Leo.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/30/2008 12:12:00 PM

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For those who enjoyed the excerpt we put up of Scott Macaulay's roundtable discussion on the current state of independent film from the Fall issue, one of the participants, Ted Hope, was on NHPR's "Word of Mouth" this week and continued the thinking that he voiced for the magazine and at his keynote address at the Film Independent Filmmaker Forum: the truly free filmmaking community will survive.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/30/2008 10:44:00 AM

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Executive producer William Horberg attended the premiere of Gus Van Sant's Milk last night in San Francisco and writes about it on his blog.

An excerpt:

It was almost 37 years ago that Harvey Milk, the subject of the film, moved to the Castro District from New York City and set up his camera shop there with his boyfriend Scott Smith, at what was to become ground zero in a cultural movement and struggle for respect and equal rights for gay people that, despite the major victories Harvey and his supporters achieved before his untimely assassination, as he became the first openly gay elected official, and won an improbable victory over the ignominious Proposition 6 and its sponsors Anita Bryant and John Briggs, still reverberates today. (Who could miss the eerie resemblance between two faces of evil separated by a generation: the well-coiffed All-American act of intolerance agent Bryant and a certain designer-clad hockey mom of today?)

So here we were, one week before an election that not only marks a decisive moment in our nation's history, but also finds us fighting against another major assault by the forces of bigotry and intolerance in a California state referendum, which is Proposition 6, repackaged now thirty years later as Proposition 8.

As Martin Luther King famously said in a speech titled Where Do We Go From Here: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." But clearly it only bends because of the efforts of good people who keep fighting the fight.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2008 11:52:00 PM

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For those of you planning a Halloween viewing party, the staff of Filmmaker has compiled thoughts on seven films guaranteed to generate chills.

Inside. If you watch a lot of horror films, at a certain point you being to feel that you've seen it all. I did... at least until I saw Inside. This French shocker is part of a new wave of Gallic horror that includes films like Haute Tension, Frontieres, Calvaire and Them. For me, it's the most extreme and transgressive of the bunch, mostly due to its relentless, remorseless elaboration of its queasy premise: a pregnant woman, who we are introduced briefly when she's involved in a car accident, finds herself stalked at home on Christmas Eve, the morning before she's due to be admitted to the hospital to deliver her baby. The film owes quite a bit to the classic "woman alone in a house" genre that began with Wait Until Dark, but here the real threat is felt in utero as Beatrice Dalle plays a black-clad stalker whose designs on our heroine's baby are expressed in three short words: "I want one." When so many horror films don't go far enough, Inside may actually go too far. No foreshadowing, implication, or theoretical possibility contained within its premise goes unexplored. There are CGI fetus reaction shots and by the middle of the film there has been as much blood and strewn tissue as most films manage in not just their first installment but also their sequels.

I argued with someone who felt that if this film had been directed by someone like Gaspar Noe it would have been a lot better because it wouldn't have felt like a horror film. And while Inside is very well acted and has moments of real subtlety, it is, definitely, a horror film -- the filmmakers are very confident pushing the limits of the genre. I'm fine with that. The genre trappings here -- the cutting, the camera placement, even the film's strange detour into zombie-ism at one point -- provide much needed elements of comfort in what remains an incredibly brutal film. Yet despite the escalating gynecological gore and its ballsy, blantant metaphorical mindfucks (Christmas Eve, c'mon!), , the film ends on a chilling poetic note, with one plot twist managing to do something I would have never have guessed possible: conclude with sympathy for Dalle's veangeful murderess. -- Scott Macaulay


Let's Scare Jessica to Death. Perhaps best known now for his 1973 hit, Bang the Drum Slowly, director John D. Hancock preceded that film with cult favorite Let's Scare Jessica to Death. Once a late-night TV staple, this brooding, dreamy mind-fuck is perhaps one of the best '70s vampire films, with nary a fang to be seen. When a young married couple and their best friend settle into their New England home to live off the land, already depressed Jessica begins seeing strange figures and hearing voices: is she imagining it all, or is something really in the lake behind the house? A potent meditation on the death of hippie culture, Hancock delivers the chills. The final moments will stay with you long after you've seen it. -- Andre Salas

The Evil Dead. Sam Raimi’s debut feature has not only become a cult classic but is a blueprint on how to make a low-budget horror film. Set in a remote cabin in the woods, a group of college friends inadvertently unleash evil spirits after playing a mysterious tape recording. In a role that would make him a B-movie legend, Bruce Campbell plays the subdued pretty boy Ash who after all the others are killed off is left to fend for himself against the spirits. Legendary for Raimi’s unconventional camera work and mixing gory horror with slapstick comedy, the film spawned the sequel/remake The Evil Dead II and the third installment Army of Darkness. -- Jason Guerrasio

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Although I'm not sure I could put together a list of what I consider to be the 10 greatest movies of all time, I would have no remorse about sliding Tobe Hooper's 1974 debut, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, alongside the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8 1/2 and Apocalypse Now. All great movies do not have to be classy or intellectual; they must be singular, brilliantly executed and leave a lasting influence -- and by those standards, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre sits quite comfortably on a throne of its reputation.

Chain Saw is an unapologetically ugly film. It has no greater agenda than to take the viewer on a tour through the most rancid elements of human derangement. Some have argued that it's really a parable about the Vietnam War or about the disintegration of the American family; to me, it's simply a clash between evolved modern frivolity and an uncivilized throwback to humanity's base (not unlike Apocalypse Now). But none of that really matters because the movie's primary intent is not intellectual but visceral.

In the early-to-mid-70s, there was a trilogy of independently produced pictures, of which TCM was one (the others were Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes -- though some would also add George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead), all shot in 16mm with budgets ranging from $90-300k, that effectively merged exploitation pictures with art films. I think Craven's pictures were more serious in their thematic construction, pitting civilization against uncivilized instincts (Last House is based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring), however, in terms of pure cinema, I find Hooper's to be more unique and skillfully made by a wide margin.

For a long time, the only version available was on a scratched, grainy, decomposing VHS tape -- and the corrosion of the picture heightened the film's aesthetic reputation of realism; it truly felt like an underground snuff film. Once, about 14 years ago, I caught a Halloween double-feature of Chain Saw and Living Dead, and on the way out a woman remarked that it was the goriest movie she'd ever seen. In fact, Chain Saw shows very little on-screen violence -- yet it's so masterfully directed, people are regularly convinced of the opposite.

Often lost amongst the discussions of realism and violence is just how well thought out the picture's visual strategy is. Beyond the famous dolly shot of Pam walking up to the house or the wide blue sky master of the van pulling up to the Hitchhiker, Chain Saw sticks to a consistent set of tactics where the camera is shifting between close tracking shots of the characters (subjectively putting the audience in the center of the action) and distant wide shots (placing the viewer in a helpless, objective position). This strategy can best be seen in Pam's murder and also during the finale, where the camera keeps juxtaposing handheld shots of Sally trying to climb onto the back of a stalled pickup with long-lens masters that force the audience to watch the events like spectators watching sports on TV. Chain Saw, unlike most horror/exploitation, is a legitimately well-made film, crafted with a true understanding of cinema and its language, regardless of its ugliness. -- Jamie Stuart

Halloween. John Carpenter's original 1978 Halloween is one of the most effective horror films ever produced. It's a beautifully distilled meditation on the eternal, confounding nature of pure evil. For many years it was the most profitable independent feature in history, and it was ripped-off, sequalized and even remade -- but none of the subsequent efforts were made with the same level of artistry...or simplicity.

Horror, in my opinion, always works best when it's set in a definable reality (Jaws, The Exorcist). This way, a relatable everyday is established first before the "monster" invades. And what could be more relatable than teenaged babysitters in the suburbs on Halloween night? Furthermore, Halloween is decidedly un-slick, unlike most modern horror films -- it's ruthlessly mundane, just like the suburbs are.
In terms of the artistry of its craft, Halloween boasts not just one of the most memorable, effective scores in the history of the medium, but it also features some of the most exquisite uses of CinemaScope compositions ever. And by ever, I mean EVER. In fact, the classic score is often used to underline specific moments where a character will be occupying the foreground totally unaware as The Shape appears on the opposite side of the frame in the background.

Halloween is a real film-buff picture, filled with references to Hitchcock, Welles and Hawks. The famous opening shot (technically two shots) that shifts from outside to inside to a murder then back outside is an admitted homage to the opening of Touch of Evil. This shot was accomplished with one of the earliest uses of the Panaglide, Panavision's version of the StediCam, and it not only beat Stanley Kubrick's gliding camera in The Shining to the screen by two years, but it also beat Martin Scorsese's famous Copa shot from Goodfellas by a dozen years.

Unfortunately, Halloween became a victim of its own success. After three decades of sequels and imitations its freshness has probably worn for a lot of people. Not for me. Dated setting aside, I'd still argue that it might be the scariest picture ever made. Turn off the lights and hit play. The moment the theme begins against black, before the first image is seen, you're completely hooked. And completely creeped out. -- Jamie Stuart

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul. The first horror film to come out of Brazil, this demented story of an undertaker named Coffin Joe who is in search of a woman to bear his son stars Brazilian actor José Moijca Marins in the lead role, he also directed and wrote the film. Marins’s performance as Coffin Joe is a tour-de-force. His beady eyes, blood-curdling delivery, unibrow and shockingly long fingernails (which he spent years to grow out) will certainly make you lose sleep. Coffin Joe would return in the sequels This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse and Embodiment of Evil, but the first installment introduces the world to one of the most Machiavellian characters in horror. -- Jason Guerrasio

The Last Man On Earth. In the same year, 1964, Coffin Joe was making his big screen debut, directors Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow’s adaptation of Richard Matheson’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi book I Am Legend starring Vincent Price was released. The first of what would become a string of adaptations/inspirations over the decades of Matheson’s novel (1968’s Night of the Living Dead, 1971’s The Omega Man, 2002’s 28 Days Later, 2007’s I Am Legend), Price plays a doctor who spends his days seeking out and killing the vampires that have taken over the world and hiding out in the evenings while they are awake, hoping the next day will bring a sign of another normal being like him. A precursor to the soon-to-be popular zombie genre, Matheson took an early pass at the screenplay but asked for his name to be taken off after being disappointed by the final version. Regardless, it’s one of Price’s best performances. -- Jason Guerrasio

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2008 04:12:00 PM

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If you're one of, probably, about 3,000 feature filmmakers who have submitted your features to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, then you are beginning to think about that best-case scenario: getting in. After the acceptance rush fades, you will realize that the whole process of finishing your film, scheduling the festival, and devising a publicity and marketing plan is a lot of work. To help you out producer Ted Hope, who has a lot of first-hand experience, has been posting this week on this Truly Free Film blog a series of pieces on the different stages of the process. He calls them "Film Festival Plan A."

His first post is entitled "Logic and Strategy." From the blog:

People are going to hear about your film when it plays at a major film festival; their "want-to-see" will be at its highest point when folks are talking about the festival in traditional media, online, and through conversation. What are the options before you headed into a festival in order to exploit this want-to-see? This is the reason you are headed to the festival, isn't it?

Click on the link to read the whole post and then work forwards through the rest of the entries.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2008 11:10:00 AM

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The filmmaker Charles Stone caused a sensation in the indie film world in 1998 with his short film, True, which launched him in both the film and ad worlds. The hilarious short, along with his music videos, led him to make his first feature, Paid in Full. And when the short was seen by ad agency DDB Needham, they had the idea to hire Stone to take the characters and concept and apply it to a Budweiser ad. These spots, called Whassup?!, won all the big advertising awards in 2000 and Stone went on to make movies like Drumline and Mr. 3000.

Now, in an interesting (and funny) case of a filmmaker mining his existing and well known character and narrative properties to make an election year statement, Stone has revisited his characters in a very funny new short. Visit the site to see the short, learn more about Stone and see the original short too. Or, watch it via YouTube, below.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2008 10:35:00 AM

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Jennifer Venditti's doc Billy the Kid arrives on home video today. Check out Nick Dawson's interview with Venditti here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/29/2008 12:25:00 AM

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In what is something like an appendix to his famous "The Sky is Falling" L.A. Film Festival keynote speech, Film Department head Mark Gill is the guest on this week's issue of the "The Business" film podcast. Gill's segment is called "Mini-Majors, Endangered Species?", and in it he discusses the independent film theatrical business in the wake of this year's specialty label shrinkage. Like everyone, Gill wags his finger at overproduction but then he extends the argument to its logical end result -- fewer movies in theaters. And that he likes.

Quoting Gill:

"The first and the best news is that there will be far fewer movies in theaters. It will go from probably 600 movies a year down to about 300 movies per year, which is where it should be. That's really good news, because a lot of the movies on the margin will not get made. The second thing is that it also means to the extent that you are thinking about going to a film on the weekend you don't have to choose from 12, you have to choose from six. And one of those is probably for teenage girls, and another one of those is the action movie you don't want to see, and all of sudden you've narrowed it down to three or four. And one of those is a tiny little art film you don't care about and, okay, you've got a couple of choices this weekend, as opposed to now, when you look at the internet or the paper for showtimes and there are twelve movies to sift through. It's untenable, and that will not last. That's going to be gone within a year."

Yes, we don't need our theaters clogged up every week with artistically interchangeable films just angling for their three-word NY Times pull quote on their way to a video release. But those titles are different than the truly diverse and unique films that swing for the artistic fences or which are directed to audiences not served by the tastes and production paradigms embraced by the studios and mini-majors.

Elsewhere in the interview Gill remembers a time when a few million dollar gross was considered okay. Now, he says, a film that grosses $5 million is a "near miss." That quote made me think about something Ted Hope says in the current conversation on the future of the independent film business model in this issue of Filmmaker. "Hopefully we can return to a much more modest [business], like looking at films that set a goal of $5 million U.S. box office," Hope said. I agree -- rather than abandon films that are never going to convince more than 600,000 or 700,000 to see them in their theatrical run, new players need to emerge that, like Sony Pictures Classics, can scale marketing expenses accordingly and run comfortably on such grosses.

For Gill, I suspect, the $30 or $40 million grossers are what the $5 million grossers of several years ago were. I'd argue that the $5 million grossers should be a middle ground between no-budget, digitally distributed features and the successful Oscar-bait prestige pics. I'll steal a concluding thought from Screen's Michael Gubbins, who ended his editorial titled "Stuck in the Middle" like this:

It may be that Darwinian market forces will cull the weaker businesses, leaving the overall market stronger. Over-production has been an issue for film for some years, even if the industry is still shy about using the term. But the economics of the middle ground have always been fragile. The reason this area of the sector has attracted such big personalities is that it requires a mental strength and vision to drive through success.

The industry is in danger of losing the ties that bind the blockbusters to the YouTubers. A long tail and a giant head do not make for a healthy film industry. Film needs its middle ground.

Also on this week's episode of "The Business": an interview with Sundance's John Cooper and Trevor Groth on the grueling job of watching those 9,000 yearly submissions. To hear it as well as Gill, visit "The Business" at the link above, subscribe through iTunes, or listen to it here on this blog through the embedded player, below.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/28/2008 03:33:00 PM

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In a piece entitled "Clash of the Titans" at the Haaretz.com blog, Shlomzion Kenan writes about the recent debate between two "superstar philosophers," Bertrand-Henri Levy and Slavoj Zizek, at the New York Public Library in late September. At one point, the conversation veered into a discussion of the Serbian director Emir Kusturica, whose vision of his homeland Zizek subjects to a a typically idiosyncratic critique of "the carnival."

From the piece:

Joyously, Zizek spreads arms out and declares to Levy: "I hope we share another point, which is - to be brutal - hatred of [director] Emir Kusturica. 'Underground' is one of the most horrible films that I've seen. What kind of Yugoslav society do you see in Kusturica's Underground? A society where people fornicate, drink, fight - a kind of eternal orgy."

Linking this to Levy's description of the May revolution as "immortal youth," Zizek makes another wee turn of the screw to unhinge the hippie mask: "The moral duty today is precisely to problematize this carnivalesque, transgressive model. 'Order is bad, let's suspend the rules, let's have free excess' and so on. Do you know a detail which maybe will interest you: Mikhail Bakhtin, the great author of the theory of carnival, you know that a Russian friend told me that now they discovered some private papers from the 1930s, when he was writing his book on Francois Rabelais, and you know what was his model of carnival? Stalinist purges: We have to see '68 in all its ambiguity."

The applause, again, is vigorous.

Levy, trying to keep up with the sarcasm, comments only that Kusturica is a case in which a man is so much less intelligent than his work that it cancels out the opposite possibility.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/28/2008 02:49:00 PM

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At The Hollywood Reporter, Gregg Goldstein reports on the stellar per-screen gross of Seth Grossman's The Elephant King this weekend at the Angelika Film Center. The 2006 Tribeca selection, now being distributed by producer Unison Films and Strand Releasing did $16,000 despite modest P&A. The secret was apparently a blend of grass-roots marketing targeting non-film constituencies as well as a Gen Art-like blend of a screening and premiere party for a higher ticket price.

From the piece:

Unison head Emanuel Michael worked with Priority Films to contact Asian, Thai, drug and alcohol groups, and film schools at local universities. The groups then emailed members inviting them to five weekend showings with in-theater Q&As that addressed their concerns. Priority used similar guerrilla marketing tactics to launch the Cambodian sex slavery drama Holly.

The real boost to its boxoffice, however, came with a unique strategy: a premiere at a 198-seat Angelika auditorium open to the public (with the $30 tickets notched in its boxoffice tally) and special Saturday night screenings including opening weekend parties.

Michael contacted Svedka Vodka and Thai beer co. Singha, who saw a marketing opportunity in giving free liquor for an hour-long open bar at the events. Once they were on board, The Country Club and Socialista agreed to host them for free, keeping their crowds well into the morning.

Unison plans a similar strategy at the Friday night Sunset 5 LA premiere, followed by another free premiere party at The Standard.

The trailer is below.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/27/2008 06:34:00 PM

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Over at Cinema Echo Chamber, Evan Louis interviews filmmaker Celia Maysles, whose debut, Wild Blue Yonder, deals with her father, documentary filmmaker David Maysles, and her relationship to him.

From the interview:

The whole idea behind Blue Yonder [for David] was trying to figure out who his greatest influences were in his life, and who he was, through making a film. He was closest with his father and his cousin Alan, who was a real risk taker, a fighter pilot. But his father never missed a day of work for thirty years. He worked in a dayjob, postal service, in the dead-letter dept. My dad was obsessed with these two extremes and who he was in relation to them both. In Grey Gardens, in all his films, he was trying to look at who he leaned towards and where the characters had come from in terms of his own life, why he was drawn to them. The drudgery of work for Paul in Salesman [who David connected with his own father], Mrs Beale in Grey Gardens as his mother, having had a very co-dependent, typically difficult relationship with her child, and Mick Jagger [from Gimme Shelter] of course was a risk taker, like his cousin Alan. It wasn't so much I was looking for that type of connection with myself in his films, it was just that I was looking for any information about him, any connection with him, from Edie flirting with him in Grey Gardens, to any of the other parts where he crept into frame, you get a really good idea about who's behind the camera and on the sidelines.

For more, including a discussion of the controversy surrounding the film and Albert Maysles reaction to it, click on the link above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/27/2008 06:08:00 PM

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Over on the main page, select stories from the Fall 08 issue is now on the site.

They include great interviews, including Charlie Kaufman on his debut feature Synecdoche, New York; Bruce LaBruce talks about his latest zombie thriller Otto; or Up with Dead People; and just in time for its release this weekend, Zack and Miri Make a Prono's Kevin Smith discusses his latest raunchy comedy.

There's also a piece on the Red camera workflow; director Jon Reiss writes how he pulled off the two-month theatrical window with Bomb It; Scott Kirsner talks about his new book and the future of indie filmmaking and there's an excerpt of Scott Macaulay's roundtable discussion on the current state of indie film. We also visited The Road's John Hillcoat in the edit room.

And lastly, starting today Filmmaker is available as a digital issue. You can see everything as you would holding the mag, but with more features. Here's a sample. Learn more about it at our FAQ page.

There's a lot going on this issue. Hope you enjoy it.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/27/2008 10:47:00 AM

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I wrote the below for Filmmaker's weekly newsletter back in late August when the digital iTunes version of Max Richter's new album was released. (Each week in the newsletter I try to write something that's different from what appears on the blog -- if you don't get the newsletter, you can subscribe by submitting your email address at left). Now the CD is out and in the stores, so I thought I'd repost what I wrote here -- a kind of musing on the record and some of the new-media related thoughts it inspired.


I’ve been listening lately to Max Richter’s very good new album, 24 Postcards in Full Colour. If you don’t know his work, Richter is an Edinburgh-based composer in the minimalist Philip Glass and Michael Nyman vein whose music often marries itself to other forms of content. His album The Blue Notebooks sets his music against readings by Tilda Swinton of Franz Kafka and Czeslaw Milosz while the following CD, Songs from Before, features Robert Wyatt reading texts from Haruki Murakami. Like a lot of modern neo-classical composers, Richter’s music sometimes sounds as if it should accompany a film and, indeed, he’s been scoring movies too – most recently the Cannes Competition entry Waltz with Bashir.

In the past I’ve liked Richter’s work even as I’ve sometimes felt that his collaborators carried a bit too much of the weight in the collaborations. I’m liking his new record a lot more, however, and I think the concept behind the album is part of the reason. You see, Richter is not calling his new release an album – he says that its 24 pieces are just a collection of ring tones. He writes on the record’s website, “Thinking about how we listen to music now, with the range of options available, I wondered why it is that the ring tone medium has so far been treated as unfit for creative music or... ‘Who says ring tones have to be so bad?’ Actually, there are lots of reasons why this medium is interesting – it is very immediate, personal and democratic – it can easily be used as a way of expressing our thoughts and feelings, to tell stories, and to connect people – which is one of the things music does best.” Richter goes on to say that the album is just one possible ordering of these 24 pieces, which, by the way, are lovely and haunting short compositions for piano, strings and electronics, and that a future performance of this work will feature the audience, who will have downloaded the songs as MP3s on their phones, playing the pieces in response to text alerts from Richter.

I suppose one could just come across this new album by Richter and enjoy these short pieces on their own, but their power is greatly elevated by knowing the concept behind them. Of course, enhancing music through extra-musical ideas is nothing new. There was the program music that flourished during the Romantic era. More recently, there were Steve Reich’s political tape-loop experiments, or Stockhausen’s use of national anthems as a basis for electronic composition. John Zorn, in his Spillane, created a work structured by the scenes, characters and narrative tropes of Mickey Spillane’s crime novels. And then there was Brian Eno’s experiment with ambient music, particularly his Music for Airports, which reminds me a bit of Richter’s work here. When Eno released that seminal album of piano and tape-loop composition, he specifically stated that it was intended to be listened to in an airport – an often tense environment in which the listener, consciously or not, is contemplating his own mortality.

24 Postcards in Full Colour puts a 21st century spin on some of these ideas. Honestly, I doubt anyone will actually use these short pieces as ring tones. But by thinking about them as ring tones, the listener reacts to them in a different way. Ring tones are intended to be comforting, amusing or simply functional intrusions into our everyday life. The more technologically attuned among us can assign different ring tones to different people we know, or, perhaps, change ring tones regularly, making them, when listened to later, audio mementos of earlier times. My Blackberry ring tone is perfectly ordinary – it’s the one that sounds like a normal telephone ringing – so I’m not one someone who’d go to these lengths. But when listening to Richter’s record and thinking about the compositions as ring tones, I add layers of personal interpretation to these short compositions. They start to remind me of people I know, or, while listening to a piece, I’ll think of what moment in my life it might be appropriately linked to. The tracks become scores for memories. So yes, 24 Postcards is just an album but it’s one that because of its concept I’m experiencing and critiquing differently. And for Richter, by embracing the idea that these are ring tones and not songs or compositions he was able to change his own way of looking at his work, putting less emphasis on sustaining compositional ideas over time and placing more emphasis on what is allusive and fragmentary – values that are perfectly suited to short-form work delivered instantly and electronically.

What does any of this have to do with film? Well, while listening to this record and thinking about these ideas I began to ponder again the issue of movie form and content in the internet age. I’ve written about this many times before, but it’s still baffling to me why so few filmmakers are trying to create original work for the web. Perhaps part of the reason is that the things directors and screenwriters have been taught are so important in a feature film – the evolution of character, story arcs, theme and subtext, a three-act structure – are simply not what we should be thinking about when devising work intended to be screened on the web, or on our mobile phone, or delivered via our in-boxes. Maybe to unlock our creativity we need to shift our own paradigms. To forget that we are making films and to think of them as something else. 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?

Read the Pitchfork review of the CD here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/25/2008 10:01:00 AM

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I wasn't able to make it out to The Conversation in Berkeley last weekend, but I heard great things from people who did attend. In a post on his CinemaTech blog, organizer Scott Kirsner gives a quick run-through of some of the highlights. Here, for example, is one of the 15 or so brief bullet points he includes in the post -- from Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, a discussion of the "90-minute-plus chunk of viewing time" that he says is on the decline.

Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, participated in a great on-stage interview with filmmaker (and Conversation co-host) Tiffany Shlain. He mentioned that Crash is the #1 most-rented DVD in the service's history. He said that the TV is turning into a Web browser, capable of displaying any content that can be published online. He suggested that a remote like the one that comes with the Nintendo Wii might be what we use to navigate this new world. Generating audience demand for your content is the new problem -- not producing or distributing it. Most provocatively, Hastings said that "the 90-minute-plus chunk of time is on the decline, as far as social relevance." Are we all still talking about films, and suggesting that our friends go see them -- or are we talking about the latest viral video we've seen? (I totally believe that people who insist on continuing to make only 90-minute features are missing the biggest opportunities of our era.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/24/2008 08:44:00 AM

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The always excellent KCRW podcast "The Business" has an interesting juxtaposition today. The first half of the program features an interview with Monica Karo, President of Integrated Sales, OMD on the effect of the recession on TV ad buying. The second half is an interview with Saw 2, 3, and 4 director Darren Lynn Bousman on his seven-or-so year saga to bring Repo: The Genetic Opera to the screen. "Darren Lynn Bousman was a kid who loved rock opera... and he's got the wedgies to prove it," says The Business's Claude Brodesser-Akner as he intros the latter segment. In it, Bousman talks about his passion for the cult musical and the difficulties he had getting a film version made and distributed, even with the hugely successful Saw films on his resume.

Download or stream it here or just go to iTunes and subscribe. It's my favorite film podcast.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/23/2008 11:32:00 PM

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One of the challenges any film faces these days is building a community of people around it -- an audience that is energized and inspired by not just the movie, when it comes out, but the idea of the movie before it hits the theaters. One film sure to draw passionate engagement is Gus Van Sant's upcoming Milk, and already its website is drawing moving and personal postings on Harvey Milk and his importance to multiple generations of gay and lesbian men and women. Check out the Milk site and read not only about Harvey Milk's life but also the lives of some of the everyday people he has influenced. And, if you are someone who has been touched by the life and work of Harvey Milk, consider putting up your own recollection.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/23/2008 02:44:00 PM

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On his blog, The Camera Eye, D.P. Keith Duggan has a straightforward, practical post on how he shot and lit the low-budget road movie Route 30. The film stars Dana Delany and is described as a "hilarious backwoods comedy," and it was made with "no AD's, no honeywagons, no equipment trucks of any kind." But shooting on two Panasonic HVX200 cameras and carrying four P2 cards and a small amount of lighting and grip equipment in half the interior and on the roof rack of the director's SUV, Duggan found a way to light the movie and give it a look. More info, a podcast, and the film's trailer are available at the link. And for more on the film, visit its own site.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/22/2008 12:36:00 PM

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William Horberg, exec producer of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, has a blog, and in today's post he compares his first reading of Kaufman's script — in one of those annoying "you have to read this in two hours and then hand back immediately to a bonded messenger" sittings — to his first assignment at script coverage back in 1986. (Hat tip: Ted Hope.)

From the piece:

As a test, the first screenplay I was given to read and analyze as a sample of my reading, writing and comprehension was, believe it or not, How To Get Ahead In Advertising, which became the second film from British writer-director Bruce Robinson after his seminal debut, that cult classic and one of my all-time favorites, Withnail and I.

For those of you who haven't seen this small British indie starring Richard E. Grant, the story centers around a harried advertising executive who grows a painful boil on his shoulder that surreally erupts into a second antagonistic head and split personality, to blackly comic results. Other than a period where I was obsessed with the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol, I had never read anything like it, and it was the last thing I expected to find upon my arrival in Hollywood.

I spent the weekend in agony. I felt I was being "gaslit" on my first job interview. If I were to confess that I loved it, would I be deemed to have hopelessly uncommercial taste. If I were to give it a negative report, would I be complicit in the studio turning down one of my favorite directors? The script felt like a Rorschach test designed to ferret out my emerging film personality.

Twenty-two years later, here I was reading one of the most wildly imaginative, deeply personal, and seductively subversive scripts I had read since Bruce Robinson's classic, and having the same schizophrenic experience of head and heart in conflict. Later, I was to discover that the name of Kaufman's loan-out corporation for his writing and directing services was auspiciously titled "Projective Testing Inc.", projective testing being the name of the whole field of psychology in which a subject is presented ambiguous stimuli to yield hidden levels of personality.

I understand Horberg's point on two levels. First, like him, my first job in film was reading scripts. I remember picking up the two "test screenplays" I was to read from New Line Cinema's old offices on 8th Avenue near Port Authority. One was conventional and pretty boring with a hackneyed "high concept." The other was more original and nutty. I spent the weekend wondering how much I should second guess myself and attempt to figure out the mindset of the development execs at the company. Finally, I just decided to say what I thought -- which, initially, was wrong. The screenplay I panned was in active development; the one I liked had been passed on. (Six months later, however, I got a call back. The "active development" script was put in turnaround and would I like to read scripts for them.)

I guess Synechdoche, New York played a similar mind game on me -- not while watching the movie, but while editing the fascinating, funny, probing and spirited interview we have with Kaufman coming up in the magazine. (It's in the print issue and will be online, probably by the end of the week or early next at the latest.) Our director Q and A's are pretty heavily edited. In real life, people talk in fragments and non sequiturs. They leave holes in their conversation that are filled in with dramatic inflection or assumed meanings shared with the person they are having conversations with. These things must all be dealt with through editing so that the reader both understands what's being said but also so that the finished conversation can exist as an informative work of prose. When it comes to my style of editing, when faced with a long transcript -- and James Ponsoldt's interview with Kaufman was a long transcript -- I tend to concentrate on what I find most interesting, assuming that the reader will also find this interesting. Questions that lead to conventional answers I tend to cut out in favor of more unexpected replies or things I haven't heard this artist say before. I also like our interviews to read as interesting and informative for those who haven't seen the movie, or who may never see the movie. So, I guess, I worry a bit about answers like this one:

There’s a sameness to our lives. There’s a continuum we’re all on: you are born, there are events there are sadnesses, there are frustrations, there’s happiness, there’s illness, there’s loss, and there’s death. I think understanding that there is that continuum is more important than reflecting on the specifics of your life. There is this correlation between Caden’s life and Ellen’s life, between his unhappiness and her unhappiness, between his loss of his daughter and her not ever having her daughter, between all those elements to the point where [Caden and Ellen] become the same person at the end of the movie. He apologizes to the actress who plays her mother for disappointing her and is in the process getting comfort and being told by this person who isn’t his mother that she’s so proud of him, and this gives him inspiration to move forward, and he gets a new idea for how he’s going to do his play. It’s actually his first new idea since Hazal dies, and it never gets realized.

So please see the movie this weekend -- it will make reading the interview in Filmmaker a lot better!

Related: in Variety's "The Circuit," Mike Jones points to an exhibition in L.A. of the 27 "micro-paintings" found in Synecdoche, New York which are created by Catherine Keener's character, Adele Lack. The show runs October 21-26 at The Montalbán Gallery, 1615 Vine Street, Hollywood, CA 90028.

Also related: click here to read Filmmaker's previous 1999 interview with Kaufman and also director Spike Jonze on Being John Malkovitch.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/22/2008 11:24:00 AM

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Ballast, which picked up several Gotham Award nominations yesterday, closes at New York's Film Forum today But the film's website has just been updated with screening dates across the county as well as in New York. (The film will move to the Cinema Village and the Brooklyn Heights Cinema for one week beginning Friday.)

Here are the other upcoming dates that have been announced so far:

Walker Art Center Minneapolis MN Oct 29
Q&A with director Lance Hammer following screening.

Music Box Theatre Chicago IL Oct 31 - Nov 06
Q&A with filmmaker Lance Hammer on Friday, October 31. Screening time TBD.

Kendall Square Cinema Cambridge MA Oct 31 - Nov 06
Q&A with filmmaker Lance Hammer Saturday, November 1 and Sunday, November 2. Screening times TBD.

Laemmle Sunset 5 Los Angeles CA Nov 07 - Nov 13
Q&A with filmmaker Lance Hammer Saturday, November 8 and Sunday November 9. Screening times TBD.

Edwards Westpark 8 Irvine CA Nov 07 - Nov 13

Ritz Theatres Philadelphia PA Nov 14 - Nov 20

E Street Cinema Washington DC Nov 14 - Nov 20

The Charles Theatre Baltimore MD Nov 14 - Nov 20

Maple Art Theatre Detroit MI Nov 21 - Nov 27

Film Streams Omaha NE Dec 05 - Dec 11

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/21/2008 03:55:00 PM

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It's not often that a movie receives a standing ovation at the end of a film festival screening. The only time I saw it happen was at Cannes for Haskell Wexler's Latino, a film with anti-American sentiments. But Danny Boyle's exuberant Slumdog Millionaire received a similarly rapturous greeting after its Austin premiere.

It's a feel-great story about Jamal Malik, an impoverished orphan from the streets of Mumbai who's one question away from winning the 20 million rupee jackpot on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and is arrested by police on suspicion that he must be cheating. The quiz show proves to be a framing device for Jamal to flash back on the events that shaped his life - events that enable him to answer the game show questions. At the heart of the movie is Jamal's attempts to reconnect with the love of his life, Latika, who he was separated from as a child. The power of love to transcend a life of struggle and hardship is one of the film's most resonant themes.

Written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), the film won the Audience Award at the Toronto Fim Festival, and has been generating steady buzz ever since, as it winds its way to its Nov. 28 U.S. release. Most everyone I spoke with the following day had the dazed look of people still caught up in a magical experience, the kind only a great film can deliver.

Boyle was a busy man at Austin, honored with the Extraordinary Contribution To Film Award and rushing from one luncheon to the next. I managed to catch up with him for a few minutes between engagements. In person, he's friendly, unassuming, and bursting with the kind of hyper-kinetic energy that defines his visual style.

Filmmaker Magazine: Watching the film, it's like we're plunged into the streets of Mumbai with these kids. How did you capture the action so vividly?

Danny Boyle: I try to make films with subjective POVS that make you fel like you're caught up in the action. You have no choice but to experience the film. For Slumdog, we used a silicon imaging prototype camera, 512K, which was strapped to a recorder on the cameraman's back. The recorder connects to a camera lens work on the hand, which allowed us to create an extra dynamism and flexibility, more than you'd get in a Steadicam shot.

Filmmaker: How did you get attached to the material? Had you read the novel (by Indian writer Vikas Swaroop) ?

Boyle: I read the novel out of respect for the writer. I didn't really want to do a film about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. But once I read the first ten pages of the script, I was hooked.

Filmmaker: What attracted you to the material?

Boyle: It was just so fresh, and it was a classic underdog story. And it was set in an India in transition. India is a tiger economy. For filmmaking, Mumbai is the future - HBO's been here, Spielberg was here. Capitalism has to keep expanding.

Filmmaker: Commercially, were you concerned to make a film with an all-Indian cast?

Boyle: You couldn't make it with any other type of cast; there was no choice. Call it arrogance, or a temporary feeling of infallibility, but I since I loved it, so I felt everybody would love it. The people who turned it down, I'd look at them like, 'are you fucking nuts'?

Filmmaker: How was it working with the children of Mumbai?

Boyle: The sript was written in English, but when we got to India, we discovered that seven-year-old Hindi children aren't old enough to grasp English, so we switched the script into Hindi. I had to call the financiers and tell them the first third of the script would be in Hindi with subtitles. They thought I had gone mad, that I was going to come back with some meditation movie on India.

Filmmaker: But it worked. You get this rare look inside an exotic culture that most of us never get to see.

Boyle: In a strange way, it makes the film more acessible, because it's more believable.

Filmmaker: The film got a standing ovation. When you came onstage after the film for the Q&A, the audience was still standing. What does that feel like?

Boyle: It was fantastic, of course, but truthfully all I could think of was what's wrong; how could I have improved it? You're always expecting people to say 'what was that'? when the film is done. Must be that British pessimism.

# posted by Graham Flashner @ 10/21/2008 10:18:00 AM

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If you saw the original interview -- or even if you didn't -- this is hilarious.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/20/2008 04:41:00 PM

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IFP announced today the nominees for this year's 18th Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards. Lance Hammer's self-distributed first feature Ballast received the most nominations with four, including for Best Feature and Breakthrough Director.

The awards will be handed out on Tuesday, Dec. 2 at New York City's Cipriani Wall Street.

Full list of nominees are below.

Best Feature

Ballast
Lance Hammer, director; Lance Hammer, Nina Parikh, producers (Alluvial Film Company)

Frozen River
Courtney Hunt, director; Heather Rae, Chip Hourihan, producers (Sony Pictures Classics)

Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman, director; Anthony Bregman, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Sidney Kimmel, producers (Sony Pictures Classics)

The Visitor
Tom McCarthy, director; Mary Jane Skalski, Michael London, producers (Overture Films)

The Wrestler
Darren Aronofsky, director; Scott Franklin, Darren Aronofsky, producers (Fox Searchlight Pictures)


Best Documentary

Chris & Don: A Love Story
Guido Santi & Tina Mascara, directors; Julia Scott, Tina Mascara, Guido Santi, James White, producers (Zeitgeist Films)

Encounters at the End of the World
Werner Herzog, director; Henry Kaiser, producer (THINKFilm / Image Entertainment)

Man on Wire
James Marsh, director; Simon Chinn, producer (Magnolia Pictures)

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Marina Zenovich, director; Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Lila Yacoub, Marina Zenovich, producers (THINKFilm in association with HBO Documentaries)

Trouble the Water
Tia Lessin & Carl Deal, producers/directors (Zeitgeist Films)


Best Ensemble Performance

Ballast
Micheal J. Smith, Sr., JimMyron Ross, Tarra Riggs, Johnny McPhail (Alluvial Film Company)

Rachel Getting Married
Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde Adebimpe, Mather Zickel, Anna Deavere Smith, Anisa George, Debra Winger (Sony Pictures Classics)

Synecdoche, New York
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan (Sony Pictures Classics)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz (The Weinstein Company)

The Visitor
Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbas, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira (Overture Films)


Breakthrough Director

Antonio Campos for Afterschool
Dennis Dortch for A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy (Magnolia Pictures)
Lance Hammer for Ballast (Alluvial Film Company)
Barry Jenkins for Medicine for Melancholy (IFC Films)
Alex Rivera for Sleep Dealer (Maya Releasing)


Breakthrough Actor

Pedro Castaneda in August Evening (Maya Releasing)
Rosemarie DeWitt in Rachel Getting Married (Sony Pictures Classics)
Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (The Weinstein Company)
Melissa Leo in Frozen River (Sony Pictures Classics)
Alejandro Polanco in Chop Shop (Koch Lorber Films)
Micheal J. Smith, Sr. in Ballast (Alluvial Film Company)


Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You™

Afterschool
Antonio Campos, director; Josh Mond, Sean Durkin, producers

Meadowlark
Taylor Greeson, producer/director

The New Year Parade
Tom Quinn, director; Steve Beal, Tom Quinn, producers

Sita Sings the Blues
Nina Paley, producer/director

Wellness
Jake Mahaffy, director; Jake Mahaffy, Jeff Clark, producers


The nominating committees for the Gotham Independent Film Awards™ announced above are as follows:

Nominating Committee for Best Feature and Best Ensemble Performance:
Ty Burr, Film Critic, The Boston Globe
Scott Foundas, Film Editor / Film Critic, LA Weekly
Dave Karger, Senior Writer, Entertainment Weekly
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Nominating Committee for Breakthrough Director and Breakthrough Actor:
Cynthia Fuchs, Film Critic, PopMatters and NPR.org
Robert Koehler, Film Critic, Variety
Rob Nelson, Film Critic, Minnesota Post
Andrew O’Hehir, Senior Writer, Salon.com

Nominating Committee for Best Documentary:
Cynthia Fuchs, Film Critic, PopMatters and NPR.org
Owen Gleiberman, Film Critic, Entertainment Weekly
Tom Hall, Director of Programming, Sarasota Film Festival
Ronnie Scheib, Film Critic, Variety

Nominating Committee for Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You™:
Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film and Media, Museum of Modern Art;
and members of the editorial staff of Filmmaker Magazine: Scott Macaulay (Editor-in-Chief), Nick Dawson, Mary Glucksman, Jason Guerrasio, Brandon Harris, Ray Pride

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/20/2008 12:33:00 PM

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No film festival celebrates the screenwriter quite like Austin's. Yesterday, I spent the morning in a ballroom at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, listening to screenwriting powerhouses John August and John Lee Hancock discuss the merits of what makes good dialogue. By the afternoon, I was in a chair-less room at the Victorian Balcony, joining 30 writers sprawled on the carpet, worshipping almost literally at the feet of Lawrence Kasdan, himself reclining on the floor with a microphone. Friday morning, I sat in on intimate roundtable discussions with development execs and producers who rotated tables, speed-dating style, and answered questions from a rapt audience of aspiring scribes, most of whom sported badges denoting their status in the screenplay and teleplay competitions (Second Rounder! Semi-Finalist!) and who seemed giddy at such unfettered access to Hollywood's gatekeepers, many of whom parted unhesitatingly with email addresses and business cards. As one writer told me, "They tend to weed out the panelists who don't provide access."


Unlike the majority of film festivals, where you're lucky to get a ten-minute glimpse of talent at a post-screening Q&A, intimate contact with producers, writers, and showrunners is what the AFF is all about. The film program isn't too shabby either - 67 features and 49 shorts in competition, and prestige titles like W, Slumdog Millionaire, and Synecdoche, New York, with Oscar aspirations. Only last year, Jason Reitman took home the Audience Award for Juno. But for at least the first four days here, the films seem almost incidental. For anyone with a script or idea to pitch, AFF's raison d'etre is the Conference, four days of intensive screenwriting boot camp, pitch fests, and networking opportunities.

Most of the action takes place at the stately, 122 year-old Driskill Hotel. This weekend, even the rabid Texas football fans, in town to see their Longhorns annihilate Missouri, took a back seat to the throngs of writer, producer, and actor wannabes roaming the halls and lining up for panels. In one room, Shane Black regaled an intimate gathering of devotees with war stories from the Hollywood front. In the cavernous Driskill Ballroom, writers could participate in Q&A's with A-listers like Jeff Nathanson and Boaz Yakin, and take part in discussions with such titles as, "What Gets Producers Excited" and "Building A Script".

Of course, these types of seminars-with-the-stars are packaged in Hollywood with mind-numbing regularity. In Austin, however, the panelists don't get to jump into their Priuses and their Beamers and cruise on home, leaving the unwashed masses in the dust. And they can't hit the slopes, as they might if this were Sundance. Here, with everyone on the same party circuit, they're remarkably accessible, so a writer who spontaneously pitched a romantic comedy with aliens to a development exec might well see that same exec at a barbecue or screening later in the day. At the roundtables, it was not unusual to hear execs inviting writers to "stalk me later" if they wanted a follow-up.

Most importantly, as several writers have already confided, there's an esprit de corps among the writers that isn't always found in L.A. Everyone's competing, but everyone seems to be pulling for each other as well. And while there've been a few grumblings about stand-offish buyers and agents not taking on new clients ("What are they doing here?" said one writer), the prevailing sentiment here is that the buyers are sincere about finding new talent. For at least this weekend, the dreams of hundreds of aspiring screenwriters felt just a bit closer to being realized. If the film and TV execs who held court in Austin were only here to hand out false hope, then it was a performance in the best tradition of the illusions that define Hollywood.

Film Report: What happened to Oliver Stone? I went to see W, the Festival's opening night premiere, hoping to see the same edgy paranoid conspiracy theories that made JFK and Nixon so riveting. Instead, I got a plodding two hour-plus film that was less revelatory than your average TV movie - and about as interesting. Where were the subversive leaps of logic, the twisted POVs? Josh Brolin (pictured at left) does a fine job of humanizing Dubyuh, and James Cromwell is stellar as Bush 41, but it's as if Stone made the film under sedation, or with a gun held to his head by Dick Cheney. I am not a political junkie by any means, and I know the same facts that anyone who reads the New York Times or watches CNN knows. So if someone like me can watch a film on Bush and feel like I've learned nothing new, that's a bad sign.

A more apt title for Mark Wahlberg's silly new action thriller, Max Payne (pictured at right) would be Max Payneful. An endless collage of bullets exploding in slow motion, rising body counts, and unintentionally funny set pieces, it's the latest in a line of video games brought to cinematic life. I loved Wahlberg in films like The Shooter and Invincible, where he played blue-collar Everymen. Here, as a moping cop hellbent on revenging the death of his wife and daughter, he grimaces and sulks his way through the movie, like an actor hellbent on finding which producer got him into this mess.

Graham Flashner is a screenwriter, producer and journalist whose work has appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Variety, Fandango.com, and others.

# posted by Graham Flashner @ 10/19/2008 02:58:00 PM

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After I produced my first feature (Tom Noonan's What Happened Was...), I imagined what my next year would be like. I'd be flying all over the world going to countless festivals with the film. But I quickly realized two things. One, festivals don't care much about hosting producers, and, two, I wasn't flush enough to float myself on a year of globetrotting and had to get back to work.

In today's diminished conventional distribution environment, film festivals are increasingly seen by first-time filmmakers not as tony travel spots but rather as cogs in a new machine that might connect them with actual revenues for their film. Christian Gaines began the dialogue with his "Do Festivals Matter" two-parter in Variety this Summer. In the piece, he suggested a new model of "festival distribution" in which sales agents would take the lead in pursuing smaller-scale revenue opportunities that would exist through film festival and associated regional distribution. Others, like Scott Kirsner, have been talking about things like using a film festival premiere as the publicity magnet for one's film and creating a short download or online rental window alongside or immediately following this screening.

At his Truly Free Film blog, Ted Hope points to Paul Devlin's current article in The Independent , "Making Films is Only Half the Battle." Devlin has been on the fest circuit with his new science-themed doc, Blast!, and he straightforwardly recounts the highs and lows of this journey. Like Ted, I was left thinking by his concluding paragraph:

Of course, the film festival model will always serve some film very well. But diverging interests may mean that film festivals necessarily become a much less essential element of a filmmaker’s strategy for promotion and distribution. Just as we seem to be entering a “post-distributor” environment in which filmmakers eschew rotten deals and embrace DIY, we may be witnessing the emergence of a “post-film festival” environment as well. As more and more filmmakers become empowered through alternatives to business-as-usual, we must keep in mind that, as the artists, none of this would exist – the festivals, the press, the sponsors, the audience - without our films.

Read the piece to learn how an "alt-theatrical" exhibition circuit might be even more helpful (and remunerative) to the filmmaker than the conventional fest circuit we know and love. The trailer for Devlin's film is below.



And while we are talking about film festivals, Chris Holland's new book, Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers is available for free download as a PDF as well as in a purchasable hard copy. (Hat tip: Workbook Project.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/18/2008 12:10:00 PM

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Digital Strategist/Consultant Alex Johnson, who writes at, among other places, The Workbook Project (and is one of the professionals featured in its Mindshare Program) has a really interesting essay up on the site discussing the value of a name. No, not a well known actor who is attached to your film, but your name, and how that moniker can help (or hurt) you in the Google-ruled world of online brand recognition. Starting off by discussing her problems of being commonly named, she goes on to detail what she's done about it while also musing on the pro's and con's of such names as McG, Miranda July, Kevin Smith and Tom Quinn -- the independent film director who happens to have the same name as the head of acquisitions at Magnolia Pictures. It's fascinating and recommended.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/18/2008 11:44:00 AM

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In this week's newsletter I mentioned that I'm trying to put together some thoughts on how the looming recession and current credit crunch will affect independent film production. It's a bigger issue than just that, however, as these economic troubles are hitting at the same time as the industry -- both Hollywood and indie -- is rethinking the business model that underpins the feature film business. (If you don't currently get the newsletter, you can subscribe by typing in your email address at right.)

I received the following response from Jane Kosek which raises a lot of good points about our current rush to DIY models, and I'm reprinting it with permission:

This is Jane Kosek of Wonder Entertainment. In addition to feeling the crunch on the investing side, we are also feeling the crunch on the sales side. Many more films are being considered tough sells in this downturned market. There is an overall reticence from sales agents to officially take on titles before knowing their premiere status, expressly because there are fewer outlets for sales. This means less support is out there for independent producers to establish a launch for their films. It also means that even high quality, entertaining films may not have a chance of seeing the light of day. And that is tragic when you think of all of the investment of time, energy and money that goes into each film that is created and the amount of talent that is going unnoticed because their achievements are being shelved due to lack of outlets to audiences. It was already a struggle to get an independent film made and released. This bad economy is compounding the situation.

The side effects to all of this is that the already-drowning and overstretched producers need to officially take on yet another hat in the process — that of sales agent and distributor. It's good to know there is something we can do should we be shut out of or mishandled by the traditional arenas, but what is being overlooked is the amount of stress and work this adds to an already-overworked independent producer. Of course, we indie producers are up for the challenge as you can't enter this business without a spirit of wanting to be involved in every aspect of filmmaking, but, at some point, we producers are going to be crushed — both mentally and physically — under the pressure of being all things to all people.

What I think is interesting is that not many people discuss how each film is like starting a small business. You have an idea, you find investors, you build your product, you sell it. In traditional business set ups, you are told to delegate and build a strong team beneath you. That is how you survive. This is because one person cannot do it all. There is a reason why people specialize. It's more effective to focus on one task and do it well. It's well known that as soon as you take on too much, you spread yourself too thin and are not effective at any of the tasks you are doing. Too much multitasking is dangerous. My opinion would be to fix the traditional arenas. Build a real foundation of support for the already struggling filmmakers so they don't have to "do it all." And I also feel that the mentoring in this business needs real change. It's nearly nonexistent. It's often every man for himself. As you can see, I can go on... Like the economy, we need change!

Thanks for featuring the daily struggles we independent filmmakers experience. It’s nice to have a community with which to commiserate.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/17/2008 03:16:00 PM

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One thing coming up in the new Filmmaker is an interview with Todd Sklar, the director of Box Elder and the head of Range Life, a company embarking on a progressively old-school DIY distribution strategy for four films this Fall. The first is Sklar's own film, and the other three are Registered Sex Offender, In Memory of My Father, and On the Road with Judas. All four are on the road, working the arthouse and college circuit in a film tour featuring not only screenings but events with the various makers. Visit the websites linked here for more info, and, in the meantime, here is the first of the group's tour diaries.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/17/2008 02:24:00 PM

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One of the past year's best shorts is now online, courtesy of New York Magazine's Vulture. I'm not sure I'd describe Myna Joseph's Man as the tale of "creepy sisters into the woods," but it does beautifully capture a particular and not often seen on screen sisterly dynamic having to do with burgeoning sexuality, competition and love. Here's what Brandon Harris wrote about Joseph when we selected her for our "25 New Faces List":

A simple and startling premise, the rivalry that exists between sisters, especially when a strange, cute boy is involved, grows into an arresting account of female adolescent sexuality in Myna Joseph‘s fantastic graduate thesis film Man. Another terrific product of Columbia‘s graduate film program, Man bowed at Woodstock last year and played Sundance and New Directors/New Films before being chosen for the 40th Director‘s Fortnight in Cannes, where Joseph was one of only four American directors invited. Initially planned for an even younger pair of girls, Joseph struggled to find actresses who were mature enough to embody the roles. “It‘s about how sex is a chasm that the older sister jumps over while the younger sister is left behind,” says Joseph. “When we couldn‘t cast those girls, I ended up bumping up the ages and I rewrote the script. That‘s how I came to what I think is a much more interesting and complicated situation.”

Joseph, who lives in Harlem with her boyfriend John Magary, himself a budding young director (he gripped on Man while directing the lauded short film The Second Line), came late to filmmaking. She majored in biology as an undergrad. “If I met my younger self now, I‘d be shocked that I became a filmmaker,” she says. “It was during college in Boston that I took a Super 8mm class that totally opened my eyes. It was like reading for the first time. It was like, ‘What the hell have I been doing! Why haven‘t I been doing this?‘”

Clearly a director who is interested in provoking and challenging the audience, Joseph is currently at work on a feature script entitled My Favorite Nightmare. “It‘s about a girl who finds herself pregnant,” she says. “We meet her when she‘s on her way to meet the young father. She goes to tell him, but she has second thoughts about telling him. She wants to make him into the person she wants him to be. In some ways it‘s a reaction to a lot of films that have been about pregnancy recently, where the girl enables the schleppy guy who knocked her up to fix his life.”

Photo: Richard Koek. Hat tip: Spout.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/17/2008 09:54:00 AM

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Despite a blog post below in which we criticized Apple for some subtly unrealistic threats having to do with a government decision on artist royalties, we are Apple fans. Really. Our magazine is made on Macs, I'm typing on one right now, and Jamie Stuart's work, which we feature on our home page, is edited with Final Cut on a MacBook Pro. So, like the techies, we look forward to Apple product announcements and the unveiling of what we will be upgrading to soon.

The aluminum enclosure of Apple's new MacBooks and MacBook Pro's, which were announced this week, looks sleek and cool, and the new graphic cards seem great. The new mini Display Port could be a very useful addition. But there's one thing about the announcement that leapt out at me: the elimination of FireWire from the MacBook entirely, and the elimination of FireWire 400 from the MacBook Pro. I'm a MacBook user, and I use FireWire to back up my computer on portable hard drives. I asked Jamie what he thought about this product change and here's what he wrote, commenting about both the laptops' FireWire change and the new port configuration.

Why entirely get rid of the FireWire 400? That's the format that virtually all Prosumer cameras use. Are filmmakers going to have to buy new connector cables because of this? Furthermore, having only one FireWire in and of itself is inconvenient. My current laptop only has one, but subsequent versions have had a 400 and an 800 (this means that I have to transfer my footage to my computer first, then transfer it again to an external drive, instead of just going straight into the other drive.) Also, by putting all the ports on the left side, they've made it inconvenient for mouse-users such as myself. Currently, I plug into the right-side USB, and it's fine. Now, I'll have to plug in on the left and wrap the cord around the back of the computer to the right side.

FireWire 800 is faster than 400, like USB/USB 2.0 -- but they're shaped differently. There are cables that have a 400 at one end and an 800 on the other. However, I'm pretty sure that most prosumer cameras use 1394 connectors, which are FireWire 400.

They'll have to redo this for then next revision. This is really bad. Or wait until the 17" comes out since that usually has more ports.

There's a lot of talk about these changes online today. In an article by Mark Webster in The Independent, he sees Apple's strategy as all about eliding differences between the consumer-y MacBook line and the professional MacBook Pro line.

But can you do without a FireWire 400 port - the connection most video cameras still support? (Apple will make adapters available, for a price, apparently.) Apple seems to be saying ‘it's USB for consumers and FireWire for professionals' as the new MacBook Pro still has Firewire 400 and 800 ports. A growing number of consumer hard drives and DV cameras do use USB instead of FireWire, tis true. Soon enough for you, though?

Despite the omission of FireWire, once again Apple has narrowed the gap between its consumer and pro machines. Why?

Partly as a response to current MacBook owners. Jobs noted that the three things MacBook owners wanted to see most in future models were: metal case, faster graphics performance and an LED-backlit display. That display is glossy, by the way, as it is in the new MacBook Pros, raising the ire of some photographers who really prefer matte.

Note that the MacBook video card, as Macworld points out, doesn't have its own RAM like ‘proper' video cards. It still borrows some of the MacBook's main memory, although a lot more than before - 256MB. So adding more RAM will always improve your MacBook, giving the system more overhead above that video-allocated 256MB.

But still, why did Apple make a consumer machine that looks and acts like a pro machine? Don Frakes of Macworld thinks the new-and-improved MacBooks will shift what he calls "the indecision point" between the MacBook and MacBook Pro. "In other words, while there are customers for whom the choice between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro is an obvious one, there is always going to be a group of people whose needs fall squarely between the two and who have to decide between saving money or getting more performance and features." A smaller, lighter model might be perfect for them.

Wired has a colorful article by Charlie Sorrell up entitled "Apple Quietly Kills FireWire 400." Despite it's intro, in which a masked hitman kills Mr. FireWire on the Apple campus, the piece winds up downplaying the move:

The internet is afire with complaints, but it's probably fair to say that FireWire is now a minority interface. If you need it, buy a Pro and an ExpressCard adapter and quit whining. For everyone else, there is USB. With Apple, every technology has a limited lifespan. There's a long list of things that Macs have dropped, and while there were complaints at the time, some of these things now seem rather quaint: the floppy disk and the modem. Heck, the MacBook Air doesn't even have an optical drive.

Mac Daily News takes some swipes at the Wired article -- mostly critiquing its headline -- and sticks up for Apple, but even it has to wonder:

We're still trying to figure out how Apple, among other concerns, plans to resolve the dichotomy between MacBooks that ship with iMovie and the lack of a FireWire port for DV cameras; the few relatively expensive solutions we've found so far (USB to FireWire DV Adapter) are all Windows-only. Surely Apple doesn't expect hundreds of thousands of potential MacBook buyers who also own cameras equipped with FireWire to go buy new USB 2 cameras, right? Some other solution must exist or be in the works, right, Apple?

We're wondering too...

To complain to Apple about the removal of FireWire from MacBooks click here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/16/2008 11:57:00 AM

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Check out Evan Louison's perfect capturing of an evening with Abel Ferrara over at Brandon Harris's redesigned Cinema Echo Chamber.

And here's one other Abel-related link: at Hollywood Elsewhere Jeffrey Wells passes on info about the way in which that Bad Lieutenant remake came to be.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/16/2008 12:05:00 AM

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In Director Interviews, Nick Dawson talks with Abel Ferrara on the release of Mary at the Anthology Film Archives. I'm a big fan of this film -- it's his best in years. (Although I haven't seen Go-Go Tales and the Chelsea Hotel doc yet.)

Ferrara fans can also dip into the Filmmaker Archives with this interview with the director about R Xmas by Jeremiah Kipp. And, not on the Filmmaker site but on the late Zoe Lund's site, my cover story on Bad Lieutenant back in 1992.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/15/2008 11:02:00 AM

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Over the weekend I read on Ain't It Cool News about James Gunn and Spike TV's "PG Porn," a series of short satiric films starring porn stars but which feature no sex. Here's Gunn from the AICN piece:

My brothers Brian and Sean and I came up with PG PORN years ago. We'd talk about all sorts of scenarios where you take the typical porn set-up and things would somehow go wrong. When I was a kid I'd go see X-rated movies in a theater with my friends. I would rarely get turned on -- it was all about laughing at the strangeness of the acting and cinematography and story lines.

The first episode is live on the Spike TV site. It stars Aria Giovanni but I decided not to link to it, preferring to wait until the Sasha Grey episode was posted because Grey has been outspoken in her love for independent and transgressive cinema. (In one interview, for example, she said, "I also wanted to say support independent films --go to an art house and watch something that confuses you and hopefully gets you to talk about afterwards even if you think it sucked.") Her MySpace page lists as her favorite directors Jean-Luc Godard, Harmony Korine, William Klein, Antonioni, Gaspar Noe, Agnes Varda, David Gordon Green and Terrence Malick, among others, and she shoots with Terry Richardson and Filmmaker contributor Richard Kern. But news events have apparently overtaken my blog editorial calendar. According to Adult Video News, Grey has been cast in a lead role in a film by another of her favorite directors: Steven Soderbergh.

Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience is in production and she is quoted as telling AVN, "To have the opportunity to work for an Academy Award-winning auteur is truly a great honor. I've been an admirer of Soderbergh's films for years, and I am elated that I have been given a leading role in a character-driven film."

Glenn Kenny previously blogged about this last April, linking to a Michael Fleming Variety piece that said a wish-list performer was a starlet who cited Catherine Breillat as a hero. In the blog This Recording last Spring Molly Young issued four reasons why "Sasha Grey is a New Kind of Porn Star." Writes Young:

Sasha is pretty in a bird-like way, with the frame of someone who fidgets a lot. She has brown eyes and root-beer colored hair. Her MySpace profile describes someone who is part ditzy teenager, (likes makeup and Tetris, plays the “guitar”) part bougie New Yorker (Carl Jung, War and Peace, Antonioni), and part dubious feminist (Anais Nin, the self-actualized porn star schtick). There’s also something of the hero’s quest to her self-presentation:

“I am Sasha Grey,” she writes. “There is no other. This is only a brief dossier because I’m not dead and don’t feel that a complete biography is yet warranted.” She sounds like the beginning of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/14/2008 07:13:00 PM

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Via Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog comes this sad notice: the East Village's Mondo Kim's will be closing, and Mr. Kim is searching for some organization to take the store's collection of 55,000 videos. (Hat tip: Movie City News.)

From the blog:

In posters on display at Mondo Kim's, he writes to say that, due to "rapidly declined" financial resources, he is seeking a sponsor to take on his entire collection of 55,000 films. The flyer goes on to say that he plans to close the rental department of his business and hopes to ensure that the collection will still be readily accessible to students and lovers of film.

There are more details at the link and also in the flyer reprinted here. Mr. Kim will open a store on First Avenue but it will consist of music and DVD sales, and no rentals.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/14/2008 03:18:00 PM

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"One truism of being a documentary filmmaker is that your subjects often continue to make news long after your film has wrapped and is widely seen," writes AJ. Schnack at his All These Wonderful Things blog. "Kicking off a new feature here at the blog, Sam Green, the co-director of the Oscar-nominated THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, writes about Ayers' return to prominence and the mixed feelings it provokes for the director." What follows are Green's thoughts about Ayres, who he got to know through the making of his documentary, his sudden emergence as an issue in the Presidential campaign, and both Ayres' and Green's media strategy of the moment.

An excerpt:

As depressing as this whole Bill Ayers thing has been, I am hopeful about one thing, and that is that I don't think that it will work. It was pathetic enough when Hillary trotted this shit out, but today, with the financial meltdown and all the other REAL issues that we're facing, I just can't see how this desperate, bankrupt ploy by McCain and his VP-pick will turn things around.

To learn more about Green or purchase his doc, visit his website. (Hat tip: Green Cine.) The film's trailer is below.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/14/2008 03:01:00 PM

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Congrats to my old friend and colleague, Karol Martesko-Fenster, founding publisher of Filmmaker and co-founder of Indiewire on his new position at Babelgum, the ad-supported internet TV platform.

From the press release:

Babelgum, the free independent web TV platform, today announced the appointment of Karol Martesko-Fenster as General Manager & Publisher of thecompany’s Film Division. Martesko-Fenster will oversee allaspects of the film offering on Babelgum, expanding programming acquisitions and partnerships and global film industry and festival activities.

Karol will also assume the role of Managing Director of theannual Babelgum Online Film Festival working closely with creator Stefania Valenti and Jury Chairman Spike Lee. He will be based in Babelgum’s New York office headed by Ethan Podell, President of Babelgum US.

A long time veteran of independent film, publishing and theInternet, Martesko-Fenster joins Babelgum after having most recently collaborated with filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, to launchthe pioneering 3-minute stories film publisher, CINELAN. “Babelgum’s film programming is mainly focused on people who are passionate about indie film”, said CEO Valerio Zingarelli, “and Karol’s passion for this material is just what we need to build a vibrant independent film community on the Babelgum platform." The people behind Babelgum have consistently championed independent programming and have established the public beta of Babelgum as a premier alternative online destination," commented Martesko-Fenster. "I am looking forward to working with the international team to position Babelgum as a market leader amongst the international independent filmmaking and emerging creative community."

I look forward to following Karol's work at Babelgum and telling you more about it here at Filmmaker.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/14/2008 12:39:00 AM

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CinemaTech's Scott Kirsner sent me an email alerting me to a really interesting project he's done with ITVS.

From his email:

Earlier this year, ITVS asked me to interview a group of documentary filmmakers who were working on the vanguard. Specifically, we wanted to focus on three things:

1. Opening up production in new ways, communicating and collaborating with the audience while a film is still in the works.

2. Distributing in new ways, through avenues like iTunes or downloads on a filmmaker's own Web site

3. Marketing and cultivating an audience for the work in new ways, and figuring out how to "carry" that audience forward from one project to the next.

Among the folks I spoke to were Tiffany Shlain ("The Tribe"), Katy Chevigny ("Election Day"), Hunter Weeks ("10 MPH" and "10 Yards"), Byron Hurt ("Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes"), and Curt Ellis ("King Corn"). Not everyone is a filmmaker who is funded or supported by ITVS... our sole criterion was to find folks who were experimenting.

The objective with these "Reports from the Field" was to try to share some of the best practices and tough lessons that this group of filmmakers have been learning.

There's also a list of 15 strategies that doc filmmakers ought to consider:

Scott is also one of the principal organizers of The Conversation, which is taking place in Berkeley this Friday and Saturday. I've blogged about this before, and there are no guarantees, but if you'd like to attend you can click this link and possibly snag a 15% discount for being a reader of this blog.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/14/2008 12:02:00 AM

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CineVegas programmer and Filmmaker contributor Mike Plante writes: "Not sure why the Off Camera festival in Krakow has gone so unnoticed in the US, maybe because it's first time and in an unknown city - but I went and it was great, all the filmmakers and jury had a blast, and they give out 100,000 Euros in their competition. Probably the biggest prize of any festival?"

Off Camera was off my radar as well, but I just checked out Mike's blog postings and they detail a spirited fest with a good, artistically attuned line-up. Here's his account of Holly Woodlawn at the Closing Night:

Then a moment to take the night up a notch. Director Paul Morrissey brought Warhol legend Holly Woodlawn to the stage in a wheelchair. She thanked the crowd and fest for a good time with the Warhol retrospective (they not only screened TRASH, but you got it on DVD with the official catalog – she also performed a live show “Tea with Holly” during the fest), then exclaimed the festival wanted her to sing. She made herself more comfortable without her jacket. The crowd went nuts as Lou Reed’s "Walk on the Wild Side," written for her, started to play. The giant screen behind her displayed stills of her career, as she sang along on the mic as the song played. When the crowd sang “do do-do do-do” at her command, you felt strange and special. Morrissey came back to get her to more big applause.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/13/2008 02:43:00 PM

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Not film related (not, that is, if you don't think the general economy has anything to do with film production, studio or independent), but congrats to Paul Krugman for his Nobel Prize in Economics, announced today. Today in the NY Times he asks whether British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has saved the world economy. That topic is also discussed by screenwriter Howard Rodman (Savage Grace) in his Huffington Post blog titled "Hank and the Swedish Model." (That's "Hank" as in "Paulson").

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/13/2008 12:42:00 PM

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Here's Stuart, Mickey Rourke, and the conclusion of this year's series.

Be back in a year for NYFF47.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/13/2008 10:12:00 AM

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This is the amount producers of David Fincher's upcoming film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will receive by cashing or selling off tax credits in Louisiana according to The New York Times today.

It's no secret that for the last five years or so many states have been welcoming films with enticing tax incentives to keep them from packing up their sets and heading up north to Canada. It worked, but with the current economic climate (and some shaddy dealings) many states are beginning to rethink their incentive plan.

An excerpt from the NYT piece:

As the number of movies made under these plans multiplied in recent years, the state money turned into a welcome rescue plan for Hollywood at a time when private investors were fleeing the movies. But the glamour business has not always been kind to those who pick up the costs, and states are moving to rein in their largess that has allowed producers to be reimbursed for all manner of expenditures, whether the salaries of stars, the rental of studio space or meals for the crew.

Louisiana, one of the most assertive players in the subsidy game, wound up covering that outsize piece of the nearly $167 million budget of Mr. Pitt’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — the state’s biggest movie payout to date — when producers for Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers qualified the coming movie, a special-effects drama, under an incentive that has since been tightened. Separately, Louisiana’s former film commissioner is set to be sentenced in January to as much as 15 years in federal prison for taking bribes to inflate film budgets (though not that of “Button”) and, hence, pay higher subsidies.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/12/2008 05:52:00 PM

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Producer Noah Harlan of 2.1 Films sent us news of his latest production: an iPhone app. Entitled the 2.1 Film Calculator, it "is a multi-purpose tool for filmmakers to aid in common tasks of film conversion and counting in pre-production, production and post-production."

From the site:

Film Calculator has three basic functions:

Length & Time Converter: This function allows the user quickly convert length to time and vice versa for a variety of film stocks and speeds. Choose from Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm or 70mm stocks and preset frames per second rates (12, 24, 25, 48) or enter your own. Then enter the time and you'll get the length or enter the length and you'll get the time.

Hard Drive Storage Calculator: Select a format and enter a time and this function will tell you how much hard drive storage space you need. Dozens of formats are included. Contact us to request more!

Script Supervisor's Assistant: This function provides a stopwatch that counts both time and length. Select the stock and frame rate and then operate this like a regular stopwatch. Saves scripty's from having to use a calculator at the end of each take. Always know exactly how much you've shot on a reel!

You can buy the Film Calculator for $2.99 by clicking to the iTunes store through Harlan's site.

I emailed Harlan and asked him to give me a bit more information on how he got into the software development biz. Here's what he wrote back:

My background is in computer programming (I have a degree in computer science) and I was really into the iPhone as a platform when it was first released. With the advent of the iTunes App store I realized there were some applications that would be really useful to a niche community like the film industry. I thought about the things that I frequently wish I could calculate on the fly - the types of things that I was googling time and time again - and decided to put them into one application. I reached out to my friend Charlie Pohl in Australia who has a design company called Conduct. I delivered them the concept, they worked up wireframes and the graphics and arranged a programmer in the UK to code the application. We communicated primarily via Skype and soon had a working version that is what you see now on iTunes. Our plan is to expand the number of video formats available and make the script supervisor functions more robust. It was a real learning process and in the end I did the final software compiling myself which, once you got the swing of it, wasn't too bad. It is available now for $2.99.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/12/2008 03:02:00 PM

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Lawrence Lessig has a new book coming out this week entitled Remix, published by Penguin Press. It's excerpted/adapted in the Wall Street Journal today; in the piece, Lessig argues that current copyright law is outdated and counterproduction, stifling both creativity and economic progress.

An excerpt:

The return of this "remix" culture could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history -- save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century -- where many create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to read a book, but spends scores of hours each week listening, or watching or creating, "media."

Yet our attention is not focused on these creators. It is focused instead upon "the pirates." We wage war against these "pirates"; we deploy extraordinary social and legal resources in the absolutely failed effort to get them to stop "sharing."

This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can't kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them "pirates." And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as "criminals." They begin to get used to the idea.

That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison.

What follows are five recommendations for changing copyright law.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/12/2008 10:41:00 AM

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Without consciously thinking about it, I regularly seem to link to Steven Klein's photography in this blog. In August, 2005, I loved the mini-cinema that was his Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie "domestic bliss" W magazine spread. Two months late I was arrested by his collaboration with Tom Ford, also for W. His latest W piece is titled "Love/Hate," and while it's not as epic it is still very much worth a view. Especially great is Klein's choice of subject: '90s supermodel icon Linda Evangelista, who plays some kind of tormented society queen in these shots.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/11/2008 08:12:00 PM

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Filmmaker's own Jamie Stuart is profiled in the Washington Post in the Sunday Arts and Living section by Ann Hornaday. It's one of her "Studio" features in which artists explain the significance of one image they've created. The image Jamie talks about is here, and following is Hornaday's text:

For the past four years, Jamie Stuart has made short Web films at the New York Film Festival (as well as Sundance and Toronto). Commissioned by Filmmaker magazine, and with a love for the quirky detail, he has brought a poet's eye to festival junkets, news conferences and sundry rituals of ballyhoo, creating off-the-cuff observational essays that vividly capture the nexus between art, absurdity and celebrity. (He once focused an entire piece on Sienna Miller's cocktail ring; in another he gave Amy Adams the camera and had her interview him.) But now Stuart, who hopes for a feature career, is ready for his own close-up. For his coverage of this year's New York Film Festival, which closes today, the 33-year-old director has created an ambitious fictional framing narrative, a "low-fi sci-fi" thriller in which he stars as a time-traveling mystery man.

But to read Jamie's thoughts on the image you'll have to click over to Ann's piece. And to catch up with the first three episodes of this year's series, click here. We'll be posting the final concluding episode of Jamie Stuart's NYFF46 this Monday morning.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/11/2008 07:42:00 PM

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Filmmaker John Magary has been writing over at the newly reinvigorated The Reeler, and he has a great interview up with director Lucrecia Martel, whose The Headless Woman is playing at the New York Film Festival. The interview comes with the drawing reprinted here, which Martel explains:

Undoubtedly, all of my films are organized in layers. For example, if I had to draw it, it wouldn’t be a straight line ... [drawing a single arcing line] ... Normally the structure of a film would be a single line: starts here, then this happens, then it evolves, then it ends. For me, it’s like this ... [drawing a wavy line] ... this layer is a storyline ... [draws two more wavy lines on top of the first, causing overlap] ... and these are more layers, more storylines ... so that at any given time within the film, you have, say, three layers. Let’s say that in one specific scene, there’s one layer in the foreground, and then a second layer in the background, and then a third layer even farther in the background. This then evolves, and in a following scene, the third layer, which was in the background originally, then pops up to the foreground. And what was in the foreground now gets switched to the background.

So ... [pointing to a single wavy line] ... say this storyline is “crime.” Maybe in the first scene, we’ll see a knife ... [writes “knife”] ... Then in the second scene, the “crime” storyline moves into the background, and we only hear the sound of the knife, or maybe deep in the frame we’ll see the shine of the knife’s blade. So, in all scenes, all layers are present, but in different degrees. For the “crime” storyline, we’ll start with a knife, then perhaps move to a dead body on the ground. “Crime” will be present throughout the film, but in different ways. Because I use this layer structure, I don’t feel the need to put things out there in a very demonstrative way from the start. By the time we get to a later scene, the presence of “crime” will be clearly felt.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/10/2008 03:44:00 PM

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It used to be that you could share a movie you've seen by loaning a friend a DVD or just recommending that he or she go see it in the theater. Now, however, you can share your viewing queue. For example, I haven't yet caught up to Mary Bronstein's Yeast, which I missed at SXSW last year. It's just been posted as an online premiere on Dailymotion, I'm planning to watch it this weekend, and I'm sharing it with you by embedding it here.

In an interview posted on the Linear Reflections blog, Mary talks about her impetus to make the film, citing as an inspiration Barbara Loden's Wanda, the amazing 1970 indie which is making something of a below-the-radar resurgence these days. (In the forthcoming Filmmaker, Kelly Reichardt talks about being influenced by the film as well when making her excellent new Wendy and Lucy).

From the interview:

The film Wanda by Barbara Loden is endlessly inspiring to me. The fact that she, an actress with no filmmaking experience, had the motivation and the determination to make that movie is indescribably inspiring to me, as a person in a similar situation. The film is beautifully shot and honestly acted. There are moments in that movie that are so raw that it is startling. I can watch Wanda a million times and find things in it that I hadn’t seen before. Most inspiring is that it is not a perfect movie. But, it works. Luckily, my filmmaker husband helped me a lot, unlike Loden’s filmmaker husband, Elia Kazan.

And here's the feature:

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/10/2008 12:56:00 PM

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Or, maybe, director Barry Levinson should have advised John McCain. In his blog at the Huffington Post, Levinson conjectures:

Over the years since directing Wag The Dog I have been asked whether Hollywood producers are directly involved in political campaigns. I hear rumors from time to time that they might be pulling the strings but no hard evidence. But my suspicion is, no Hollywood producer is involved in the McCain presidential run. I say this for a simple reason, it's badly orchestrated, lacks a narrative, and when they come across a good story idea they bungle it. An example: When McCain left the campaign trail to return to Washington to help solve the financial crisis it blew up in his face. It made him seem erratic, ineffectual, and worse of all, not true to his words. There's an old Hollywood axiom that says, "Don't put the leading man in a scene that makes him look bad."

What follows is Levinson's rewrite of McCain's scene. It's better.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/10/2008 12:43:00 PM

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Even more so than independent film, the porn industry has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to capitalizing on new trends in the entertainment industry. It capitalized on home video early on and more recently has been in the forefront of downloadable content, content for iPods and PSPs, and the segmentation of content into niche-targeted "clips." Now, it may be at the forefront of dealing with two challenges -- the threat from user-generated free concert and the atomization of our attention spans.

Like both Hollywood and independent film, porn is facing tough times. In fact, they may be having it tougher because there's a somewhat interchangeable quality to much filmed porn that makes the threat from free online content on filesharing or user-generated videos even more dire.

Matthew Garrahan in the Financial Times visits an L.A. porn set and talks to industry leaders about porn's current economic challenges and how the business is confronting them.

From the piece:

With demand falling, producers are reacting by making more films, spending less on each one and selling them for knockdown prices. “It’s great for consumers,” says Fishbein. “It’s never been better because if you want to buy and own DVDs, prices are low and there’s so much choice. There are 150 websites for every niche and thousands of titles.” Porn, he adds, is easily accessible on cable, in hotels, on DVD and on the internet. “But there’s too much product ... There are a thousand new titles released a month on average, compared with probably 250 [mainstream] DVDs. Margins are falling because people are selling fewer titles.” The industry, he says, has become a victim of technological change. Technology used to power the industry, he goes on; now it is eating it alive.

This is the great irony of the predicament that the porn industry finds itself in. In the past, pornographers were pioneers who paved the way for the mass adoption of new technologies. Their willingness to embrace the fledgling VHS video format in the early 1980s proved to a sceptical Hollywood that there was a market for a nascent home entertainment format. It was a similar story with DVD: porn led the way and Hollywood followed. And again with the internet: porn producers figured out how to make money from their online operations long before more mainstream entertainment companies got in on the act.

But the internet is a great leveller and porn now finds itself in a similar situation to the music and newspaper industries, which are both struggling to adapt to the online world. The profusion of free content online has shaken established business models in those industries and relentlessly eroded their profitability. Where the music industry used to make the bulk of its money from selling albums on CD, music fans now buy only the individual tracks that they want. Or often they download them free from an illegal file-sharing site. As in music, so in porn – why buy a whole movie if all you want is a clip?

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/09/2008 10:36:00 PM

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In addition to making a great film (and shouldn't that be enough?), Ballast director Lance Hammer has energized the growing DIY distribution community by turning down an industry deal and releasing his Sundance-winning feature himself. But it's one thing for all of us to applaud what Hammer has done; it's another to support him -- and the filmmakers who follow in his wake -- by going out and seeing his film. It's a great movie, and if you live in New York and haven't seen it, I recommend heading down to the Film Forum this weekend.

Below is the first of several blog posts Hammer will post to this site and to the blog at Film Independent.


Hello. This is the first of several correspondences that I will post from the field as Ballast makes it’s way into cinemas as an independently distributed film. Scott Macaulay and Josh Welsh asked me write candidly of this experience for the purpose of disseminating information that may be of use to other filmmakers who are facing the prospect, either by choice or necessity, of independent distribution. Because I found some courage in the realization that others could conceivably gain some valuable information in this case study I have agreed to post to this blog as regularly as possible. I will do my best to convey information that is actually useful. Some of this may take the form of facts or figures and some may be my personal opinions or analyses of noteworthy occurrences. I will endeavor to be transparent and forthcoming.

It is not news that the traditional mechanism for distribution of independent films is in tatters. This has been a difficult year. There is no other way to look at the number of jobs lost this year with the closure of yet another distribution company than with sadness. No matter what you or I think of the corporations in question, these are good people who are now struggling to pay rent. However, in typical independent spirit, independent filmmakers are already responding with innovation, with action, with a fight (there are many this year – something I’d like to talk about in a future post). This is heartening to me because it proves that while this is certainly a time of loss it is also a time of transformation and of opportunity. For those who, by choice or by necessity, have jumped from the ailing airliner without a parachute, a net is already beginning to materialize. At least that what it looks like to me at 30,000 feet, hurtling to the ground. I may be wrong. So, to be safe, this is the point where I must pause to make a plea:

IF YOU ARE IN NYC, IF YOU WANT TO PROTECT INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING FROM EXTINCTION, PLEASE COME TO FILM FORUM THIS WEEKEND TO SEE BALLAST. WORD OF MOUTH IS OUR TRUE POWER. IT WORKS. IF YOU ARE NOT IN NYC, PLEASE COME TO SEE THE FILM WHEN WE ROLL OUT ACROSS NORTH AMERICA IN OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER. PLEASE EMAIL YOUR FRIENDS TO DO THE SAME.

I will post again tomorrow to discuss the basis of my decision to pursue this path and the mechanics of our approach. I will discuss the team that has been assembled in detail.

Back to the cinema now.

Best,

Lance Hammer

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/09/2008 09:40:00 PM

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Congrats to two of Filmmaker's 2008 25 New Faces, John Magary and Dee Rees, for being selected as Sundance Institute 2008 Time Warner Storytelling Fellows. Congrats also to the third winner, playwright Kirsten Greenidge.

From the press release:

Sundance Institute and Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) announced today the selection of playwright Kirsten Greenidge and filmmakers John Magary and Dees Rees as the 2008 Time Warner Storytelling Fellows. Greenidge (with her project BOSSA NOVA) participated in the 2008 Sundance Theatre Lab. Magary (with his project BLOOD ABUNDANCE, OR THE HALF-LIFE OF ANTOINETTE) and Rees (with her project PARIAH) participated in the 2008 Sundance Directors Lab.

The Time Warner Storytelling Advancement Fund, established in 2007, provides substantial support over four years to help fund the development and celebration of independent artists across the Sundance Institute's Feature Film and Theatre Programs. Time Warner Storytelling Fellows, a talented group of Sundance film and theatre artists (up to 20 Fellows over a four-year period), receive grants to enable them to focus specifically on the advancement of the narrative and voice in their projects. Additionally, the Fellows receive a combination of year-round guidance, residency support, mentoring, work presentation and professional development.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/09/2008 07:59:00 PM

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Mad at humanity? Wipe it out. In Dark Realm Studios' online game Pandemic 2, you try to wipe out all of mankind by being perfect disease.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/09/2008 07:55:00 PM

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From Matt Dentler and Cinetic Rights Management comes news that Rick Linklater's seminal indie, Slacker, is now available for free viewing on Hulu.

When, in 1996, Filmmaker picked the 50 Most Important Independent Films, Slacker was number 10. Here's what we wrote:

Rick Linklater's Slacker was rejected by several domestic festivals, but then a Film Comment scribe spotted the film at the Seattle Film Festival and wrote a laudatory piece. And when a tape made its way to John Pierson, who forced distribution execs to travel to Linklater's hometown of Austin to attend the film's run at the local Dobie Theater, one of the brightest indie directorial careers of the '80s and '90s was born. Slacker, Linklater's second feature (his first was a little-seen 89-minute Super-8 epic titled It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books), was both a no-budget feature which inspired a score of Gen-X philosophizing and a film-savvy work informed by Linklater's days running a local film society. A La Ronde-ish jape in which the camera follows a succession of deadbeat characters, Slacker was capable of both entertaining and boring while always convincing the viewer that a potentially more engaging subject was just a scene or two away.

Kevin Smith, who is a big fan of the film, has a great post on the Hulu blog about discovering the film. Here's his lede:

August 2, 1991. The day of my 21st birthday. Most folks elect to cut loose and enjoy the freedom that turning 21 affords. I, however -- being a total loser -- opted, instead, to take the 50-mile drive up the Jersey Turnpike with my friend Vincent Pereira so we could peep a film reviewed, quite favorably, by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice. It was unheard of in my neck of the woods to drive that far to see a movie (let alone a movie with zero movie stars in it), but the promise of a scene centered on a Madonna pap smear of questionable authenticity was bait enough to lure us from the Jersey 'burbs into the wilds of Manhattan-after-dark.

Also, sections of Linklater's Slacker book are available for free preview on Google Books.

Check out the film and the lively comment thread, which seems to be all about the fear of a One World government and the observation that if you look closely 58 minutes in you'll see a Ron Paul poster.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/09/2008 01:26:00 PM

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Over in Director Interviews, Nick Dawson interviews Marianna Palka, writer/director of the Sundance Competition film Good Dick, which opens this weekend in Los Angeles at the NuArt and then rolls out to other cities around the country. (New York opens next weekend at the Sunshine.) In it she explains the title, saying, "It's like titling a poem or something. You have to title it, you can't just call it 'These People.'"

From the piece:

Filmmaker: The film tackles the subject of dislocation and the difficulty of connecting with people in L.A.

Palka: Right, and everybody's so isolated in their car. The way that he meets her is so similar to what people are going through every day here. People are walking on the street and they don't know where they're going, and I always wonder about those stories of the people who are walking. Because if you don't have a car in L.A., you're kind of lost. I think if I'd moved here and I didn't have the friends that I have, I'd have left.

Filmmaker: Where did your ideas for the characters in the film come from?

Palka: Well, I would go to Cinefile, the video shop which is a real place in Santa Monica, and I would rent videos from there. The guys in there would sit around, eat food and talk about films; they're kind of like librarians, but also keepers of the kingdom, in the sense that they just know everything about every film that was ever made, good and bad. They can talk to you about a Fellini movie the same way that they can talk to you about a kitsch, weird, bizarro film that nobody's ever seen except them and their friends, so I got the idea all of a sudden that it would be so funny if a girl came in and rented from their erotica section. I was thinking that would rock their world, so that's where the idea for the movie came from. And then I started to write and research the film and I started to rent erotica, because I was going, “What is this exactly? What kind of movies would she rent?”

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/08/2008 11:51:00 AM

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On the Filmmaker Video page you'll find the third part of Jamie Stuart's NYFF46. Appearances by Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood, Mike Leigh, Wong Kar-Wai, Christopher Doyle, Alexander Olch and Susan Meiselas.

If you haven't seen the first two episodes in this year's series, which you need to have seen to follow this one, you can find them here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/07/2008 01:30:00 PM

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Fresh DV has posted a podcast with filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain. Shlain is an organizer of and presenter at The Conversation, coming up next week (October 17 and 18) in Berkley, California. Below you can watch Shlain discuss her new project, "Connected: A Declaration of Independence." And as noted in my post below, The Conversation is offering a special discount to Filmmaker readers who would like to attend the event. Click on the links here for more info and to take advantage of the discount.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/07/2008 01:27:00 AM

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As noted on Jon Taplin's blog, one of his students, Russell Newman, with the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication, has "compiled a list of the main presidential candidates' views on hot-button political topics about media and technology such as media ownership/consolidation and network neutrality." Click on the link to compare the candidates' views on Net Neutrality, Media Ownership and Consolidation, and other topics.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/07/2008 01:21:00 AM

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New models, new forms of storytelling, convergence, how we will make money, how we will make art -- being an independent filmmaker or investor or producer right now is all about talking. Being part of the dialogue. Taking part in the conversation. Appropriately, then, Scott Kirsner of the CinemaTech blog, Ken Goldberg, Tiffany Shlain and Lance Weiler are co-hosting The Conversation/The Future of Cinema, Games and Online Video: New Tools/New Distribution/New Rules at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California on October 17 and 18th.

The official spam:

This October, pioneers at the forefront of change in cinema, video, games, media and technology are coming together to share ideas, insights, and innovations. Our focus is on new tools, new distribution channels, and new rules.
The format of the gathering will be experimental: rather than a traditional conference, short talks and demos, "fireside chats," and roundtables will spark a dynamic series of overlapping conversations.

All this will happen at UC Berkeley's renowned Pacific Film Archive theater over two days this October. It's a conversation that will bring together media-makers and technologists to share experiences, discuss, debate, and map out the future together.

You can check out the dense and really interesting schedule, which features people from Dreamworks SKG, JibJab, Lucasfilm, YouTube, ITVS and many other organizations. There will also be some faces familiar to Filmmaker readers, like Weiler, Arin Crumley, and M. Dot Strange. If you live in San Francisco or are able to make it there, I highly recommend that you register and attend. To help you out, Kirsner has very generously offered a special discount for Filmmaker readers. Click on the link and enroll before it sells out.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/06/2008 11:20:00 PM

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Back in 1995 Ted Hope wrote a full-throated and trenchant critique of the indie film business for Filmmaker that was entitled "Indie Film is Dead." It's either sad, funny, curious or fascinating (take your pick) that much of what Hope wrote 13 years ago still applies today. (If you haven't read this piece, I really recommend hitting the link and taking a look at it.)

I thought of this piece today while reading something on his Truly Free Film blog -- a report from a panel discussion at the Woodstock Film Festival.

First, from the old Filmmaker piece:

The film industry, like all others, mystifies by design. All industries create their own vernacular, keeping the have-nots clouded in confusion. Variety takes this talent to an art form. The neophyte needs a class in how to read the trades, let alone understand them. Where is the information when you need it? Whether it’s a rolodex or a financial chart, good luck in getting up-to-date info. The industry promotes a paranoia and close-to-the-chest confidentiality in all its’ parishioners, whispering that if you don’t leap in, you’ll be out forever.

The issue Ted identified back in the '90s -- the issue of a producer's ability to aggregate accurate information about the distribution of his film -- is an even bigger one now in the age of digital distribution. While internet and download options tease us with the promise of true transactional transparency, Ted's post reminds us that this is something we need to fight for in our contracts. As Lance Weiler and others have written, an independent filmmaker's ability to construct a database of his or her audience -- where in the country they live, who they are, etc. -- will be essential for anyone attempting to build their own more self-sufficient model. On the panel Ted spoke on,, the issue of transparency was brought up with regards to IFC and it's VOD distribution outlet and Cinetic Digital Rights Management with regards to the deals it's negotiating with filmmakers.

From Ted's post:

Neither company, to my knowledge and according to what was said on the panel, currently does anything to provide the content generator/creator/filmmaker with access to any of the data that their work generates. I hope that's now going to change, and what was said on that panel makes me believe it could.

Matt Dentler, Cinetic's Digi-maven, has expressed that Cinetic's DRM initiative is all about transparency for the filmmaker. John Sloss backed that on the panel by saying that he thought it made sense that future contracts include a provision mandating that buyers provide the digital data to the filmmakers. Not that Cinetic does that yet for its clients, but it can, and as John said, it will. Ryan Werner also replied to an earlier question that he felt that such information could be provided to the filmmakers if they asked for it (even if they did not contract for it).

Now its up to the filmmakers to demand that their lawyers craft such language. What will that be? What is the information we need? And how can we make sure that we are able to share it with each other? It would be great if an industry leader on the legal side really stepped up and showed their commitment to filmmakers' rights and drafted something that could become industry standard. It would be great if we could link to it now! Who's going to help?

If you are licensing your film for next to nothing, if you have decided to split your revenue with your sales agent, shouldn't you at the very least get the information on who your audience is, where they are located, when they are watching or purchasing, whatever. If you, the filmmaker, feel forced to make this kind of deal, shouldn't you at the very least be getting the data your work generates? As filmmakers, not only should you be asking for language from your lawyer, but demanding that your licensor, your distributor provide this. Do it and according to the leaders on the panel yesterday, they will listen and provide. I hope it is so.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/06/2008 10:15:00 AM

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Filmmaker 25 New Faces writer/director Antonio Campos is written up in the New York Times today by Dennis Lim.

About his new feature Afterschool, which plays at the New York Film Festival:

Afterschool, which Mr. Campos called a “present-day sci-fi film,” wrestles with a strange and relatively new fact of life that we have barely had time to process. We live in a world where, he said, “it feels like YouTube has been around forever and will always be around.”

For more from Campos, visit the Filmmaker Videos page, where our friends from Filmcatcher have produced for us a short interview with the director.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/05/2008 12:00:00 PM

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As you might have noticed from Scott's post yesterday, we really like Joshua Safdie's The Pleasure of Being Robbed. So we have no shame in letting you know again. Head over to our Filmmaker Videos section where Evan Louison and David Woolner of Coin-Op Pictures have sent us a promo they co-directed for the film. It opens today at the IFC Center in New York. But in all honesty, Robbed was one of our favorites from this year's fest circuit and hope it does well.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/03/2008 02:16:00 PM

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Over the last few months, the Workbook Project has been staging a number of open discussions around filmmaking. DIY DAYS are free conferences that bring together people from various sides of the industry. The objective is to discuss how to fund, create, distribute and sustain as filmmakers. So far stops have included LA, SF and NYC. This coming weekend DIY DAYS and From Here to Awesome come to Boston. For details on the free screenings and free day of workshops, case studies and roundtables visit www.diydays.com

All the content of the DIY DAYS events are released as open content that is free to embed and spread.

From DIY DAYS LA - "The Realities of DIY"
There’s been much discussion about the democratization of the tools but what’s really involved in taking your film from a concept to something an audience will pay to see? How can you fight your way through the clutter and what are the pitfalls to avoid when you decide to go it on your own?

Discussion Leader: Mark Stolaroff - panelists Arin Crumley, Ondi Timoner, Hunter Weeks and M dot Strange.

# posted by Lance Weiler @ 10/02/2008 10:18:00 PM

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Every week newsletter subscribers receive an email from us in which we link to key stories from the blog and the website from the previous seven days, highlight various pieces of news and festival deadlines, and in which I write a brief Editor's Letter. I tend to write stuff that I don't post elsewhere on the site or in the magazine, and it's free to join -- just subscribe by typing your email address in the box at the left.

I'm posting below the letter from this week's newsletter as I used it to plug two great movies opening this week. One, Ballast, you've heard about as it's gotten a lot of press. The equally worthy The Pleasure of Being Robbed, which was the Closing Night film at this year's Director's Fortnight in Cannes, you may not have. If you are in New York, please see both this weekend!


One of the things I’ve discussed quite a bit in this weekly newsletter in recent months is the changing landscape of independent film distribution. Like everyone, I’m interested in how digital downloads and VOD will not only change the way we watch movies but will also change what those movies are. A lot of my friends are purists and romantics about these notions, arguing that the theatrical experience must be preserved at all costs. To be somewhat contrarian I’ve taken to saying that I’d be perfectly happy if the aesthetic satisfaction of seeing a great movie could somehow arrive in my “in” box this morning.

But, having said all of that… I have seen some great movies in theaters recently. The one-two of the Toronto Film Festival and the New York Film Festival have given me one of the best viewing sprees I’ve had in a long time. Just in the last ten days I’ve seen The Class, Summer Hours, Wendy and Lucy and The Wrestler – all fantastic, and all made even more fantastic by having seen them in theaters. Yes, there’s the satisfaction of seeing a film as part of an audience, but for me what’s most important about the theatrical experience is its ability to focus our attention on the film while simultaneously granting us the private social space to allow our minds to wander while we do so.

So since I’m celebrating for the moment the old-fashioned notion of seeing movies in theaters, I’ll urge you to do so twice this weekend as two tremendously important debut films show up in theaters. The first is Lance Hammer’s Ballast, which you can read about in the capsule blurb below. The second is a film I also more-than-highly recommend, and for whatever reason it hasn’t gotten the press attention it deserves. Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed is a beautiful ode to the joys and irresponsibilities of youth, and it’s inflected with a freewheeling love of cinema that’s reminiscent of the early French New Wave. The film follows the absolutely riveting Eleonore Hendricks as she treats other people’s private property like dazzling baubles to pick up and play with in the toy store of modern life. But to dub her a shoplifter or thief is to miss the point of this exhilarating film, which is an indescribable blend of early Godard, Jacques Tati and the downtown New York cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The film also introduces to feature audiences Red Bucket Films, an imaginative and hardworking collective of young filmmakers who are building up an indispensable catalog of shorts, web videos and, now, features. (Safdie is about to begin his second full-length, which will this time star Frownland writer/director Ronnie Bronstein.)

At the moment, The Pleasure of Being Robbed is only booked in New York. It premieres at the IFC Center on Friday and is scheduled for a one-week run. I hope it will play elsewhere in the country soon after, and I understand it will appear on VOD at the end of the month. I give it my highest recommendation - don’t miss it.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/02/2008 06:53:00 PM

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Rex Crum at Marketwatch reports:

The Copyright Royalty Board on Thursday left unchanged the amount record companies will pay songwriters for the sale of CDs or digitally downloaded songs. The three-judge panel said the record companies will continue to pay 9.1 cents a song, while the National Music Publishers Association had sought an increase to 15 cents a song. Apple Inc. and other online music stores had opposed the potential price increase. Additionally the CRB set a payment rate of 24 cents each for songs sold as ringtones for cellphones.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/02/2008 05:38:00 PM

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Nikki Finke points to this Los Angeles Times piece that reveals that pro-movie biz breaks are included in the bail-out bill that just passed the Senate and which is headed for the house. Specifically, the bill extends the film production cost deduction included in the 2004 Jobs Creation Act to December, 2009, and it lifts the budget cap on eligible films. Now, instead of being limited to films budgeted at up to $15 million, the deduction is capped at $15 million for any single film no matter what the budget.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/02/2008 04:26:00 PM

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The Fortune article entitled "Digital Music Showdown" is linked all over the web today as it contains a seemingly bombshell-like piece of news: that Apple is threatening to shutter the iTunes music store over the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C.'s proposal to increase the royalty rates for digitally-sold music by six cents a song. The story is grabber, and it grabbed me -- I playfully lifted a page from Keith Olberman to protest what I called Apple's "preposterous piece of brinksmanship."

Of course, the devil is always in the details, and as a number of posters to the original thread pointed out, the situation is a bit more complicated. Detail Number One has to do with the original Fortune story, which CNET New discusses here:

Apple did indeed say that if it couldn't make a profit, it "most likely" will not continue to operate iTunes....

Fortune magazine published a bombshell of a story on Tuesday by reporting that Apple once threatened to close iTunes if forced to pay more for music royalties. A more careful reading of the statement from an Apple executive shows that it was more of a veiled threat. Regardless, it's possible Apple could shut down iTunes.

But is it likely? No.

First, the comment was made by Eddy Cue, vice president in charge of Apple's iTunes Store, in a written statement to the Copyright Royalty Board sometime before April 2007....

Cue's comment that the company has "repeatedly made clear" is something else to look at closely. I can't find another example where Apple has said it will shut down iTunes. Two music industry sources told me that at no time have iTunes' representatives made such a statement to the record labels--not in negotiations, not in passing, never.

So is the Fortune story just a case of yoking a year-plus-old statement to an obscure current administrative event to ramp up page hits? Maybe... and maybe not. Again, from Greg Sandoval's CNET piece:

I have to question why it has taken 18 months for Cue's comments to come to light, and why they're popping up just two days before the board is scheduled to rule on a possible rate hike?

Maybe it's coincidence. Or maybe Apple is firing a public-relations shot across the bow of the music industry and CRB. When it comes down to mass appeal, Apple holds all the cards. If word gets out that music publishers are trying to stick it to consumers, and Apple is fighting to keep prices down on their behalf, well, there's liable to be public backlash against the record industry. If this thing follows the normal course, there would be calls for boycotts, protests, and so on.

The reason this story is of interest to me -- aside from the fact that I am an Apple customer, am typing this on a Macbook and have a huge iTunes library -- is that issues of artist royalties in the digital space are big ones in the film world right now. (To the Anonymous poster on the thread below -- I used the word "artists," not "filmmakers," and am assuming that this readership understands how a royalty arrangement reached on behalf of musicians might be instructive for filmmakers to know about too.) Not being in the music business, I tend to think of "artist royalties" as the one thing that flows straight back to the artists. However, as this article on Free Advice points out, royalty payments are not so simple:

Before the artist/songwriter eventually receives their "reduced" US mechanical royalties, there are numerous withholdings by the recording company pursuant to the artist’s recording contract. There are frequently several clauses that give away "freebies" and eat away at the artist’s basic royalty rate (e.g., getting paid on less than 100% of units sold, receiving no royalties for "free goods" or promotional CDs, or for "non-controlled" songs, getting a lower royalty rate for CD’s, cassettes, and record club or budget records, giving free licenses for promotional music videos, etc).

So yes, this should be considered as much of a battle between the record companies and Apple, the Fortune story may be overblown, and, depending on how today's ruling goes, this could all be a moot point. I still think the Apple threat, whether it was yesterday or a year ago is kind of preposterous. The issue for Apple as a company is not only the pricing of its digital media but also the revenues generated by the sale of hardware designed to play that digital media. But if there's one thing that the Fortune article has done its bring to the forefront this whole discussion of digital royalties, like this argument proposed by Erick Schonfeld in the Washington Post:

On its face, it looks like Apple and the record companies are once again trying to stick it to the little guy (artists, song writers, and other music publishers). But in this case, Apple and the recording industry are actually right. Music on the Web is currently crippled by the fees set by the Copyright Royalty Board (not just for downloads, but for streaming Internet radio as well). As it is, Apple pays 70 cents from each track sold to the record companies (which then pay the music publishers their cut). There is not much margin left out of which to take that extra 6 cents, and charging $1.05 per track will have an impact on sales.

Moving to a revenue-sharing model makes a lot more economic sense. That way digital music sales has more breathing room to establish itself, and the artists will be able to grow with the industry. Eight percent of a bigger pie is better than nine percent of a smaller one. Rather than focus on how much each publisher gets per track, the Copyright Royalty Board should try to maximize the total amount of fees that publishers will get. A rev-share model is the way to go.

The Copyright Royalty Board rules today, and given the press attention this has gotten I'm sure there will be an Apple response. Stay tuned.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/02/2008 11:29:00 AM

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I'll steal a page from Keith Olberman as I link to this CNN article on Apple's threat to shut down its iTunes movie store over a dispute over artist royalty rates.

From the piece by Devin Leonard:

The Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C. is expected to rule Thursday on a request by the National Music Publishers' Association to increase royalty rates paid to its members on songs purchased from online music stores like iTunes. The publishers association wants rates raised from 9 cents to 15 cents a track - a 66% hike.

Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) declined to discuss the board's pending decision or its previous threat to shut down iTunes. But it adamantly opposes the publishers' request. In a statement submitted to the board last year, iTunes vice president Eddy Cue said Apple might close its download store rather than raise its 99 cents a song price or absorb the higher royalty costs.

"If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the ... royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss - which is no alternative at all," Cue wrote. "Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably."

This is a joke. Apple's bluff is a preposterous piece of brinksmanship that seeks to short circuit an attempt to boost digital royalties for artists while not acknowledging the massive hardware profits the company reaps from iPod sales. Go after the record companies (or match Amazon's .89 cent downloads and add the .06 to that) but don't draw a line on the sand right at the spot where artists might see more money.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/01/2008 11:26:00 PM

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