Cinekink co-founder and director Lisa Vandever emailed a short note with the press release announcing the film festival's 2005 awards, which were handed out last week at the conclusion of the fest's week-long run at the Anthology Film Archives. Last year, blogging the awards, I made a bit of fun out of Cinekink's p.r. bannering of a special tribute award to At Home at the End of the World while the more provocative titles were chronicled well out of the lede. So this year, Vandever, who is profiled here in the New York Press by J.R. Taylor, makes note that this year's release is focused more clearly on Cinekink's winners but explains why the festival still retains "some tip of the hat to Hollywood." She writes, "Figure we need some kind of notice of how they're representing kink -- and if we didn't reward the positive with an award, we'd just be standing up there every year bitching about Law and Order!

In Taylor's piece, Vandever elaborates, explaining that the festival is trying to carve out a niche devoted to provocative s/m and fetish-themed that can't properly be classified as porn. She says that the festival moved away this year from audience screenings of fetish videos to more developed features: "It's a different experience to watch a fetish video on the big screen for 80 minutes straight. Now we've gone back to narrative films -- hopefully ones that we can help get noticed by programmers in other festivals.... We don't have a category for Best Porn," explains Vandever, "because most porn doesn't have a narrative. Also, we'll often see filmmakers in our festival explaining why their films aren't porn. You can't easily classify these things."

This year Cinekink's Tribute Award went to Bill Condon's Kinsey with honorable mentions to Desperate Housewives, E!'s Dr. 90210, and Wedding Crashers, but the awards release highlights the festival's best narrative and doc films. Eric Werthman's Going Under, which stars Roger Rees, Geno Lechner and Miho Nakaido, won Best Narrative Feature, and Pornology New York (pictured), Michele Capozzi's "gritty paean to underground New York, circa 1970-85, and four of its most colorful protagonists -- Michele Capozzi, urban explorer and self-titled pornologist; Neville Chambers, founder of the infamous Fuck Factory; Lenny Waller, long-time front-man of the now-defunct Hellfire Club and renowned pornstar/mistress/shaman, Porsche Lynn," won Best Doc.

Cinekink will be travelling its award-winners this fall, with the first stop being the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco November 3 - 5. For a list of winners visit Cinekink's website.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/30/2005 08:09:00 PM Comments (0)

Via GreenCine comes this link to a good new blog by Repo Man director Alex Cox. Click over to it and you'll find Cox's commentary on a forthcoming DVD "special edition" of his cult classic, news on possible new projects, and a bunch of interesting observations, from fancy L.A. hotels ("Hotels like this terrify my because they're so fucking expensive. Even though my generous hosts paid for my bed and breakfast, every time you approach a door, some guy in a top hat opens it for you and you have to tip him ten bucks -- whether you want to go through the door or not!") to film recommendations ("Back on the plane to England I watch on my trusty laptop the DVD of a film called #33X Around the Sun. The director is John Hardwick, it was made last year. It's the story of a nameless man wandering through the night-time streets of a nameless city. Supposedly it's been compared to Rivette, but Eraserhead seems closer territory. Doesn't matter. The thing is, it's very, very good.") to discussions of the politics involved in obtaining U.K. funding and re-releasing U.S. studio films on DVD.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/30/2005 02:38:00 PM Comments (3)

There's a breaking story today about the leaking of an internal Wal-Mart memo that reveals the company's plans to put "unhealthy" workers off the payroll in favor of younger, more jockish types (read: teenagers), as well as reducing 401(k) benefits.

As that develops, I'm curious to see what dirt filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed) will turn up in his upcoming documentary about the retail behemoth. The DVD arrives on November 13, the same day that The Disinformation Company will release Greg Spott's Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, a behind-the-scenes companion book about the making of Greenwald's film, which the press release describes as "a nine-month journey filled with breakthrough moments and unexpected challenges. Given unlimited access to the filmmakers, Spotts reveals the new tactics and technologies that are revolutionizing political filmmaking, offering inspiration for aspiring filmmakers and activists."

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 10/26/2005 12:46:00 PM Comments (0)

IFP, Filmmaker's parent company, has just announced the nominations for the 2005 Gotham Awards, which will be held this year on November 30. They are:

Best Feature:
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - Directed by Ang Lee / Written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana / Produced by Diana Ossana and James Schamus
CAPOTE - Directed by Bennett Miller / Written by Dan Futterman / Produced by Caroline Baron, William Vince and Michael Ohoven
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE -Directed by David Cronenberg / Written by Josh Olson / Produced by Chris Bender and JC Spink
KEANE - Written and directed by Lodge Kerrigan / Produced by Andrew Fierberg
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW - Written and directed by Miranda July / Produced by Gina Kwon

Best Documentary
BALLET RUSSES - Directed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller / Written by Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine, Gary Weimberg and Celeste Schaefer Snyder / Produced by Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine, Robert Hawk and Douglas Blair Turnbaugh
ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM - Written and directed by Alex Gibney / Produced by Alex Gibney, Jason Kliot and Susan Motamed
GRIZZLY MAN - Directed by Werner Herzog / Produced by Erik Nelson
MURDERBALL - Directed by Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro / Produced by Jeffrey Mandel and Dana Adam Shapiro
WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD - Directed by Michael Almereyda / Produced by Michael Almereyda, Jesse Dylan and Anthony Katagas

Breakthrough Director
Miranda July for ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
Bennett Miller for CAPOTE
Phil Morrison for JUNEBUG
Andrew Wagner for THE TALENT GIVEN US
Alice Wu for SAVING FACE

Breakthrough Actor
Amy Adams as "Ashley" in JUNEBUG
Camilla Belle as "Rose Slavin" in THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as "Neil" in MYSTERIOUS SKIN
Terrence Howard as "DJay" in HUSTLE & FLOW
Damian Lewis as "William Keane" in KEANE

Best Ensemble Cast
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Linda Cardellini, Randy Quaid, Anna Faris
CRASH - Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, William Fichtner, Brendan Fraser, Terrence Dashon Howard, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Thandie Newton, Ryan Phillippe, Larenz Tate, Nona Gaye, Michael Pena
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK - David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Frank Langella
NINE LIVES - Kathy Baker, Amy Brenneman, Elpidia Carrillo, Glenn Close. Stephen Dillane, Dakota Fanning, William Fichtner, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Holly Hunter, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Ian McShane, Molly Parker, Mary Kay Place, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Aidan Quinn, Miguel Sandoval, Amanda Seyfried, Sissy Spacek, Robin Wright Penn
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE - Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 10/25/2005 11:38:00 AM Comments (1)

Really is there anything sadder than watching the Right Wing eat its young ? The Bradblog announced the production of a documentary The Gospel of Ann which intends to pull apart that warrior of the Right Wing Ann Coulter from her blond roots on down. The organization Citizens for Principled Conservatism (CPC) -- that is producing the piece -- seeks to expose those who "use the tenets of the true Conservative Movement merely for cynical, opportunistic political gain." Ann Coulter -- Cynical? Opportunistic? Say it ain't so Ann.

# posted by Peter Bowen @ 10/24/2005 04:34:00 PM Comments (0)

Within the licentious world of popular entertainment, one film that has been hailed by folks of all stripes is March of the Penguins. However. for some the film is more than a dramatically shot nature documentary. The right has hailed the film as a parable of traditional values as well as an argument for "intelligent design," the anti-evolution theory du jour.

So, here's director Luc Jacquet throwing some cold water on the Michael Medveds of the world in the Times Online:

"'If you want an example of monogamy, penguins are not a good choice,' Luc Jacquet told The Times. 'The divorce rate in emperor penguins is 80 to 90 per cent each year,' he said. 'After they see the chick is OK, most of them divorce. They change every year.'... 'For me there is no doubt about evolution. I am a scientist. The intelligent design theory is a step back to the thinking of 300 years ago. My film is not supposed to be interpreted in this way. Some scientists I know find the film interesting because it can be a good argument against intelligent design. People should not jump on these bandwagons.'"

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/23/2005 02:28:00 PM Comments (1)

I was reading GreenCine Daily and I noticed this link to a column at Kirkus reviews entitled "Adapt This," which highlights hot film potential material from the month's releases. Clicking to the column, I was happy to see that among this month's four selections is Under the Bridge, the second book from former Filmmaker alumni Rebecca Godfrey. Here's what Kirkus's Chris Barsanti had to say about the book:

"Although it initially has the feel of a story normally captured on film for, at best, a 15-minute piece in one of the weekly newsmagazine shows, Rebecca Godfrey's haunting, true-life murder story Under the Bridge (Simon & Schuster, $24) is phenomenal cinematic raw material. The setting couldn't be more idyllic -- the quiet British Columbia suburb of View Royal -- and the crime hardly more horrific, a teenage girl murdered by a group of her peers after a series of inexorably escalating misunderstandings culminates in a shocking confrontation and stranger-than--iction cover-up. The rainy, lo-fi setting could work as a corrective to the standard high-octane views of transgressing adolescents, and there's an organic, fly-on-the-wall quality to the material that recalls Larry Clark's Kids but without the exploitation. But finally, it's the cast of characters that makes this story as vivid as it is, ranging from copycatting social outcasts to gentle-seeming yet ultimately vicious gangster wannabes and coddled borderline sociopaths. These are normal-appearing kids, for the most part, yet morally crippled by their inability or refusal to imagine consequences or even a day after tomorrow."

Godfrey's film smarts were proved long ago on the Filmmaker staff, and her power as a writer was proven by her debut novel, The Torn Skirt. The new book sounds great, and I hope that Barsanti's prediction proves correct and we'll see if in the theaters as well as the bookstores.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/17/2005 10:00:00 PM Comments (2)

Whether you're on the left or the right, the most suspenseful narrative playing out right now is the Fitzgerald investigation into the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson case. And one of the most passionate (and righteously sarcastic) bloggers covering this issue is movie producer Jane Hamsher, best known for her partnership with Don Murphy and producing of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Now based in Oregon and a contributer to the firedoglake blog, Hamsher brings the same punk sensibility to her political reporting as she did to her movie producing.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/15/2005 01:22:00 AM Comments (0)

Billy Friedkin's Sorcerer is probably best known -- thanks to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls -- as one of the movies whose production excesses helped put the nail in the coffin of the last great Golden Age in American filmmaking. I happen to love the film, especially Tangerine Dream's haunting original score. Then I came across this post on Subterranean Cinema. Apparently, jazz keyboardist Keith Jarret recorded some music for the movie on an 18th century organ that was never included on the film's original soundtrack. Thankfully, the folks at Subterranean uploaded an MP3. Enjoy.

Incidentally, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear -- the French classic on which Sorcerer was based -- was just released on DVD by Criterion. Essential viewing.

For more Tangerine Dream action: Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, currently in theaters, pays clever homage to the '80s with its lifting of the Risky Business theme.

(Thanks Paul.)

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 10/14/2005 12:02:00 PM Comments (2)

Just below I linked to The Hollywood Reporter about the movie industry's slow awakening to the impact on the Justice Department's 2257 regulations on both studio and independent production. There's a bunch of articles on the web this morning about H.R. 3132, the Children's Safety Act, which passed the House and, if it gets through the Judiciary Committee and passes the Senate, will expand the onerous recordkeeping requirements of the 2257 in alarming ways. A number of the articles are on legal and cyber blogs. Here's a piece on BoingBoing that details the consequences, and it includes PDF links to the relevant Pence Amendment.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/13/2005 12:45:00 PM Comments (0)

When designer Tom Ford left Gucci a while back, he seemed to sink into a mid-life crisis with a series or morosely reflective interviews and then talked about going into the film business, becoming a director. It's been a couple of years and no film is on the horizon, but Ford has just teamed with photographer Steven Klein, whose recent photos consciously draw upon the visual tropes of film narrative, to take off his clothes and do a W portfolio timed around the release of a makeup line for Estee Lauder.

Style.com has a preview in which Ford, who, from the photos seems to have been hanging out with David Cronenberg and the members of Kraftwerk, discusses his vision of today's society:

"We've become plastic, objectifying the human body. We're no longer animals. Women and men are so waxed and polished and buffed and shined up and manipulated. We don't age. We've got these weird lips that don't really look like lips. We've started to lose touch with what a real breast looks like; we've started to lose the animal side of our nature. It's time to somehow pull it back to something more human. We treat women almost like cars. It's happened over the last 25 years. When we were kids, it was lift and separate. Now, of course, Victoria's Secret pushes it all together.

W: You've always said that looking good requires work -- polish and a certain fakeness.

TF: But I've also always talked about why the Seventies were such an important moment to me -- because there was a relaxed quality; bodies looked real. I think it had to do with the fact that back then you really could have sex. We used to watch sitcoms where people had one-night stands all the time, and we grew up thinking that that was okay. Today we have a more perverse look at sexuality, but stylized and almost fake. If you watch a porn film today versus a porn film from the Seventies, there's something much sexier about the Seventies film because it's more natural. Today it's so stylized, sort of cartoonlike. But we're in a cartoonlike moment. I mean, think of Angelina Jolie's face. It looks like Lara Croft. She is exaggerated. Her lips are exaggerated. Our beauty standard today is cartoonlike, and it's artificial. So the idea of all these dolls [in the shoot], we're living in a world where there are humans who actually are just dolls. And the boys, are they dolls or are they human? They are in fact human, yet there are three of them so they're all the same and they look like dolls. The fact is that men are moving toward the same plastic beauty. And it's about me living in this world."

Lest you think Ford is turning into some kind of cyber-era moralist, he later discusses "good plastic surgery," which is basically about, well, good work:

"I'd like to see something more natural. I'm all for Botox, collagen, cosmetic surgery. But I've been wondering, Why can we send a man to the moon but we can't make a breast look real? Then I encountered a girl the other day who had implants that really looked natural. She had nursed and her breasts changed, so she had it done, and her breasts looked just so amazing and so real. I'm all for manipulation to a certain extent, but I think it's very important not to deny the fact that we are animals. We need to look human."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/13/2005 01:13:00 AM Comments (1)

Ray Pride posted this link to the new videoblog by the makers of the indie film Four-Eyed Monsters (which, given how hard I've been trying to get a screener DVD from the filmmakers, must be the hardest-to-see film of all this year's hard-to-see pics without distribution).

While I wait... and wait for a screener, I'll content myself with the videoblog, the first clip of which is a totally charming ode to being a broke filmmaker without a deal.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/13/2005 12:11:00 AM Comments (0)

... about the article by Stephen Beachy in this week's New York which argues that author and sometime Filmmaker contributor J.T. Leroy is actually not a young former teen hustler turned novelist but rather a 39-year-old mother from Brooklyn. To see what Leroy himself might have to say about the piece, I clicked over to his site and found the photograph, at right, on his homepage with the caption "The J.T. Leroy's hard at work on the next novel." An admission of truth or an ironic riposte? You decide...

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/12/2005 08:46:00 PM Comments (0)

Back in July I posted this blog about the Federal Government's new "2257" regulations and wondered why the independent film community, which can mobilize armies at the withdrawal of promotional screeners, has had so little to say about this bill which, while targeting the adult entertainment industry, looks to spread quite a bit of collateral damage. A week later I posted again after some readers added their own comments to the end of my original article. Now, today, finally, I read in The Hollywood Reporter a piece by Brooks Bollek which describes a 'buried clause" in the regulation that could affect studio and independent movies.

For anyone who has looked at this regulation, its implications on non-adult media have been pretty clear from the outset, and I'm surprised it's taken so long for an industry publication to note that many mainstream producers are probably unwittingly violating this bill right now. For those in the dark, the rule requires producers of films containing sex scenes -- even, possibly, scenes in which the actors are clothed -- to adhere to absurdly cumbersome recordkeeping requirements. The bill seems clearly an attempt to do with rules and regulations what courts reviewing obscenity cases have been unwilling to do.

From the article, which quotes unnamed Hollywood execs:

"The provision, written by Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., could have ramifications beyond simply requiring someone to ensure that the names and ages of actors who partake in pretend lovemaking as compliance with Section 2257 in effect defines a movie or TV show as a pornographic work under federal law. Industry sources say the provision was included in the bill at the behest of the Justice Department. Calls to Pence's office and the Justice Department went unreturned Tuesday.

Industry executives worry that the provision, which is retroactive to 1995, will have a chilling effect on filmmakers. Faced with the choice of filing a 2257 certificate or editing out a scene, a filmmaker might decide it's not worth getting entangled with the federal government and let the scene fall to the cutting-room floor, the executives said.

"From the creative side of the street, there's concern that the government of federal law enforcement would get involved in what you were doing," one industry source said. 'At some point, people would be faced with the decision: Do I include the scene and register a 2257 or leave it out?

"The 2257 provision also has ramifications beyond the artistic as a federal tax provision designed to stem runaway production is unavailable to anyone required to register a 2257. Many state incentives designed to entice filmmakers to shoot on location also contain similar language."

Digest that last bit -- make a movie with even simulated sex and become ineligible for the film tax deduction contained with the Federal Jobs Creation Act.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/12/2005 08:12:00 PM Comments (17)

I haven't been posting much recently due to an overall work crunch -- the putting to bed of the new Fall issue of Filmmaker, and two new films my company is producing both going into production. Hopefully I'll get back into the blogging swing of things in the next few days, but I couldn't help posting this piece in Variety about Paul Dinello's film Strangers with Candy. According to the trade, Warner Independent is not releasing the film, which was slated to open October 21, "out of concern that the producers didn't secure all the needed rights, including for such items as posters and props."

As a producer, arguing with directors (usually first-timers) about clearances is something I do all the time, with directors being angry that they can't just "show the world." Stories like this are my ammunition to enforce the accepted rules of rights and clearances within the industry. Of course, studios have been known to nitpick clearances in order to drop films they feel won't perform or that they overpaid for. I have no idea whether that's the case here or not, so hopefully soon they'll be word on what items of set dressing are preventing Strangers with Candy from hitting the theaters.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/11/2005 09:54:00 AM Comments (0)