We at Filmmaker are big fans of Errol Morris, who we have interviewed numerous times and have placed on our cover. Morris is a very successful commercials director (that's part of what enables his ambitious doc work), and we've linked to some of his TV spots before too. So, in the interests of completeness, we embed his latest, a commercial directed with his customary real-person adeptness for Depends.

The folks at AdGrabber, who picked this up, seem to be perplexed by Morris's approach, though. "Many brands use analogies to help explain their product features and benefits. Even makers of diapers for grownups. But seriously, WTF? Touting the new line of Depends by comparing the fact they're different to the fact men drive differently than women and commentary on who rules the world; men or women?"


Find more videos like this on AdGabber

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/31/2009 05:11:00 PM Comments (1)

Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir took home four awards including Outstanding Achievement in Direction at last night's Cinema Eye Honors, which highlight the year's achievements in non-fiction. Handed out by the event's creators -- filmmaker AJ Schnack and Thom Powers, documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival -- at the Times Center in the New York Times building, James Marsh's Oscar winning doc Man on Wire was awarded the evening's big award, Outstanding Achievement in Non-Fiction, along with two other prizes. Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze won the Debut Feature award as well as Audience Choice.

The full list of winners are below.


Outstanding Achievement in Non-Fiction Feature Filmmaking
MAN ON WIRE
directed by James Marsh; produced by Simon Chinn

Outstanding Achievement in Direction
Ari Folman for WALTZ WITH BASHIR

Outstanding Achievement in Production
Simon Chinn for MAN ON WIRE

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography
Peter Zeitlinger for ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Outstanding Achievement in Editing
Jinx Godfrey for MAN ON WIRE

Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Animation
Yoni Goldman & David Polonsky for WALTZ WITH BASHIR

Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition
Max Richter for WALTZ WITH BASHIR

Outstanding Achievement in International Feature
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
directed by Ari Folman; produced by Ari Folman, Serge Lalou, Gerhard
Meixner, Yael Nahlieli & Roman Paul

Outstanding Achievement in Debut Feature
UP THE YANGTZE
directed by Yung Chang

Audience Choice Award
UP THE YANGTZE
directed by Yung Chang

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3/30/2009 11:39:00 AM Comments (1)

An additional $350 million for the New York State Film Production Tax Credit program has been found to continue supporting the state's popular film and TV tax incentives. The funds were announced as part of the budget that was proposed today; however, given that last year the state issued $460 million in film and TV tax incentives and that this new $350 million is capped, it's clearly a stopgap motion for the program. The lack of long-term visibility means that TV shows in particular will be wary of setting up shop in New York for fear that the program will not be extended in future years. George Szalai in The Hollywood Reporter has the details, and he quotes John Johnston from the New York Production Alliance:

Johnston and [Silvercup's Stuart] Suna said the industry will continue to push for legislation outside the budget bill that would provide unlimited funding for the production incentives.

"We certainly don't want to wait until next year's budget to talk about this," Johnston said. "This is a short-term fix, not a long-term solution."

Industry folks point out that the incentives get paid out long after the state gets additional tax revenue from productions, which also employ more people. This means the tax credits are a boon for the state at a time of declining tax revenue and gaping budget holes due to the recession.

The Ernst & Young report found that for 2007, New York's incentives program created and retained 7,031 industry jobs in New York, or 19,512 when including other sectors. The study also found that production credits amounting to $184 million for the year led to added state taxes of $209 million. For 2004-10, the study predicted $2 billion in added revenue from incentive-related economic activity in the state.

"This is an economic engine, but it needs fuel," Johnston said.

Everyone who lobbied or called in support of the program should consider this at least a partial victory. We'll keep you informed as to the next round of lobbying.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/30/2009 11:37:00 AM Comments (1)

William Grimes in the New York Times reports that Steven Bach, former U.A. studio executive and author of Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate has died of cancer at the age of 70. As an exec he was associated with such films as Annie Hall, Cutter and Bone, and True Confessions, but he is perhaps best remembered for Final Cut. Says critic David Thomson in the Times obit: "It is the best book ever written about the making of a movie. It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. It’s all the more remarkable because he’s one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.”

I'll second Thomson's recommendation. It is the best book about studio moviemaking that I've read, possibly because failures are more illuminating than successes, but also because the wrenching experience of making Heaven's Gate cast the egos, emotions and machinations of its participants in a kind of bas-relief that Bach able captures in his writing. Even though the age of this kind of cinematic folly is largely over, I think because of its insights into the logic of production decisionmaking this book is a worthy read for anyone making studio movies.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/29/2009 10:19:00 PM Comments (0)

Mark Cuban asks on his blog the question, "Are Tweets Copyrighted?" Wondering whether republishing a tweet violates copyright law, Cuban puts a legal spin on something that I wondered when I joined the service recently. In fact, the first day I was on I tweeted (?) the following: "Wondering: is Twitter quotable outside the Twitterverse? Or is that bad nettiquette?" The response I got was that tweets are public speech and yes, people can quote them. Funnily, this made sense to me even though I do think copyright law generally prevents people from quoting in full. In other words, I viewed Twitter's 140 characters as more a public utterance than a piece of writing which is, after all, contradictory because tweets are text.

In Cuban's post, he writes:

I got to thinking about this when I tweeted about an NBA game. I tweeted to the people who follow me. While I never asked that they not distribute it to other tweeters, i did not give anyone permission to republish my tweets in a commercial newspaper, magazine or website.

So when an ESPN.com or any other outlet republishes a tweet, have they violated copyright law ?

Is twittering the process of publishing in 140 characters or less, or is it a private communications to those that follow you ? Even if you dont block outsiders from seeing it ?

So far, the comments that have appeared on his blog seem to take the "copyrighted speech" position. I'd be curious to hear what everyone here thinks. Oh yeah, and for Cuban, this isn't just a theoretical discussion.

As Sports Illustrated explains:

The NBA slapped Mavericks owner Mark Cuban with a $25,000 fine Sunday for publicly criticizing the officials after Denver's 103-101 win over Dallas.

Cuban used Twitter to complain after Friday's game that Denver's J.R. Smith was not called for coming off the bench to taunt Antoine Wright after he missed a shot near the Nuggets bench.

Cuban said in another posting Sunday that he "can't say no one makes money from twitter now. the nba does."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/29/2009 08:45:00 PM Comments (2)

At GreenCine Aaron Hillis spies a freelance opportunity for some kind of film critic and relays this ad on Craigslist:

Hi,

We just finished a film and need to buy a one sentence quote from someone who calls himself a film critic. Thanks.

Hillis writes:

Now, in my relatively brief tenure as a full-time journalist, I've had my share of unprofessional favors asked of me, including one that permanently estranged a years-long camaraderie because I refused to watch a friend-of-a-friend's movie with the explicit purpose of giving a pullquote for their forthcoming DVD. Yet while I laugh at the above posting because it was clearly instigated by a filmmaker who doesn't understand the professional position of a critic, I half-worry that an unscrupulous somebody might just take that person up on the offer. On the other hand, perhaps it's a positive sign for critics, that our opinions still hold a monetary value.

And re that Craigslist post, please not that it is NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests!

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/29/2009 03:27:00 PM Comments (3)

Here's the third of our guest blogs from Sundance Lab-supported filmmaker Gayle Ferraro, who is blogging from the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.

Day 3

No sleeping in after the late night, this is the last day and a short day at the forum so we have to get moving. The morning sessions were again a great offering. I opted for one called “We are the government and we are here to help,” which had a funny ring to it even though I had no real idea what it would be about. At the session, Barry Coleman from Riders for Health, whose work is delivery of health care services with motorcycles, said of his approach when entering a new village, “You look for the woman in glasses and she probably does all the work.” Something about that was not lost on the women in the room.

Our Sundance Team regrouped for a debrief lunch on our own. We gave feedback on our experiences — all very positive and how we thought it could be improved in future years. We walked around Oxford center doing our last minute obligatory gift shopping, stopping for tea at a pastry shop (like we needed yet another meal...) and just enjoyed the time off for a few hours before the final night tapas in town with our Skoll hosts.

As I head out in the morning for NYC I have to reflect on what a wonderful experience this had been for me — meeting the other filmmakers and spending time with them; the Sundance Institute and the detailed care they took of us; the Skoll Foundation and the fascinating organization pushing for unusual and meaningful changes in so many ways; and the countless impressive social entrepreneurs I spoke with. At this point I have little else except my admiration and appreciation of some very dedicated, talented and future-thinking people. Thanks for bringing me along.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/28/2009 07:39:00 PM Comments (0)

Just a quick note to let the filmmakers in our readership know that the IFP Narrative Lab, which I am leading along with Gretchen McGowan, has a deadline of April 17. The lab is a five-day intensive series of workshops, roundtables and presentations for filmmakers whose works are at the rough cut stage and who are seeking guidance about editing and reaching picture lock, sound design, festival strategy, distribution and legal issues, and DIY releasing strategies. It takes place in New York June 8 - 12. A number of past participants have blogged about their experience over at The Workbook Project, and you can see a short video that gives you a taste of the labs here.

Obviously I'm biased because I'm a part of it, but I think this is a great program. It's open to first-time U.S. filmmakers who have complete their principal photography. Further criteria can be found at this link, and the application can be downloaded at the site above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/28/2009 11:59:00 AM Comments (0)

I previously blogged Clay Shirkey's "Newspaper and Thinking the Unthinkable", which is an essential article about the media business in this time of transition. Via Keeyool.com I just came across this short interview with Shirkey that is also tremendously thought provoking not just for media outlets and companies but for anyone in the content business.

Key quotes:

"The transition is going to go to the people who have the lowest cost of experimentation for the highest value."

"Digital lowers the cost of failure."

"The heightened ability to experiment means that you have to embrace the idea that instead of reducing the likelihood of failure your organization is going to reduce the cost of failure and fail forward fast."

See it below.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/28/2009 11:31:00 AM Comments (0)

Thanks to Jamie Stuart for the heads up about the trailer for After Last Season, which is in the early stages of going viral by virtue of its genuine oddness. Michael Tully at his Indiewire blog writes, "It’s like Todd Haynes lost his mind after Safe and was hired to direct a series of cable access sci-fi infomercials," while David Lowery writes, "I've watched the trailer about ten times now, and have yet to tire of it. It is so beyond logic in its construction that it essentially reinvents itself anew upon each viewing." In addition to being featured on the film's own website, the trailer also appears on Apple's trailer page.

Jamie at Knox Road says he's spoken to the film's director, Mark Region, and the picture, which many doubt is an actual feature film, is apparently for real and slated for a June 5 release. Region also says in the interview that the film's budget is $5 million.

From Knox Road:

[Region] said the trailer for the movie can be misleading.

“It’s pretty much what you see in the trailer, but more than that,” said Region. “It’s different.”

Although Apple Trailers labeled the film a comedy, Region said it’s a mistake. He said the movie is more like a Hitchcock film, dark and mysterious.

“The movie is just a regular mystery… with special effects and computer effects,” he said.

The special effects, which appear in the trailer, cost a big part of the movie’s $5 million budget said Region. He said most of the money came from local investors, not from Hollywood.

He said he wanted to keep the set simple and hired local actors to keep the the film low-budget.

“It took a lot of effort, we tried to do our best,” he said.

The trailer for After Last Season is below. And I agree with Lowery — this demands multiple viewings.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/27/2009 10:05:00 PM Comments (17)

Here's the second of our guest blogs from Sundance Lab-supported filmmaker Gayle Ferraro, who is blogging from the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.

Day 2

The days keep getting better and I am feeling like I have known my fellow filmmakers and the Sundance folks for a long time. It is funny how that happens before you know it. We filmmakers all have code names, an affectionate shorthand, for the people we have all spoken with — the rat guy, the French guy with the cell phones, the water guys….

For the first part of the day I was a bit distracted trying to coordinate an important shoot in Queens, New York for the film while participating in the Forum. The shoot came up last minute and puts closure on a central storyline so it had to be covered.

Upon arrival at the forum's day two I joined Cara Mertes (Director, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program) at a press announcement for the Sundance/Skoll Stories of Change as a Grantee. I spoke a few minutes about my film on Dr. Yunus and the Grameen start-up in Queens and was then off to attend my first session: "Winning Hearts and Minds, The power of a well told story." It was packed — no surprise given the speakers, Susan Collin Marks (Sr. VP of Search for Common Ground), Amitabha Sadangi (CEO Intl Development Enterprises- India) and Greg Barker, (Director, Silverbridge Productions). Reading their bios is impressive and the presentations hit it home with everyone.

From there I hit another two sessions in the afternoon, "Power to the People" and then "Expansion Finance For Social Impact." For sure this sounds deadly dry, but trust me it was fascinating if you like to know who is doing what in the world and how it is working. These are committed people who are really smart and know a lot if you get into listening. The audience questions are really right-on and everyone rightly so wants publicity for their projects.

At the break I tried to hide (brain turning to mush) but I found myself with Heidi Khun (Roots of Peace) who worked with Yunus ten years ago so we have an easy connection. As we are having tea she is pulling together a half dozen women who are all working in Afghanistan doing something or other to put together a collation to meet with Obama. These are powerhouse women and they are combining forces.

The Awards Ceremony followed with the nine awardees — each receiving grants of around one million cool dollars to further their vision of a social enterprise they have brought into creation. Jeff Skoll and Sally Osberg (President and CEO, Skoll Foundation) presented the awards to the grateful recipients. Here is the thing: you may think that these guys/gals just showed up last year or the year before and hit it out of the part. No, everyone I spoke with has been hard at it for 15 years or more — except Kiva brainchild, Matt Flannery, who after three years managed to get a grant and raised $100M on the microcredit website.

Then it was a reception, dinner and the party — I had been storing up the sleep hours so that I could splurge. We started the evening by entering a packed reception hall at the University Examination Hall. We (Sundance Execs and filmmakers) took one look at the crowd and opted to head directly to the Brasserie to get a start on our drinking and conversing. The venue shifted at midnight to the third floor party at the Castle (Malmaison) where it probably went on most of the night but I don’t know as my fellow filmmakers and I backed as inconspicuously as possible into the elevator and pounced into a waiting cab to get some necessary shut-eye.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/27/2009 09:52:00 PM Comments (0)

Here's the second of our guest blogs from Sundance Lab-supported filmmaker Gayle Ferraro, who is blogging from the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.


Day 1

The first day was amazing. Our opening Sundance filmmaker Meet and Greet session, which was more like a panel presentation, went very well; it was a great opportunity to learn about my fellow filmmakers and find out where their game is at. Sundance really picked a seasoned group of wonderful people with Joe Berlinger, who talked about Crude; Robert Kenner, who just premiered Food, Inc.; Greg Barker, who talked about his latest, Sergio; and Jon Alpert, who rounded out the team with an extraordinary collection of his work from the past 20 years, beginning and ending with his video bus headed for Denmark. The conversations we are having within the film team seem to be a continuous dialogue where one film blends into another, and we are "jumping" as the ideas are coming to each of us so quickly. It feels like nothing else exists.

When it was my turn to speak I told the audience that they should pursue whatever publicity and filmmaking ideas that make sense to them because, well, you never know. I used my own experience as an example — having made 16 Decisions in Bangladesh 10 years ago I am now working again with Dr. Muhammad Yunus shooting a feature doc on his work.

After the Meet and Greet, all us filmmakers were surrounded by social entrepreneurs who had incredible projects they wanted to share. This experience was really like being in a candy store — fabulous material for film and willing participants! A group of three men from "Friends of the Earth - Middle East" approached me and announced they had won the top honor at the World Forum for their peacekeeping through water management on the river Jordan. The delegates were from Israel, Jordan, and Palestine and wanted to discuss how this tale could be told in a film. I had an African refugee cell phone compay, the founder of Kiva, children who make music from garbage and numerous others waiting to pitch.... all interesting and exciting. A filmmaker's dream for sure.

From there we attended the opening forum at the Sheldonian where Jeff Skoll addressed the Forum. He said that we are looking at shifting global power dynamics and discussed the implications of these changes. He was followed by a panel moderated by PBS's Ray Suarez with Mary Robinson, Daniel Lubetzky (founder of Peaceworks) and Kailash Satyarthi, founder of the successful Global March Against Child Labor, whose work exemplified how people can make the difference. Closing the Opening Plenary was Kenneth Brecher, Executive Director of the Sundance Institute who himself had graduated in the "Middle Ages" from Oxford. His story of the persecuted Russian Poet Anna Akhamatova who received an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1965 because of her determination and passion to speak freely brought down the house.

I had forgotten how absolutely stunning the colleges are until I went to dinner at Keble College later that evening — the architecture, the vastness and organization of the space, the detail, all of it utterly extraordinary in what it represents.... I need to make time to meander a bit so as not to miss some of the sweetness this land has to offer.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/27/2009 12:45:00 AM Comments (0)

We are still putting up our SXSW features, and the latest to go up on our SXSW page is Alicia Van Couvering's interview with Kristian Fraga and Mike Scotti of the Iraq war doc Severe Clear. Fraga is the director and editor, and Scotti is both subject and cameraman as the film follows him and his fellow soldiers of the 1st Batallion, 4th Marines as the 2003 invasion of Baghdad begins. Writes Van Couvering:

We first meet Mike and his unit in a desert camp, where they drink too much, curse too much, make gay jokes and fart jokes, shoot guns at stuff and otherwise prepare for war. It’s unsettling to see these men acting like such silly meatheads because, like the happy couple at the beginning of a horror film, you know what’s coming for them. Fraga deliberately used horror film techniques to tell this story, but despite three years of careful editing, it never feels like anything but Scotti’s personal story. Danger, bloodshed and chaos escalate by the minute as they make the battalion makes their way towards the capital, but Mike almost never stops filming. The story is framed by Scotti’s letters home, personal diaries and notes for the book he’s planning to write when he gets home.

The Iraq War is probably the most-photographed and most-filmed conflict of all time. Soldiers have taken thousands of hours of personal video and millions of pictures; we’ve seen the results of some of them. Severe Clear doesn’t preach or explain, and it can be hard to watch, but you ignore it at your peril.

The film's trailer is below.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/25/2009 11:21:00 PM Comments (0)

Today at the Said Business School at Oxford University, England, the 2009 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship kicked off, and with this year's edition comes a partnership between the Skoll Foundation and the Sundance Institute that sends four doc filmmakers to the forum.

As the Skoll Foundation describes the conference, "Each year nearly 800 delegates from more than 60 countries convene for this premier gathering of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. Prominent figures from the social, academic, finance, corporate and policy sectors engage for three days and nights in a series of debates, discussions and work sessions focused on accelerating, innovating and scaling solutions to some of the world’s most pressing social issues."

Sundance describes their initiative with Skill thusly: "It is a $3 million, three-year initiative designed to explore the role of film in advancing knowledge about social entrepreneurship. In essence, there are activists who want to draw attention to social issues and there are filmmakers looking for compelling stories to tell. Sundance Institute brings the two groups together. Film is the medium for modern storytelling. Storytelling drives social change."

The Sundance Institute's Ken Brecher and Cara Mertes are attending the forum this year and they brought with them four doc filmmaker fellows supported by Sundance, who will observe the proceedings and network among the attendees. The filmmakers are Robert Kenner (Food, Inc.), Gayle Ferraro (To Catch a Dollar: Muhammad Yunnus Banks on America), Greg Barker (Sergio), and Joe Berlinger (Crude)

Gayle Ferraro will be guest blogging here this week, relaying stories of the people and ideas she comes across at Skoll. Here is her first post.


As more extraordinary things happen with making this film – too intimate and unusual to get into here… I have been invited by Sundance Institute as their guest to attend the sixth Skoll Social Entrepreneur World Forum here at Oxford University.

Since I am in the final stages of production and into post on a feature doc (To Catch a Dollar –WT) portraying 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Grameen Bank Founder and the patron saint of all social entrepreneurs (according to Patricia Finneran Sr. Consultant for Sundance Institute) Dr. Muhammad Yunus AND the film project is a recipient of a generous grant from the Skoll Foundation (Sundance/Skoll Stories of Change) – one could say that it is quite fitting that I participate in this event. Add to that I briefly attended Oxford ten years ago (before switching up for Harvard) and have some familiarity with the University and surrounds so it is an experience I feel very comfortable and engaged in as I arrive on site.

Cara Mertes (Sundance Institute Director) has assured me that it is a truly amazing experience with brilliant speakers and ideas. It seems that it could be a great place to find different points of inspiration as my editor (Keiko Deguchi) and I find our way through our rough assemble. Inspiration and renewed belief are good things even though everyday seems to be in no short supply of the former when you are looking at over 200 hours of events and travel with Yunus on your edit screen. It is nice however to step out of that exact context and be exposed to others who are finding their way and in the sense of how much work it all takes and appreciate what that means as I learn about others in the next few days.

I have a short clip and presentation this first afternoon. I don’t know what I am going to talk about yet. I sense that no matter what I decide beforehand – I’ll wing it in the end. I really like the spontaneity of going with the energy of the room. This seems like the doc filmmaker in me.

From there it is off to the Opening Plenary where Jeff Skoll (Skoll Foundation founder and first EBay President) and Sundance Institute Executive Director Ken Brecher will be making opening remarks. After which we are all ‘assigned’ to College Dinners for networking with the 700+ delegates!

It’s all good……

— Gayle Ferraro, April 28, 2009, Oxford, U.K.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/25/2009 07:23:00 PM Comments (1)

Premiering on Babelgum today is a new doc web series, "Radar," created by a number of people familiar to readers of Filmmaker magazine. The Workbook Project's Lance Weiler, whose "Culture Hacker" column will begin appearing in the next issue of Filmmaker, produces, Alex Johnson directs, and the d.p. is Tom Quinn, one of our "25 new Faces" for his feature The New Year's Parade. The Workbook Projects Lab series looks at creators who are exploring new forms of storytelling in their work, and here's what the series' site says about the debut piece, "Next Door Neighbor":

We all have a next-door neighbor and a next-door neighbor story. With this realization in mind - comic book artist, Harvey Pekar collaborator and founder of webcomix collective ACT-I-VATE, Dean Haspiel approached storytelling site SMITH magazine. The result: a yearlong anthology of diverse, shocking and heartfelt true-life webcomix published biweekly by both emerging and celebrated writers and artists. We visit Dean, and contributors Joan Reilly and Joe Infurnari, at their communal workspace deep in industrial Brooklyn and discuss the importance of place and community – real life and virtual.

Watch the film at Babelgum here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/25/2009 06:13:00 PM Comments (0)

After too many months of rumors and studio-blogger back-and-forth, the trailer for Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are has broken online, and it looks absolutely wonderful. The story involves an angry young boy who runs away to a land populated by giant beasts. In the two minutes of the trailer, which will premiere this weekend before Monsters vs. Aliens, there are costumes, Arcade Fire, great graphics and an authentic feeling of being young. The script was co-written by Dave Eggers and both he and Jonze, according to this USA Today piece, regularly contacted Sendak for his input. But, relays Jonze, ""He was adamant that I make my own thing. He had strong opinions, but he would ultimately defer to us. He said, 'Make something personal to you.'" Commenting on his artistically ambitious approach to the family movie, Jonze also said, ""I never thought of it as a children's movie. My intention was to be true to how it felt to be 9 years old. Maurice's whole thing is to be honest. You can say anything to kids as long as you are respectful and not pandering."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/25/2009 05:33:00 PM Comments (2)

I was editing the next edition of "Game Engine," Heather Chaplin's game column in Filmmaker, and I started wondering where I could play some of the really interesting indie games she has been writing about. Of course, they are available on PS3 or Xbox for download, but that brought up the question for me of why can't there be a console intended for games that don't exist as disks but as downloads or streams? Well, today, voila, just such a console was announced. At Variety, Marc Graser was the first to announce the new OnLive, created by WebTV founder Steve Perlman.

From the piece:

The OnLive Game Service, which is being shown off at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, will essentially turn any computer with a broadband Internet connection into a high-end console and enable users to play games instantly without the need of a download.

Service makes videogames the last form of entertainment to turn to on-demand as a future form of distribution.

CNet explains the tech:

According to Perlman, OnLive's technology will make it possible to stream the games in such a manner — high quality, no matter what kind of system the user has — by virtue of a series of patented and patent-pending compression technologies. And instead of requiring users to download the games, OnLive will host them all and stream them from a series of the highest-end servers. Users will have only to download a 1MB plug-in to get the service up and running.

Lev Grossman at Time's "Nerdworld" has more:

I saw a demo of this a couple of weeks ago, and I gotta say, it's impressive. OnLive comes out of an incubator company called Rearden, which was started by Steve Perlman, the man who made zillions of 1990's dollars off of WebTV. My first question for him was: who's the wackjob who greenlit this project? I wouldn't have thought it was possible: if you take my PS3 and move it to some server farm in Virginia, and leave my TV here in Brooklyn, doesn't that introduce huge amounts of latency into the system? Especially considering how sensitive twitch gamers are to lag? But what I saw looked very real. Apparently they've been working on this for 7 years, and they have a raft of major publishers on board: EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Atari, THQ, and so on.

The consequences keep on unfolding in my head. I mean, I'm not generally a fan of turning games from a product into a service: I don't like renting -- I'm an iTunes guy, not a Rhapsody guy. I like to own my hardware and software. But think about it: all at once, OnLive could make hardware irrelevant. I played Crysis on a MacBook Air that was hooked up to OnLive, and it was spookily crisp and smooth. Something that can make a MacBook Air into a high-end gaming platform? That's going to change the landscape. Hell, I haven't been a PC gamer for years, because I couldn't keep up with the relentless upgrade agenda, but OnLive takes that out of the equation -- they upgrade their hardware for you. (You don't even need a PC or a console at all: OnLive will sell you a little cigar-box-sized dongle-type object that hooks up directly to your TV, that will process their signals for you.)

This is pretty interesting on a lot of levels and I'm going to look forward to checking it out.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/24/2009 06:50:00 PM Comments (1)

Over at our SXSW coverage page we are posting in the next few days a few straggler reviews and pieces. First up is Alicia Van Couvering's talk with Gerald Peary about his For the Love of Movies: The History of American Film Criticism. Van Couvering gets Peary to talk about a number of issues echoing across the blogosphere these days, including, well, the blogosphere, but also the pressure to write shorter, the huge number of ex-critics, and, of course, the rivalry between the Paulettes and the Sarris-ites. A question about which camp he adheres to (A: Sarris) leads to this great exchange about what film writing in alternative papers used to be like:

I lived in New York when the Village Voice was the greatest paper in the world and Molly Haskell was writing a feminist column. One of first Americans who died of AIDS, Stuart Byron, came out in the paper and talked about getting his wallet stolen while getting a blowjob; that was part of his review. I just thought, wow, this is great. I read Sarris’ book American Cinema, and that’s how I grew up. Then Kael came along, and I loved her first book -- although I’m not a Paulette, the two times I met her she was very, very nice to me.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/24/2009 12:30:00 PM Comments (0)

Amy Taubin (and Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman and Scott Foundas), you have truly penetrated the popular culture when you are namechecked in a Funny or Die video — in this case, the channel's take on indie film and the m-word. (Although I doubt the film in question would garner these quotes from any of you...)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/24/2009 01:40:00 AM Comments (0)

Tribeca Film Institute today announced the selected projects for Tribeca All Access (TAA). TAA is designed to help foster and nurture relationships between film industry executives and filmmakers from traditionally underrepresented communities. Celebrating its sixth year, Tribeca All Access will present 27 new projects during the six-day event taking place April 20 – 25 during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, held from April 22 – May 3.

This year’s TAA jury is comprised of respected industry professionals – actors, writers, producers and directors – who will review script excerpts and work samples prior to the Festival, and deliberate over the most promising projects. The 2009 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award Narrative jurors are Viola Davis, Sanaa Lathan, Anne Carey, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Luis Guzman, Darnell Martin, Lance Reddick and Amy Robinson; the 2009 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award Documentary jurors are Ellen Kuras, Fenton Bailey, and Lola Ogunnaike.


Tribeca All Access Lineup:


Documentary Filmmakers

Gina Abatemarco (Director) The Kivalina Project
When your island is being swallowed by the sea, climate change is not about “going green”, but about survival- for the people of Kivalina, Alaska, time is running out. Other Listed Crew: Anne Takahashi (Producer), Anna Wendt (Producer)

Jason DaSilva (Director, Producer) When I Walk
A young filmmaker living with multiple sclerosis turns the camera on himself, inspired by the desire to reconcile filmmaking with the difficulties of living with the condition. Other Listed Crew: Leigh DaSilva (Producer)

Xochitl Dorsey (Director, Producer) Shot in Mexico
Brad Will, an independent video journalist, goes to Oaxaca, Mexico to document a rising conflict; caught between protestors and the local police he tragically captures his own final moments. Other Listed Crew: Alex Rivera (Exec. Producer), Monica Campbell (Producer), Kahlil Hudson (DP)

Mark French (Director, DP) Wham! Bam! Islam!
One man’s quest to bring new perspective to the rising population of today’s Muslim youth results in a whole new set of unexpected comic book superheroes. Other Listed Crew: Isaac Solotaroff (Director, Producer, Editor)

Stephen Maing (Director, Producer, DP) High Tech, Low Life
Truth and potential fame motivates a young Chinese vegetable seller to become China’s first citizen reporter covering the country’s controversial and censored news stories via his blog, digital camera, and blackberry. Other Listed Crew: Anne Marie Stein (Consulting Producer), Meng Xie (Field Producer), Jian Yi (Consulting Producer), Kirsten Johnson (Consulting Producer)

Shirli Michalevicz (Director) Borderline
A group of forgotten Palestinian and Israeli mentally ill patients live side by side within an asylum surrounded by a society that lives in a state of conflicting “madness.” Other Listed Crew: Claudia Levin (Producer), Tova Ascher (Editor)

George Reyes (Co-Director, Producer) La Muneca Fea (The Ugly Doll)
A group of elderly sex workers in Mexico City seek peace and find community behind the walls of Casa Xochiquetzal, a refuge established by one of their former colleagues. Other Listed Crew: Claudia Lopez (Co-Director, Assoc. Producer), Nekisa Cooper (Producer)

Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster (Directors, Producers) An American Promise
Two sets of parents embark on a 12 year quest to find what is the price we pay to provide the “best” education for our children in our cities.

Marco Williams (Director, Producer) Resolution 07-609: The Rule of Law
A community is torn apart when legislation to curtail immigration deems certain members unwanted, asking the greater questions of who belongs and who has that right to decide. Other Listed Crew: Whitney Dow (Executive Producer)


Narrative Filmmakers

Ana Lily Amirpour (Director, Screenwriter) The Stones
In modern day Tehran, class, tradition, and love all violently collide as a young working class girl embarks on a forbidden love with a wealthy young man with fatal consequences. Other Listed Crew: Gordy Hoffman (Producer), Sina Sayyah (Producer)

Miguel Aviles (Director, Screenwriter) Somnium
When one man’s subconscious becomes jealous of his conscious, he must confront his darkest fears, through his dreams, in order to salvage his life and get his true love back. Other Listed Crew: Michael Jasionowski (Producer, Editor)

Benny Boom (Director, Screenwriter) The Unforgiving Minute
Devastated by his best friend’s betrayal, a young street hustler is forced to choose between revenge and redemption, while tracing the chain of events that led to the ill-fated moment. Other Listed Crew: Jonathan N. Brown (Screenwriter), Philip Lee Hayes, Jr. (Producer), Compton J. Chester (Producer), Gerald Rawles (Producer)

Andrew Bui (Director, Screenwriter) Bronxopolis
A geeky Vietnamese teenager turns his crush on his sassy Dominican neighbor into a comic book character that is far from the lives they grow into in the Bronx.

Gene Cajayon and Van Partible (Directors, Producers, Screenwriter - Van P.) Saturday Morning Christmas An enterprising nine-year-old boy discovers the true meaning of Christmas while hunting for his favorite Saturday morning superhero action figure and avoiding the town bully. Other Listed Crew: Hisham Abed (DP)

Kat Candler (Director, Screenwriter) The Spider in the Bathtub
When a newly divorced mom and her two oddball children find a tarantula in their bathtub, an all-night adventure involving their goofy neighbors and oven mitts proves family conquers all. Other Listed Crew: Chris Mass (Screenwriter), Scott Colquitt (Producer)

Robert Davenport and Travis Wright (Screenwriters, Producer - Travis W.) Harlem Hellfighters
While fighting for his country as part of Harlem’s all black 369th U.S. Infantry, a railroad porter from New York City rediscovers courage and dignity to confront racial injustices. Other Listed Crew: Yves Simoneau (Director)

Giancarlo Esposito(Director, Producer) Diamond District
An off-duty FBI agent manning his father’s hotdog stand interferes in what he thinks is an undercover operation and gets caught up in a conspiracy to destroy a diamond cartel. Other Listed Crew: Alan Brooks (Screenwriter)

Jinho Ferreira aka “Piper” (Screenwriter) Walter’s Boys
A clandestine training operation run by an ex-CIA agent recruits urban teens, but faces treacherous consequences from the trainee’s intent on breaking free with the help of a former mentor.

Tanya Hamilton (Screenwriter) Ghost Days
In a chance happening miles away, a Rwandan refugee comes face to face with her family’s killer in Washington D.C. and ponders revenge after a fail attempt on her life. Other Listed Crew: Phil Bertelsen (Director, Producer)

Hugo Perez (Director, Screenwriter) Immaculate Conception
When her popstar husband Pablito dies during a plastic surgery operation, Maria is left with a decision that may finally bring her happiness but requires a little divine intervention. Other Listed Crew: Katharyn B. Marquez (Producer), Nick Spicer (Producer), Francisco Bello (Editor)

Jennifer Phang (Director, Screenwriter) Look For Water
A couple wakes up one morning finding they have literally lost sight of each other, igniting them on a path to rediscover each other and others lost along the way. Other Listed Crew: Dominc Mah (Screenwriter), Robert Chang (Executive Producer)


International Selections

Australia

Pauline Chan (Director, Screenwriter, Producer) Mei Mei
When Mei Mei, orphaned in an earthquake, sets out to meet the Good Samaritan who provided financial support, she finds him in the most unexpected of places - emotionally, and physically. Other Listed Crew: Martin Edmond (Screenwriter), Penny Carl (Producer), Lesley Stevens (Producer)

Samantha Saunders(Director, Screenwriter) Binawee
A young Aboriginal girl enters domestic service in a white household. The lines between master and servant dissipate and a new form of respect takes place.

Canada

Sudz Sutherland and Jennifer Holness (Co-Director, Co-Screenwriter, Executive Producer) Home Again
Three deportees are sent back to Jamaica only to be ostracized by their fellow islanders, forcing them to reconsider who they truly are and where they belong.. Other Listed Crew: Arthur Cooper (DP)

K’naan Warsame (Screenwriter) The River of Blood
Somali-born K’naan strives to become a voice for his nation through his music, while trying to reconcile conflicting influences of his culture that pull him in different directions. Other Listed Crew: Anthony Leo (Screenwriter, Producer), Andrew Rosen (Producer), Jason Xenopoulos (Director), Martin F. Katz (Executive Producer)

United Kingdom

David Alexander (Director, Screenwriter) Together
Morality and judgment come to a clashing and brutal ending when three English teens decide to play with one girl’s life. Other Listed Crew: Barrington Paul Robinson (Producer), Neus Olle (DP)

Lab Ky Mo (Director, Screenwriter) Goldfishing
A son searches for himself and his father amongst the streets of Bangkok - a twilight world of massage parlours, tuk tuks and sex tourists.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3/23/2009 10:38:00 PM Comments (0)

If you missed Joe Swanberg's Alexander the Last on screen at SXSW last week (the only place, actually, where you could have seen iit on screen), then join Swanberg and stars Jess Weixler and Amy Seimetz at the IFC Center in New York tonight for what will be a rare public screening of the film. I say "rare" because the film is already screening on IFC's On Demand and with that being the case many regional festivals will likely take a pass on the movie. Filmmaker's Alicia Van Couvering, who wrote for us in 2007 what I still think is the essential article on mumblecore will be moderating the conversation afterwards, and the screening starts at 7:00 pm.

For more on the movie, check out Van Couvering's recent interview with Swanberg here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/23/2009 12:31:00 PM Comments (0)

As the clock winds down, members of the New York City film production community are lobbying hard for the continuation of the Empire State Film Production Tax Credit, which has supported a boom in film and television production in New York.

Once financing is in place, film production companies can start on a dime, quickly crewing up and supporting local vendors, restaurants, hotels and other businesses. They often attract investment capital from outside the state and even outside the country, and they are swift tools of job creation. Furthermore, when it comes to television production, these jobs stay within the local economy for years. New York's tax credit served to turbo-charge the film and television industry in New York; now, its uncertain future is causing production companies to locate their shows in other states that are offering these incentives. Ironically, the early success of the program threatens its future as allocated funding has run out and future funds appearing in the new state budget have yet to be specified.

One of the groups organizing a response is the New York Production Alliance, which is asking all members of the New York fim community to make their voices heard in support of an extension of the credit. It is getting too late for letters. Phone calls to representatives are needed now. On their website they list a number of facts demonstrating both the efficacy and budgetary viability of the program:

EMPIRE STATE FILM PRODUCTION TAX CREDIT FACT SHEET

I. Program Overview
The Empire State Film Production Tax Credit is 30% of qualified film production expenditures, (crew and vendor costs - no star, producer, writer, director salaries eligible). NYC offers an additional 5% credit on same costs.


II. Overall Production Statistics: 2004 - 09

Total Production Jobs Created/Retained: 165,645
Total Combined NYS and NYC Tax Collections: $2.7 billion
Total Combined NYS and NYC Tax Credits Applied For: $685 million
Credits Remaining: 0

Arguing for the future, the NYPA explains:

The Empire State Film Production Tax Credit started as a pilot program in 2004, limited in funding in its formative years to allow officials to confirm the program could function as intended – to revitalize an industry decimated by domestic and international competition that left NY as a production backwater.

In 2009 what officials have is a catalyst for job creation that puts substantially more money into state and city coffers than are issued in credits. With sufficient future funding the program will continue to expand, diversifying a New York economy faced with an eroding manufacturing base and diminished financial service industry. However, if NY regresses its credit % or places a limit on the number or amount of credits that can be issued, the program’s dramatic gains will be reversed.

At a time when the program is attracting more than $2 billion of production spending on local vendors and workers, and is poised to continue the industry’s growth trajectory, Government opponents of the program seek limits on the program that, if adopted, would drive down production spending down to $500 million, if not less.

Can New York afford another 20,000 plus jobless claims or the $200MM+ in positive tax revenues? The loss of health insurance benefits alone for thousands of workers would be devastating. The farsighted policy decision in this case is simple; restore funding and allow this industry to help fuel New York’s recovery.

I just made all of my calls, and I urge readers of this blog to pick up the phone and make theirs. Here is info provided by the NYPA:

NYPA WANTS YOU to pick up the phone and call Governor David Paterson (518-474-8390), Senate Majority Leader, Malcom Smith (518-455-2701) and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (518- 455- 3791) and your NY State Senator and Assembly Representative urging them to authorize continued funding of the Empire State Film Production Tax Credit.

You should also call your State Senator and Assembly Representative. If you don't know who these people are, you can identify them by typing in your zip code on the NYPA page.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/23/2009 12:00:00 PM Comments (0)

Kudos to Noah Harlan for braving the tape-recorded audio wilds of the breakfast conversation I took part in at SXSW this past week. At the festival CinemaTech's Scott Kirsner gathered myself, Ted Hope, Lance Weiler, Brian Chirls, Liz Rosenthal, Brett Gaylor and Caitlin Boyle for a morning roundtable in which he asked us what had been on our mind while attending the festival. Each of us spoke for a few minutes and then there was a group discussion.

As Harlan notes, the audio quality is poor, and I think an edited version, which I hope one of us can put together sometime in the near future, will be more useful than listening to the tape. Still, Harlan listened to the talk in its entirety and used it as the jumping-off point for a blog post at his 401st Blow blog.

He writes:

As I listened to them wrestle with questions relating to finding revenue in a digital age, I got the sense that there was a battle that had been fought and had already been lost. The battle was over payments for content. The semi-consensus view, and one I know Lance in particular espouses, is that the days of people paying directly for content (or at least paying up front) are rapidly disappearing and we should step forward into a share economy (I’m not sure that Scott was totally in agreement, but I don’t won’t to put words in anyone’s mouths). There was much discussion of putting your work out for free and then asking for contributions from consumers and this model, I feel, is akin to going back to the shareware model on computers.

I'm not quite sure that's what we all felt (although I will note that the "free" meme was floating around SXSW, with Chris Anderson giving his closing keynote just a few hours later). In fact, I would categorize my own position as somewhat schizophrenic. I do subscribe to a number of Anderson's tenets (see my summary of his talk here) and believe that digital distribution does tend to push the price of the broad category of digital goods to zero. The question for me is, does it need to drive the price of specific digital goods perceived of as having high cultural value to zero?

For Harlan, like many who have been writing recently about the newspaper industry, the solution is not to follow the logic of the "free" model but to create a coherently constructed digital marketplace. He writes:

We need to embrace and fight for the technological innovations that can support our need to support ourselves. While releasing media for free and asking for contributions may work on a micro-scale and/or for the few, amazingly talented promoter/marketers like Lance and Arin, but for many talented filmmakers, it’s not their best skill and they should still be able to make amazing work, pay back their supporters, and earn a living. I do not believe that throwing in the towel and saying we live in a Pirate Bay world now and that we should give up on paid content is the right attitude and doing so will potentially hamstring future generations of content creators in their endeavors to make lives from their work.

Read the entirety of Noah's post because before these concluding statements he details a five point plan to make this happen.

In thinking about these issues lately, my mind has been influenced by a number of things, including the same ongoing discussion of the decimation of the newspaper industry, an occurrence that is mulled over at the end of Eric Daniel Metzgar's documentary Reporter, which observes that free models, or blog-style production can't support the time-intensive, long-thinking and necessary reporting of the New York Times' Nicolas Kristof. At the same time, preserving reporting like Kristof's within a huge, print-media publication with Auto and Home and other lifestyle sections, may not be the answer either. Like Brian Newman at his Springboard Media, I was taken by Clay Shirkey's recent essay, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable." I highly recommend reading the entire essay, but here are a few key graphs:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

And:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

And:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

(There's a lot more to Shirkey's piece. Make sure to read it.)

Brian Newman's adaptation of Shirkey's thoughts to the film world is this:

The old system of making and distributing films is broken and it isn't coming back. Arguing for how we can keep theatres going, or preserve the DVD market or the margins or the profits are asking for the lie.

But if we shift the question away from how do we keep doing the same old thing to what really should be done, we start to get interesting answers.

After quoting the same "demanding to be lied to" passage that I quoted above, Newman ends his piece just as he starts to get going on what comes next:

Amen. In film/media, I think this means let's focus on - "what do audiences want" and "what best connects filmmakers to these audiences" who are also producers, participants and even filmmakers by the way....

Newman is clearly pointing to a different conception of "audience," one that is more communal and two-way. My thought after reading Shirkey is a bit different — it's one that analogizes the feature film to the newspaper. What shouldn't be fought for is the feature film at all costs but rather boundary-exploring-and-breaking, formally challenging, compelling, and skillfully executed filmed storytelling hailing from outside the dominant commercial culture. There are those who say that the feature film is an immutable unit of dramatic presentation, but I'd rather fight for great work of whatever length and in whatever form most suitable for its delivery medium. Sure, there will always be feature films because there is something deeply satisfying about the form. But whether the feature film will continue to be the default choice for filmic storytelling, and whether the market will support this, are what's up for discussion. (Actually, with regards to the second part of the preceding sentence, I think the markets have already made their chioce.)

This is obviously an ongoing dialogue. For a summary of the things I wanted to talk about at the Kirsner breakfast, some of which apply to what is being discussed here, here are the notes I scribbled down before the meeting:

So much of the energy at SXSWi was focused on work that is informational, instructive, or has to do with games; how do we harness that same desire for new business models and modes of delivery but point it towards the making of films that have art and culture as their goal?

As new modes of online distribution take hold, how will the form of our cinematic storytelling change?

How do we convey a sense that our work has scarcity and value when it is so easily delivered to our audiences?

How do we force our artists to be ambitious in a medium that prioritizes the quick and immediate?

How does viewing work through a browser window change both our perception of its value and our reception of its storytelling?

And, finally, what are the alternatives to increasingly dominant ad models when it comes to the financial support of independent film? Chris Anderson has written about his “free” theory and said that in today’s digital economy you need to give away 95% in order to charge that remaining 5% of our customer base. True success comes, he said, when you can up that 5% to 10%. If this is true, how do we get 10% of the people out there who say they desire quality cinema to make a regular, predictable commitment to pay for it so we can begin constructing new financial models for our films?

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/22/2009 09:06:00 PM Comments (5)

One of the best received narrative films at SXSW this past week was David Lowery's St. Nick, his subtle tale of two children making their way through their world mysteriously on their own. Alicia Van Couvering interviewed Lowery for Filmmaker here, and David Hudson rounds up reaction from the blogosphere here, but over at his own blog, Drifting, the writer/director posts the screenplay as a PDF download.

Writes Lowery:

A few weeks ago, I read over the film's final shooting script for the first time since production, and was surprised to find it even more exiguous than I remembered. It was designed as a blueprint, and the resulting film has supplanted whatever implicit worth it might have contained. As it should be. Nonetheless, I'd always wanted to make it available once the film had premiered, and so here it is — all 30 pages of it:

Reading it before you see it won't ruin the film; reading it after you see it may serve as supporting evidence to whatever opinion you may have formed, positive or negative. You may wonder how in my right mind I can call myself a writer - to which I'd say that I wrote this thing to direct. To which some of you might respond that I'm not too hot in that regard either, for which I can do nothing but shrug and agree to disagree.

The script can be downloaded here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/22/2009 08:37:00 PM Comments (0)

As part of a new effort to bring attention to under seen independent films and to support one of New York City's last independent video stores for specialty films, Hammer to Nail and Cinema Nolita have teamed up to host a series of weekly late night screenings in Nolita's space on Mulberry St. Tonight at 11pm, Jennifer Venditti, who Filmmaker selected as one of its 25 New Faces in Independent Film in 2007, will be on hand to screen her SXSW Jury prize winning doc Billy the Kid. In a piece for H2N last fall, Cullen Gallagher had this to say about the film:

Unlike the exaggerated characters in even the best high school movies, there’s something unshakably authentic to this fifteen year-old-kid from Brunswick, Maine with a rat tail who wears trucker t-shirts with cut-off sleeves. And it’s not just because Billy the Kid is a work of non-fiction, but rather that director Jennifer Venditti has managed the incredible feat of both finding and conveying cinematically a character who is absolutely singular and unique, and at the same time exists as an “everyman” who sums up our collective adolescence.

While we can deduce that he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, the film smartly never explains this and instead treats Billy like any normal teenager. Billy the Kid refuses to be a disability-movie, instead leaving the varying diagnoses vague and inconclusive, and allowing his eccentricities to be what they are: colorful facets of his complex personality. In fact, the more one tries to pin down Billy’s “uniqueness,” the more one is confronted by how un-unique he really is.

Read the full review at the link.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 3/22/2009 12:09:00 PM Comments (0)

Director Spike Jonze has returned to music videos with a clip for UNKLE entitled "Heaven." It's a gorgeously shot slo-mo return to Jonze's skateboarding days that crescendos with... well, I won't spoil it any more than the below statement from UNKLE's MySpace page (and the screen grab) already does.

"Heaven" was used in the acclaimed skate film Fully Flared directed by Spike Jonze and Ty Evans. The collaboration inspired the directors to take footage and re-edit a sequence of shots that shows the Lakai skateboarding team demonstrating their considerable skills as they navigate through and around various exploding obstacles. With "Heaven" as the musical backdrop, the resulting marriage of sound to picture is quite extraordinary.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/20/2009 07:15:00 PM Comments (5)

Casey and Van Neistat, who Filmmaker picked as part of our 2006 "25 New Faces" selections of up-and-coming talent, have had their independently produced autobiographical series bought by HBO. According to Variety, which reported the story, the series is exec produced by Tom Scott, founder of the Nantucket Nectars juice company as well as the Plum TV network. In the Filmmaker piece, Matt Ross detailed the brothers' early career, the full text of which can be found at the link:

The Neistats began making films in 2000 with the purchase of two iMac DVs, and their early projects involved reworking home movie footage shot in the ’80s and ’90s. The piece that first got them attention was 2003’s iPod’s Dirty Secret, a three-minute video that involved, not surprisingly, sticking it to the man: as we hear a customer service representative from Apple explain to the brothers that the iPod battery will eventually die but will not be replaced by the company, Casey walks around spray-painting a warning on iPod ads that have been plastered all over New York City.

The video went viral, and the brothers kept churning out short films and videos at an astonishing rate — they now have more than 300 no-budget shorts to their credit (which have been shown at 30 film festivals and seven museums worldwide). For a recent project, The Challenge (which aired on Comedy Central), the brothers responded to a friend’s dare to make a film in one day by doing a shot-for-shot remake of the Jurassic Park trailer with items bought in a thrift store.

"25 New Faces" is an annual feature in which Filmmaker selects the rising writers, directors, actors and other filmmaking talent we believe will be shaping the independent film of the future. To view our most recent list, click here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/19/2009 12:15:00 AM Comments (0)

I decided today that Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is the best film I've seen at SXSW. Nominally, the film is about the Japanese interest and obsession over insects in nature and beetles as pets. But somehow, just through images and sound and words, it immerses you in another culture so deeply that it becomes about... everything. There is a story, in as much as you come back to the same characters again and again -- the little boy who we meet buying a new pet beetle, then introducing it to his other beetles, then introducing it to his friends' beetles; the insect harvester who we accompany on a hunting trip, then watch drink hornet-infused-sake, and finally ride with him in his bug-profit Ferrari. Interviews with entomologist/philosophers and bug merchants weave in and out, adding meaning and framing the edit, but it's still not really a story. Voice over in Japanese waxes poetic about the symbolic relationship between insects and nature, zen and human existence. Mainly there just images: thousands of umbrellas walking through the street, shot from overhead; two single ladies picking out treats and bedding for their pet beetles in a department store; gigantic $10,000 show beetles on display; bonsai gardeners; the flashing lights of a traffic cop's vest; lightning bugs swarming through a delighted crowd.

# posted by Alicia Van Couvering @ 3/18/2009 10:51:00 PM Comments (0)

“Sounds Like Teen Spirit,” Jamie Jay Johnson’s energetic documentary about the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, is a crowd-pleaser in the best possible way. While the film might seem like a no-brainer (cute kids + compelling stories + kitschy costumes = crossover doc hit), it manages to trace a precise, well-considered path, never detouring into JonBenet territory. At a post-screening Q & A on the opening night of the True/False Film Festival, Johnson explained his technique: “I followed the kids I liked.”

And it’s that simple.

This isn’t to say the film lacks depth—far from it. Each of the young (ages 10-15), talented protagonists has his or her own trial: Marina from Bulgaria tries to make sense of her father’s absence (while singing in a girl-group called “Bon-Bon”; yes, that’s really their name); exuberant Yiorgos from Cyprus stays positive despite taunting in school about his sexuality; and Mariam, from tiny, impoverished Georgia, has the pressure of an entire country weighing on her.

Eurovision is a huge event for these children, and the finals are broadcast across the continent, the winner determined by a televote. The European Broadcasting Union states that the event’s purpose is: “to promote young talents in the field of popular music, by encouraging competition among the children performers.”

This seems like a recipe for bubblegum-heartbreak, right?

Johnson manages a coup by finding kids who seem actually, sort of…well-balanced. They’re articulate, talented, and just want to perform. While the film is poppy and humorous, it’s also unabashedly sincere. The actual Eurovision event is a joy to behold, and while not all the protagonists receive the number of votes they hoped for—in fact most don’t—all of them sing their hearts’ out.

One of the straight-faced, too-peppy Eurovision hosts sums up the ecstatic tone best by exclaiming to the camera: “I’m pissing my pants with excitement!”

Enough said.

For more of our SXSW coverage, click to our special page here.

# posted by James Ponsoldt @ 3/18/2009 05:44:00 PM Comments (0)

A couple of weeks before the festival, Filmmaker reached out to directors with films in the festival to offer them space to recount the making and mission of their movies. Below is a response we received from Keith Maitland, whose documentary, The Eyes of Me, premieres at the festival today.

How do they see the movie, if they can’t see at all?

The Eyes of Me follows four blind teens over the course of one dynamic year at the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, TX. I didn’t know much about blind people before I decided to dive into their world and make the film, so naturally, I had a lot of questions to answer … and apparently so do a lot of other people out there. This week at SXSW, host to The Eyes of Me World Premiere, I’ve talked to film fans, the press and lots of other filmmakers and a question that keeps coming up is “Why make a movie about blind people, if they can’t see it?”

In the almost four year journey that has been The Eyes of Me, that question never came up because from the moment I started working with the amazing kids in the film, I realized that blind teens are still just teens…and they like things that all teenagers like – including movies (and television) – in typical, teenaged, heaping quantities.

When Chas, a blind high school senior complains, “I can’t even watch Family Guy, you know how that affects me?” it’s not because he’s blind, that he can’t watch his favorite show, it’s because he hasn’t paid the utility bill and his electricity was cut off.

There is a step that we can take as filmmaker’s interested in making our work more accessible to blind audience members, it’s called Audio Description. PBS has lead the way, requiring many projects to provide an audio descriptive track for the visually impaired. Typically, Audio Description is a simple set of narrated facts to fill in some of the info that’s delivered visually – They ride into the sunset; A tear rolls down her cheek -- you get the idea. At SXSW, I’m very excited to premiere the use of Live Audio Description for The Eyes of Me. Through use of wireless headset receivers, additional scripted info is transmitted live, by a real person, in the back of the theater.

Back to that question though… here’s the simple answer: Blind people watch movies. They go to movies, they hear them, they experience them & when made well, they feel them deeply… just like you.

SXSW will present the World Premiere of The Eyes of Me on March 18th, with an encore presentation on March 20th. We’re next slated to screen in competition at AFI Dallas in two weeks and I’m happy to report that we will be screening at the Little Rock Film Festival in May. Hope to see you on the festival circuit!

--Keith Maitland
Producer/Director/Editor
The Eyes of Me

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/18/2009 10:00:00 AM Comments (2)

Long Tail author and Wired editor Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, isn’t out until June, but SXSW attendees got a taste at Anderson’s closing keynote at this year’s interactive conference. By now, many are familiar with the gist of Anderson’s argument, which is that the internet drives the marginal cost of digital goods to zero, which means that the price of these goods also is driven down to zero. “Free is the animal force of digital economics,” Anderson said. Furthermore, he said, “If you have not made your product free, piracy will do it for you.”

However, that doesn’t mean that all is lost for content creators hoping to make a living from their work. Instead, it forces them to think more creatively about just what it is that they are selling and to embrace ways other than the “producer/consumer” model of interacting with their audiences. Anderson brought up an example involving Cantonese pop stars in China, nothing that their latest albums are instantly and widely pirated. “If you are a Canton pop singer these days, you use piracy as a form of marketing and then monetize the ensuing celebrity. Each one of us is creating micro-celebrity and turning that celebrity into cash.”

Anderson explained that “’free’ is the inversion of the ‘free sample’ model. You give away 90, 95% for free in order to sell 5%. If you convert 5% to paid, you can cover your costs, and if you can get to 10% to 15%, you can make money.”

Moderator Guy Kawasaki pointed out that soon VC firms will be deluged with business plans that take the above model as gospel and chart projections based on reaching that 10 or 15%. But, Kawasaki continued, “People misunderstand how hard it is to even get that 5%.”

At this point, discussions of “free” economics turn into discussions about added value, consumer psychology, ethics, and community. All of this is framed, argues Anderson, by the fact that “we have internalized near-zero marginal costs.” In other words, people expect digital goods to be free now (or, perhaps I’ll rephrase it: people expect digital goods to exist in free versions). “In the digital world, no one thinks badly about something because it is free,” he says. “It’s out there for free in one version but then it is out there in a superior version [you pay for]. For some people [the decision to pay] might be conscience, but for most of us it is simple utility or convenience.”

Anderson also talked about needing to build “free” into a business model from the very beginning. “The old version is starting free and then waiting two years [to convert to paid], but then you’ve broken the social contract [with your users],” he said. Things work the other way too. He talked about the Village Voice having appeared to become less valuable when it went free versus The Onion, which started free and has become even more respected and has grown its audience. (Here I’d wonder if the Voice didn’t start to lose its respect when it cut back on investigative journalism and large-scale cultural stories and whether ‘free’ models dis-incentivize traditional media publishers to commission such pieces, but that discussion is for another blog post.)

For filmmakers depressed by all of this, I will point out that one of the questions asked at the Q&A was from someone who wanted to know why there wasn’t one easily searchable site where he could pay for high-quality, HD video. He complained that YouTube was low quality and that he could never find what interested him there. It wasn’t clear whether he had heard of iTunes or other download services, but the question itself was heartening.

Chris Anderson’s Free will be out in June and yes, it will be free — as a PDF on his website. If you’d like to help put food on Anderson’s table, you can be part of his 5 or 10 or 15% and pick it up at a bookstore near you.

For the rest of our SXSW 2009 coverage visit our standalone site here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/18/2009 01:24:00 AM Comments (0)

Two filmmakers born out of the early ‘80s independent film movement, Todd Haynes and Rick Linklater, shared a casual, free-flowing conversation that ranged from New Queer Cinema to Tarkovsky to strategies for staying creatively alive at SXSW on Tuesday. There was no stated theme, so Linklater briefly discussed the genesis of his Me and Orson Welles, Haynes talked a bit about I’m Not There, but mostly they just shared common experiences of being directors having had early success in what now seems like the boom era of independent moviemaking.

Of the New Queer Cinema, Haynes said, “Because I lived in the AIDS era, we all looked at periods like the ’60s and ’70s as great periods because there was a political necessity driving the films. What I never minded about the term New Queer Cinema, which was a press construction, was that it meant I was a part of a family of filmmakers making films out of necessity that didn’t just share themes and topics but formal theories and strategies. And all of a sudden, there was a market for these films, and that’s why there was a New Queer Cinema.”

When asked whether it was any easier to get a movie made now that he is an established filmmaker, Linklater replied, “Yes and no. The good thing is you have a body of work, and the bad thing is you have a body of work. After Slacker I did get a “gimme film,” my high school rock-and-roll movie [Dazed and Confused]. I had a producer who was going around town saying, “How do you know this guy isn’t the next George Lucas?” And then you do your film and you’re not the next George Lucas. A few years ago I thought I caught a groove, that I could handle anything, but the last two films have been the most difficult, the trickiest. They tested [me] mentally, physically, psychically. It never gets easier.”

“I haven’t even had that groove,” Haynes replied. “ I remember hearing a quote from Robert Altman who said, “It’s always hard, it’s like starting from scratch every time.” And at the time I hadn’t even made a film yet!”

The best anecdote, one that united the two directors, was told by Haynes, who described going with Jim Lyons to Los Angeles’s Nu-Art theater to watch his first film, Poison. That particular night, Haynes was excited that Madonna was in the crowd. “It was a largely gay audience,” recounted Haynes, “and they could just smell Madonna — they knew she was there. And then the trailer for Slacker came on and that ‘Madonna pap smear’ moment happens, and the entire audience turns around and looks at Madonna and she gets up and leaves!”

Remembering back, Linklater said, “You know, [while in production] I didn’t want to do anything to date the film, and I wondered, is Madonna going to be around for three or four more years? But I made the commitment. I felt she was in it for the long haul.”

The final word went to Haynes: “We made it through [this panel] without bitching about how fucked-up the industry is right now!”

For the rest of our SXSW 2009 coverage visit our standalone site here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/18/2009 01:20:00 AM Comments (0)

The winners of the SXSW jury and audience awards were just announced and Judi Krant's Made In China (pictured right) was awarded Best Narrative Feature while Bill Ross's 45365 took home Best Documentary. Another standout is Scott Teems's That Evening Sun which won a Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast and the Narrative Audience Award.

The complete list of winners are below.


Feature Jury Awards

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Winner – 45365
Director: Bill Ross
An inquiring look at everyday life in Middle America, the film explores the congruities of daily life in an American town Sidney, Ohio.

Honorable Mention – The Way We Get By
Director: Aron Gaudet
On call 24/7 for the past 6 years, a group of senior citizens transform their lives by greeting nearly one million U.S. troops at a tiny airport in Maine.

NARRATIVE FEATURE
Winner – Made in China
Director: Judi Krant
Lost in Shanghai, an inventor discovers that it takes more than a bright idea to succeed.

Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast – That Evening Sun
Director: Scott Teems
A ruthless grudge match between two old foes. Lines are drawn, threats are made, and the simmering tension under the Tennessee sun erupts, inevitably, into savagery. Cast: Hal Holbrook, Mia Wasikowska, Ray McKinnon, Walton Goggins, Carrie Preston


Audience Awards

EMERGING VISIONS
Winner – Motherland
Director: Jennifer Steinman
Six grieving mothers journey to Africa in order to test the theory that “giving is healing.”

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Winner – MINE
Director: Geralyn Pezanoski
After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of pets were rescued and adopted by families around the country, leading to many custody battles. Through these stories, the film examines issues of race, class and animal welfare in the U.S.

NARRATIVE FEATURE
Winner – That Evening Sun
Director: Scott Teems
A ruthless grudge match between two old foes. Lines are drawn, threats are made, and the simmering tension under the Tennessee sun erupts, inevitably, into savagery.


Special Jury Awards

SXSW & AIGA AUSTIN MOVIE POSTER AWARD
Best in Show – The Dungeon Masters
Director: Keven Macalester
Designer: David Plunkert, Spur Design, LLC

SXSW / CHICKEN & EGG EMERGENT WOMAN AWARD
Winner – Made in China
Director: Judi Krant
Lost in Shanghai, an inventor discovers that it takes more than a bright idea to succeed.

SXSW WHOLPHIN SHORT FILM AWARD
Winner – Sister Wife
Director: Jill Orschel
In a time when the practices of Mormon fundamentalism offer sensational fodder for the evening news, Sister Wife offers a rare glimpse into the cloistered lifestyle.


Shorts Jury Awards

REEL SHORTS
Winner – Thompson
Director: Jason Tippet
Since second grade Matt and Ryan have shared the bond of speech impediments, weapons, and things that go fast. But as their last days of high school speed by, the two friends find that their go-carts, dirt bikes, and RC cars can’t outrun adulthood.

Special Jury Award – Happy 95 Birthday Grandpa
Director: Gary Huggins
A fleeting memory in five minutes.

ANIMATED SHORTS
Winner – Shaman
Director: Luc Perez
Waiting for the bus on a rainy day in Copenhagen, the old shaman Utaaq sees a rare bird from his past. This makes him reminisce his youth, and a beautiful tale about the forces of nature begins.

Special Jury Award – Sweet Dreams
Director: Kirsten Lepore
A Stalwart cupcake escapes from his native land to discover what lies beyond the sugar skyscrapers and candy-condos. His violent shipwreck on a foreign shore forces him to adapt to a new lifestyle.

EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS
Winner – Cattle Call
Director: Matthew Rankin & Mike Maryniuk
A high-speed animated documentary about the art of livestock auctioneering.

Special Jury Award – The Idiot Stinks
Director: Helder Sun
Animation, Angst, Media, Martians and Miscommunication.

MUSIC VIDEOS
Winner – Thunderheist, “Jerk It”
Director: That Go-Noel Paul & Stefan Moore

Special Jury Award – Fleet Foxes, “White Winter Hymnal”
Director: Sean Pecknold

Jury Special Mention – New Pornographers, “Myriad Harbor”
Director: Fluorescent Hill

TEXAS HIGH SCHOOL COMPETITION
Winner – Performance Evaluation
Director: Breannah Gibson

Special Jury Award – TIE
Fresh Fruit
Director: Edward Kelley & Brenden Cicoria

AND

A Hospital Bathroom
Director: Miguel Johnson

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3/17/2009 10:30:00 PM Comments (0)

Dreamy, moody, and as haunted as the film she stars in, Stella Schnabel’s portrayal of a recently released psychiatric hospital patient named “Shelly” is simultaneously: funny, annoying, unpredictable, solipsistic, direct as a child, bullying, and so fragile it seems as if she might shatter on screen. With an unadulterated, multiple-format gaze, director Ry Russo-Young may have discovered, in only her second feature, her Klaus Kinski.

“You Wont Miss Me” feels like a knowing ode to the bohemian downtown New York of the 1980’s—the time and place in which both Schnabel and Russo-Young grew up. Feminine and frankly sexual images from this era were captured indelibly by photographer Nan Goldin and in Bette Gordon’s peerless 1985 film, “Variety.” Russo-Young situates her film in the modern world, but the range of shooting formats—from 8 mm to cheap video to 16 mm and HD—feels like a conceit with emotional aims, yet succeeds equally in creating an homage to several generations of experimental and independent filmmaking. The beautiful, cool youth of “You Wont Miss Me” might have, in another decade, fit in with Norman Mailer’s “white negro,” or Warhol’s Factory gang, or James St. James’ Club Kids, or, well, you get the idea.

Part of what makes “You Wont Miss Me” so hypnotic, so emotional, and ultimately so successful is the bulldozer trapped in a tornado that is Stella Schnabel (yes, she is his daughter). Russo-Young creates an enveloping character study by parachute-dropping the audience into Schnabel’s skull, and there is acceptance, knowing, and identification in the director’s decision. What’s notably, wonderfully, lacking is judgment of Shelly. Yes, there is sincere affection—not objectification—in this director’s gaze.

When Shelly reacts abrasively to her friends, would-be romances, and casual acquaintances—as she frequently does—the audience experiences her flawed decision-making process, which is distorted by emotions and cornered animal paranoia. In a particularly funny-painful sequence, Shelly and her friend Carlen (played by the equally charismatic Carlen Altman) travel to Atlantic City to see a performance by The Virgins. As the night progresses, alcohol-fueled jealousy rises, and Shelly proceeds to gracelessly dismantle the friendship. The fight—which is both monstrous and completely relatable—is a wonder to witness. Shelly is unable to censor herself, which may be a blessing for a young actress, but is a minefield for her friends. The power that Shelly possesses—and she is strong—comes from a complete lack of concern for what anyone else thinks. It’s never a question of will Shelly alienate the people around her, but rather: How long will it take?

The beauty of Ry Russo-Young’s film is that despite all the video/film stylishness and evocative dream-poppy score (by the talented Will Bates), “You Wont Miss Me” feels like a tragedy—and Shelly stays with you after the film is over. Like Johnny, the protagonist of Mike Leigh’s “Naked”—who spews venomous monologue after venomous monologue, yet earns the audience’s empathy because he’s so clearly lost and in pain—Shelly seems as if she may burn through an endless parade of people, going from one destructive relationship to another, never capable of the honest self-reflection that might be necessary for her happiness.

But, Shelly is only 23. She’s young. Like so many young, creative people before her, Shelly is just lost and hoping to discover something—or someone—meaningful in New York City.

For more of our SXSW coverage, click to our special page here.

# posted by James Ponsoldt @ 3/17/2009 12:08:00 AM Comments (1)

At Scott Kirsner's SXSW panel on digital downloads and vanishing physical media, he urged his panel members, who included Matt Dentler of Cinetic, Steve Savage of New Video, Rick Allen of Snag Films, and directors Gary Hustwit and Morgan Spurlock to spill the deep dish about digital downloads. Just what are the deal terms at the various outlets and what are the size of the checks filmmakers are receiving? "C'mon," he said, "there are no journalists here. Nobody's going to tell."

Not everybody took the bait, but Hustwit and Spurlock were both quite candid. Hustwit said that the digital sales, mostly on iTunes, have accounted for $60,000 of revenue for his film Helvetica, which is about one tenth of its total take. And when it came to ad-supported streaming sites, Spurlock was blunt. "Filmmakers need a reality check; you can pay your phone bill, not your rent, with these [revenues]," he said. "The interent does a great job of garnering eyeballs. It is amazing because it's putting movies where movies wouldn’t normally go. The first eight weeks Super-Size Me was on Snag it was the number one film. We received $1,200 for those first eight weeks for a package of 20 films [that included Super Size Me]. The last quarter of last year, Super Size Me sold 69,000 DVDs. How many people were spurred to buy the DVD because they saw it online? We don't know."

A little later, Rich Allen offered something of a response. "I would describe our checks as modest," he said. "They don’t approach TV license fees. However, they are 1,000 fold the size of the checks a doc filmmaker has received from a theatrical release. We are looking now at a traditional business model that is definitely broken. It’s important [filmmakers] hit all of the streams. The approach of free streaming and tying it to upsell to dvd is an effective one. This is like the early days of cable, except if you look at streaming on the web you see that advertising pricing parity [to cable] has already been reached. Now it's about scaling the eyeballs so you can make reasonable money."

After the panel, Kirsner headed over to the trade show floor where he autographed copies of his new book, Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age.

For the rest of our SXSW 2009 coverage, visit our special site here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/16/2009 10:00:00 PM Comments (2)

The most unlikely act of cultural excavation and redemption, Michael Paul Stephenson's Best Worst Movie is a hilarious and poignant celebration of not only the communal experience of making and watching movies but the sheer randomness of life itself. The doc is Stephenson's attempt to find out why a seemingly execrable B-movie he made as a child actor, Troll 2, has garnered a cult following of viewers who not only get off on its badness but also find an odd kind of joy in its screwy storytelling.

While Stephenson is present in the film, he smartly chooses as the doc's focus one of his co-stars, a small-town Alabama dentist named George Hardy, who onscreen resembles a cross between Jim Nabors and Joe Biden. Hardy is the quintessential American optimist, whose sunny disposition and boundless good cheer makes him beloved by his patients, his town and even his ex-wife. Stephenson follows Hardy as he discovers that the 1989 no-budget horror film he acted in has developed a cult audience that stages parties and screenings, complete with viewers who know the film line by line and shout out its most egregious bits of dialogue. As Best Worst Movie progresses, Stephenson widens his scope, watching as Hardy reconnects with fellow co-stars, travels to screenings of the film across the country, and even reunites with the director, Claudio Fragasso, who, while he won't turn down the airline tickets to the screenings can't seem to come to grips with his film's designation on iMDB as the worst film ever made.

I'll confess here to not having seen Troll 2. And, in fact, I'll also admit that half way through this movie I wondered whether or not the whole thing was some big put-on and whether there even is a Troll 2. (Perhaps my mind was warped by having just attended Lance Weiler's ARG event.) But, as hard as it may be to swallow while watching Best Worst Movie, Troll 2, with its tale of vegetarian goblins attempting to turn a young boy's family into edible plants, is for real. Watching the footage, it's easy to see why Stephenson distanced himself from the movie for so many years and why one of its actresses basically views it as having ended her career. Indeed, the film's high-camp quotient is so extreme, and Stephenson and editors Andrew Matthews and Katie Graham are so adept in hitting every possible comic beat that big chunks of the film were inaudible over the audience's laughter.

But what makes Best Worst Movie great is not just its sheer hilarity. Indeed, Stephenson reaches for and accesses something moving and even kind of deep in his movie. From the older actor who realizes that he may have frittered away the years to the fragile, damaged actresss who played the mom to Hardy's third-act recognition that perhaps he too should put the VHS of Troll 2 away on the shelf and get back to his life, Stephenson has turned his collaborators on the film into a wistful and oddly sagacious group of commentators on subjects ranging from cultural value to aging to concepts of permanence, legacy and renewal. There are a lot of great documentaries about movies and moviemaking, but most of them either celebrate a great movie or detail a particularly crazy production. Best Worst Movie is one of the few films that focuses on the cultural and, more importantly, human trail that films leave in their wake. Highly recommended.

For the rest of our SXSW 2009 coverage, visit our special site here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/16/2009 07:24:00 PM Comments (0)

Sub-theme for me at SXSW this year: Fair Use. A day after posting my article on Tommy Pallotta about his American Prince, which employs a Fair Use strategy to include film clips illustrating doc subject Steven Prince’s life in the movies and relationship with Martin Scorsese, I run into Gerard Peary, who is here in Austin with his doc For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. His film includes interviews with critics like Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Harry Knowles, Karina Longworth and Elvis Mitchell, and it also includes clips from the films they talk about. For the latter, rather than formally licensing the clips from the rights holders, Peary relies on the doctrine of Fair Use, which holds that limited use of copyrighted material can be employed within educational or journalistic contexts.

Before relying on Fair Use, Peary researched the doctrine and employed a lawyer, Karen Shatzkin, who is an expert in its use. With Shatzkin overseeing Peary’s approach, he and producer Amy Geller (both pictured above) were able to secure E&O (Errors and Omissions) Insurance, meaning that a distributor willing to pick up the film is insured against a claim from a rights holder.

Central to For the Love of Movie’s use of clips from films like Titanic and Psycho is, as Peary says, the idea that “the words of a critic talking about a film changes the footage. It is a transformative use.” Peary says he spent months researching Fair Use; “we did not use it in a flippant way,” he adds. He also argues that the nature of the film, which is a celebration of the relationship between journalism and cinema, is its own argument for Fair Use incorporation of clips. “Our movie is a very ‘pro movie’ movie. We are using clips in a very respectful way. Anyone who would sue us, would, we hope, would take into consideration that we are not trying to attack cinema, we are trying to expand cinema.”

Still, the challenge for Peary and his film, which he has been working on for eight years, will be whether various distributors sign off on his Fair Use claims. “The interesting thing is that when even Fair Use is established, especially with television, which is the place you have the most potential to sell [a documentary], you still need television to accept Fair Use, and that doesn’t seem to be always the case. The TV stations are seemingly still very cautious. I think theatrical [distributors] are a lot less cautious, and of course film festivals are a lot more open about it.”

For a longer discussion on Fair Use issues with another filmmaker here at SXSW, check out Alicia Van Couvering's talk with RIP: A Remix Manifesto's Brett Gaylor.

See the trailer below:



Click here for the rest of our SXSW 2009 coverage.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/15/2009 07:56:00 PM Comments (5)

At SXSW, the first festival to play out after Twitter passed the tipping point, I've seen something I've never seen before at a festival: people passed out after a long night of partying with their laptops open on their laps. For those more awake, early response here has been very good for the opening night film, John Hamburg's I Love You, Man, starring Paul Rudd; David Lowery's St. Nick; Joe Swanberg's Alexander the Last; Gary Hustwit's Objectified. One outsider recommendation: at a party last night, one industry vet raved to me about 45365, which refers to the zip code of Sidney, Ohio. It wasn't on my list before but it is now.

For detailed coverage of the festival, please visit our special section that contains interviews with the filmmakers as well as a photo blog. There's my interview with Tommy Pallotta about his American Prince, Alicia Van Couvering's snap of the screen-lit aftermath of Gary Hustwit's doc, and more.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/15/2009 12:25:00 PM Comments (0)

Films set in prisons frequently depict inmates as “others,” as morality tales, and the emotional color palette of their grim lives runs from gray to black. Or the stories aim for easy, unearned inspiration. Fortunately, Bradley Beesley’s humanistic “Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo" dignifies the subjects of his documentary—female prisoners. While the film doesn’t forgive them or skirt their crimes (the majority of the women are serving stiff sentences for drug-related charges), the true subject of the film is not crime—it’s freedom.

Once a year, the inmates at Oklahoma State Prison participate in a brutal, gladiator-style rodeo—on prison grounds—while their friends, family, and complete strangers watch them compete for cash prizes. Prisoners are trampled, butted, and gored. The rodeo is an ultra-violent event, and the female inmates prepare by getting dressed in matching pink outfits and applying make-up (which is otherwise barred from the prison). The stars of the film—like Rhonda Buffalo, Brandy Witte, and Crystal Herrington—are depicted as humans, as women, and not simply as prisoners. Their lack of freedom doesn’t define their identity. These ladies are just people who messed up, got caught, and are paying the price. They’re also damn good athletes.

Is this antiquated event—which started in 1940—exploitative? Repulsive? Perhaps. Do the inmates seem to mind? You couldn’t tell by looking at them. This event is what they look forward to for the entire preceding year. Prison “is boredom,” states inmate Danny Liles, and the risk of being stomped by a bull is preferable to spending 23 hours a day in a cell.

Beesley, a veteran documentary director of the cult classic “Okie Noodling” as well as “The Fearless Freaks” (which profiled The Flaming Lips), manages to reveal the humanity of his characters—their hopes, fears, dreams, and regrets—while they train for the rodeo. A formally elegant film, its tone gentle and humorous, “Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo” gains a profound gravity as it charts a deceptively simple path to the main event: the 2006 Oklahoma State Prison Rodeo, which allowed—for the first time—female inmates to compete against males.

Much like “The Fearless Freaks,” which made a sobering tonal shift when musician Steven Drozd became explicitly candid about his heroin addiction, “Sweethearts”’ possesses a deep reserve of emotion that is earned by staying close to its subjects’ desires—release from prison, a visit from family members, or a day at the rodeo. What these men and women want, we want.

It’s simple, right? Freedom, family, forgiveness—these are human needs. Without ever loudly announcing its statement of purpose, while focusing on bulls and broncos and adrenaline, “Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo” makes a plea for human dignity and compassion.

(Full Disclosure Note: The producer of this film, Amy Dotson, is the Deputy Director of the IFP, the parent organization of Filmmaker -- Editor.)
For more of our SXSW coverage, click to our special page here.

# posted by James Ponsoldt @ 3/14/2009 05:38:00 PM Comments (0)

SXSW kicks off today, and here at Filmmaker we've aggregated our coverage in a standalone page that you can reach by clicking here. Up now are a number of pieces, including Alicia Van Couvering's interviews with Joe Swanberg, whose Alexander the Last premieres this weekend and is available nation-wide on IFC On Demand, and the team of Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones of the film Breaking Upwards. There's also Ry Russo-Young's conversation with editor Lance Edmands and a series of "Austin Survival Tips" we've collected from a number of SXSW vets. I'll be moderating the DIY distribution panel Sunday at 1:00 pm, so if you are there come up and say hello. And check back throughout the festival for more features, blog posts and pictures from the festival.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/13/2009 11:42:00 AM Comments (0)

From Variety comes news of an executive reorganization at Fox, with the big news for independents that Peter Rice, president of Fox Searchlight, will be moving over to become chairman of Fox Broadcasting. Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula, formerly COO's of the specialty label, will now jointly take over Rice's job.

From the press release as published at Deadline Hollywood Daily:

“Peter Rice is one of our most talented creative executives, having championed such films as Slumdog Millionaire, Little Miss Sunshine, and Juno during his tenure at Fox Searchlight. As we increasingly look to apply unconventional approaches to our traditional businesses, I’m convinced Peter Rice is the right person to transform our broadcast television business.”

With Mr. Rice’s departure at Fox Searchlight, Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula will jointly run the business, reporting to Mr. Gianopulos and Mr. Rothman. Nancy and Steve, COOs of Fox Searchlight, who have been Mr. Rice’s partners through all of the unit’s great successes, will assume full authority for the business. Claudia Lewis, president of production, remains in place.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/12/2009 05:56:00 PM Comments (0)

Film Independent announced today that producer and former executive and festival programmer Rebecca Yeldham has accepted the post of Director of the Los Angeles Film Festival.

From the press release:

“Rebecca has a wide range of experience in the industry and she’s an inspiring leader -- her many talents make her a natural fit for the Los Angeles Film Festival,” said Dawn Hudson, Executive Director of Film Independent. “She has been intimately involved in the building of this festival and the organization over the last nine years as a Film Independent Board member. Rebecca shares our vision of expanding the festival within Los Angeles and the global film community by introducing audiences to unique filmmakers and their films.”

“Dawn and her team have done an amazing job growing the Los Angeles Film Festival over the last few years,” said Yeldham. “In these times, there is such a desire to come together and celebrate our unique city, community and industry, to bridge differences and champion great filmmaking and film-going experiences. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to join this dynamic team and lead the charge in taking this Festival to the next level.”

She steps into the position vacated by Rich Raddon, who resigned in November following controversy over his support of California's Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage. Rachel Rosen remains the Director of Programming. Yeldham, who is a member of the Film Independent board, has most recently been a producing parter with filmmaker Walter Salles and was previously Senior V.P. of Production at FilmFour and, from 1997 - 2001, Senior Programmer of the Sundance Film Festival.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/12/2009 02:29:00 PM Comments (0)

If you have a film at SXSW and would like to send short reports on the festival, your film, and your experience there for Filmmaker blog posting consideration, you can email me at editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com. We have a number of feature interviews going up throughout the festival, and we'll be posting from the ground, but Filmmaker always welcomes first-person pieces from those involved with the films themselves. And, if you are attending, stop by my panel on Sunday at 1:00pm. (Why does the SXSW calendar function keep auto-syncing it do my calendar at 2:00pm?) It's entitled "Self-Distribution: Not All By Yourself," and here is how it is described:

Mention the words "self-distribution" to an independent filmmaker, and weeks filled with envelope stuffing, print shuttling, and Quickbook keystroking come to mind. But, these days, a DIY approach to distribution doesn't actually mean that you have to do it all yourself. Join veterans of the distribution wars as they help you understand the network of deals and alliances that filmmakers can strike themselves in order to get their films in front of audiences.

I am moderating and my fellow panelists are Chris Hyams, CEO and Founder of B-Side; Richard Abramowitz of Abramorama; filmmaker Jon Reiss, whose articles on DIY distribution have been appearing in Filmmaker; and Caitlin Boyle of Paradigm Consulting. I'll be covering what the paragraph about said but also the inverse: in a DIY or so-called "hybrid" distribution scenario, one in which various consultants and partners have been brought on board, what are the things that it are essential for the director to be energetically involved with?

If you are a reader of the magazine, come up and say hello afterwards, and for those who won't be there, I'll try to post some notes on the blog.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/12/2009 10:21:00 AM Comments (0)

As I sit here editing the interviews and short reports we'll be posting in our SXSW section beginning Thursday night/Friday morning, I'm wondering what level of SXSW reporting rises to the level of the impactful meaningfulness we aspire to on this blog. There is less industry news at SXSW, and fewer (try no) eight-figure acquisitions... but does that mean that we should be promoting a contest in which all you aspiring filmmakers create a music video for Double D's "South By Girls"?

From the site:

It all started as a joke. On a Twitter challenge from a record-industry friend, Eston made a rap song about SXSWi. While we weren’t able to finish the video in time for SXSW, that doesn’t mean that you can’t. Make a video using Double D’s single and submit it to the Vimeo group by April 1, 2009. Our kick-ass panel of judges will then choose the best video and the winner will be sent a $199 gift card valid in any U.S. Apple Store.

Remember, the more you show your geek-gangsta cred, the better.

The blogosphere is mildly amused, even Wired's Chris Anderson who blogs, "Now I can die happy" and quotes the relevant lyrics:

Fuck the panels, there ain't one girl ta talk to
I didn't fly here to see some Wired dude

You want The Long Tail? Well that's the wrong tail
Imma take these geek girls back to ma hotel

Who wrote these lines? According to the site, Eston Bond:

Eston is the writer of “South By Girls.” An ex-Facebooker and designer at young startup iList, Inc., Eston is an avid lover of underground hip-hop and electronic music. He’ll pound out tracks in Ableton at night and then pound out JavaScript the next morning. His hint for the contest? Be a geek, but keep it trashy.

The full lyrics can be viewed here.

Entries must be uploaded to the contest's Vimeo group by April 1. Austin attendees (and even those staying home), start your Flip cameras...

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/11/2009 10:04:00 PM Comments (1)

Former publicist Reid Rosefelt resurfaces today with the launch of SpeedCine, a site that acts as a database for legal film viewing and downloading on the web. It's a clever idea. You scan through the titles listed on the site, click one, and you're sent to a page with links to the various viewing options on the 'net. For example, say I want to watch Jeff Lipsky's Flannel Pajamas. One click and I see that I can instantly watch it on Amazon VOD or, if I have a subscription, via Netflix. I can also download to rent from Jaman or Amazon, or download to own from Amazon VOD. Antonioni's Il Grido? I can watch instantly at The Auteurs or download to DVD from EZTakes and iArthouse. Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks? I need a subscription to watch instantly or download at Movieflix.

The site is a database, not a search engine, ostensibly to prevent torrents from showing up in the results. Anne Thompson spoke to Rosefelt about the site over at her Thompson on Hollywood blog. From her piece:

SpeedCine is a small-scale demonstration model of what Rosefelt and Harris eventually want to do. This version boasts a selection of 150 feature titles (no shorts) that are available for free online. Later, when SpeedCine piques the interest of potential partners, Rosefelt and Harris will expand to the bigger better version, with a planned relaunch this summer. There, a film fan would register and type in their profile specs--say, PC/TiVo user looking to rent a video--and their search would come up. Ideally, that same user could travel to France and change their specs accordingly.

Rosefelt figures that once people see how the site works, venture capital will follow. He's hoping to build relationships and share data with sites such as Amazon, Netflix and iTunes, and generate revenue from driving traffic to his affiliates, as opposed to just selling ads. "This will work for the whole industry," he declares. "I believe that everybody will do better with this."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/11/2009 06:23:00 PM Comments (0)

Tonight the Sundance Institute announced the appointment of John Cooper as the new director of the Sundance Film Festival. Cooper has been with Sundance for 20 years and now, following Geoff Gilmore's departure to Tribeca Enterprises, steps into the leadership position. When Holly Willis interviewed him for this magazine three years ago she wrote, "Funny, self-deprecating and entirely approachable, Cooper is known to thousands of American filmmakers as the guy who calls with really excellent news. For the festival, he’s integral, the armature that supports everything." We congratulate Cooper on the appointment and look forward to talking with him in the weeks ahead about his plans for the festival.

From the press release:

Sundance Institute today announced the appointment of John Cooper as Director of the Sundance Film Festival. Effective immediately, Mr. Cooper will serve as the Festival's artistic director leading the Festival's programming and strategic growth, also overseeing activities such as content production, online initiatives and key national and international partnerships. Mr. Cooper previously served as Director, Creative Development for the Sundance Institute and Director of Programming, Sundance Film Festival.

Highly respected by the film community and known for his innovative style, Mr. Cooper joined Sundance Institute in 1989 and has played a pivotal role in both the evolution of Sundance Film Festival and the development of the Sundance Institute's new initiatives. Long committed to diversity and building audiences for independent film, he has pioneered the Institute's expansion of cinematic storytelling by fostering the development of New Frontier on Main, the intersection of contemporary artists with technology and the moving image; boosted the Festival's now content-rich website, enabling a virtual Festival experience for film lovers all over the world; and led the distribution of short films through strategic relationships with iTunes, Netflix and Xbox 360 platforms. Last year Mr. Cooper was instrumental in engaging Blue State Digital, architects of President Obama's groundbreaking online campaign, to connect with the Institute's film and theater alumni, enhancing donor communication, and the recruitment of new Institute and Festival supporters. In addition to programming the popular Sundance Institute at BAM series, since 2005 Mr. Cooper has spearheaded The Sundance Institute Art House Project, a national initiative of 18 art houses from across the country designed to connect regional audiences to the Sundance's films and filmmakers.

Robert Redford, Sundance Institute President and Founder said, "When we established the Festival, it was always with two goals in mind: supporting new artists and inspiring new audiences. Cooper has never lost sight of these goals. He brings to the position an infectious enthusiasm as well as a deep understanding of the Sundance brand and culture. Forward thinking, he is a natural choice of succession to lead the Festival into the 21st century."

Added Ken Brecher, Executive Director of the Sundance Institute, “The Trustees and I are very pleased that Cooper has agreed to serve as the Festival's new director. To have such an innovative leader who is very much in tune with the needs and interests of today's filmmakers is invaluable."

"This is a tremendous opportunity not just for me but for the entire programming team," Mr. Cooper said. "Our industry is at a crossroads: innovative technology and global accessibility are making filmmaking wildly creative while, at the same time, traditional funding and distribution models are being challenged. Never has our Festival been more relevant. I am honored to accept this position and ready to get to work on shaping the Festival of the future."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/11/2009 03:01:00 AM Comments (2)

Today Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York are released on DVD and Blu-Ray. We're giving away 1 DVD & Blu-Ray disc of each film to the first people to e-mail us the correct answers to the designated questions below. The answers can be found in our stories on the films in the Fall, 2008 issue.

E-mail your answer to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com. (In subject line put in the film title and either "DVD" or "Blu-Ray" so we know what question you're answering. Please only answer 1 question.) The winners will be notified and mailed the disc.

DEADLINE is 5:00 pm (EST) today. Good Luck!

(DISCLAIMER: Contest is only available for those living in the U.S.)

Rachel Getting Married
DVD QUESTION: What did Rosemarie DeWitt say inspired her to jump and hit the ceiling at the end of the film? (REMEMBER: When you e-mail the answer type "Rachel Getting Married DVD" in the subject line)

BLU-RAY QUESTION: What film does Jonathan Demme say is the first time he trusted his actors to take full responsibility of their characters? (REMEMBER: When you e-mail the answer type "Rachel Getting Married BLU-RAY" in the subject line)


Synecdoche, New York
DVD QUESTION: Who does Charlie Kaufman say was the person who conviced him he didn't need to reshoot the ending of the film? (REMEMBER: When you e-mail the answer type "Synecdoche, New York DVD" in the subject line)

BLU-RAY QUESTION: What does Kaufman say his reason was for hiring editor Rob Frazen? (REMEMBER: When you e-mail the answer type "Synecdoche, New York BLU-RAY" in the subject line)

Update: We have our winners. Congrats, everyone. The answers are: "Hitting the attic door in her house," "shooting Citizen's Band," "Phil Hoffman," and "the work of Nicole Holofcener."

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3/10/2009 12:00:00 PM Comments (0)

Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, who used to date, made a movie called Breaking Upwards about breaking up with each other starring themselves.  The fourth of four promos for their SXSW premiere came out today.  The first promo is a rap video with Olivia Thirlby rhyming "SAG Modified Low" to other things, in her bra. Daryl gets naked.

# posted by Alicia Van Couvering @ 3/09/2009 12:20:00 PM Comments (2)

While we wait for a resolution to the problems facing the New York Film and Television Tax Credit program, pressures mount on the filmmaking community here in New York as more productions contemplate moving out of the State. The latest is the HBO series In Treatment.

From Roger Kimpton in the New York Post:

The executive producer of HBO's In Treatment series said he will yank the show and its 70 jobs from the Big Apple if Gov. Paterson doesn't fund the state's 30 percent tax credit for TV and movie production.

The producer, Warren Leight, said the four episodes left to film this season will be the last in New York if the money isn't forthcoming - he is ready to take California's tax credit cash and move 3,000 miles away.

"Not knowing what's happening here is scary for them," Leight says of his crew, all of which are New Yorkers hired recently when the show moved its production from Los Angeles-specifically because of the tax credits.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/09/2009 11:51:00 AM Comments (3)

A bit late to the Dance Party USA, David Denby discovers mumblecore in this week's New Yorker, devoting his entire film column to the genre.

From the piece:

You’re about twenty-five years old, and you’re no more than, shall we say, intermittently employed, so you spend a great deal of time talking with friends about trivial things or about love affairs that ended or never quite happened; and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you fall into bed, or almost fall into bed and just enjoy the flirtation, with someone in the group. This chatty sitting around, with sex occasionally added, is not the sole subject of “mumblecore,” a recent genre of micro-budget independent movies, but it’s a dominant one. Mumblecore movies are made by buddies, casual and serious lovers, and networks of friends, and they’re about college-educated men and women who aren’t driven by ideas or by passions or even by a desire to make their way in the world. Neither rebels nor bohemians, they remain stuck in a limbo of semi-genteel, moderately hip poverty, though some of the films end with a lurch into the working world. The actors (almost always nonprofessionals) rarely say what they mean; a lot of the time, they don’t know what they mean. The movies tell stories but they’re also a kind of lyrical documentary of American stasis and inarticulateness.

Channelling Margaret Mead, Denby forages through some of the familiar discussions of the m-word before the piece reveals itself to be a long wind-up to a brief discussion of Joe Swanberg's Alexander the Last, which will be premiering at SXSW this weekend and then going immediately to IFC On Demand. While some of us in the blogosphere may find Denby's acknowledgement of these films, which have bubbling up since 2002, rather tardy, the real story here is the fact that the genre's slow burn, its public cresting just as most of its practitioners have distanced themselves from the label, has leveraged major media play for films that premiere not in theaters but at festivals. From what I understand, other Big Media Outlets are having their film reviewers cover Swanberg's latest as well, making it something of a watershed event.

I also think Denby has touched on the apt directorial reference for Swanberg and some of his colleagues as they move forward: Eric Rohmer.

In Alexander the Last, the project is a local theatre production. A married actress (Jess Weixler) attracted to a good-looking actor she’s working with contemplates an affair with him, only to discover that her sister, with whom she’s very close, is already sleeping with him. The story, in its formal symmetries, suggests one of Éric Rohmer’s narratives of advance and retreat in Six Moral Tales. In the past, people in Swanberg’s movies slept with one another without much consequence—the plots were not fully worked out, and many implications, not to mention relationships, were left hanging. The slapdash style of storytelling was part of Swanberg’s cool contempt for mainstream filmmaking. But in Alexander the Last he’s advancing toward a firmer structure and more emotionally explicit scenes.

I'll let you all decide whether Rohmer is a comparison or a goal, but his name popped into my head as well as I watched Swanberg's latest movie. Alicia Van Couvering's interview with Swanberg will appear this week as part of our SXSW standalone section, but in the meantime you can check out her lengthy article on mumblecore, "What I Meant to Say," from our Spring 2007 issue.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/09/2009 11:19:00 AM Comments (4)

The economic crisis has hit filmmaker Ken Burns. As reported in the Detroit News, General Motors, which has been a major funder of the director, is ceasing its support due to its own economic woes.

From the piece by Robert Snell:

The cash crunch ends a 22-year relationship between GM and Burns, a graduate of Ann Arbor's Pioneer High School and award-winning filmmaker who has created documentaries for public television about the nation's wars, jazz and baseball, among others. Under a 10-year deal that started in 1999, GM paid for 35 percent of each film's budget and funded educational outreach programs tied to each documentary.

While exact figures were not available, GM has spent millions underwriting Burns' films. The last film made under the deal is The National Parks: America's Best Idea, a six-part series that airs this fall...

Under the GM deal, Burns and his production company, Florentine Films, agreed to produce one film a year. GM provided funding to support production, marketing and educational programs.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/09/2009 10:55:00 AM Comments (0)

Will Oldham, AKA Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, has always had distinctive music videos, directed by talented folks like Braden King, Harmony Korine, and Andy Bruntel.

"Beware," the new Bonnie 'Prince' Billy album, will be released on March 17th, and the album's first single ("I Am Goodbye")--directed by Jennifer Parsons and Leif Johnson--is striking for its lo-fi elegance and beauty.

Oldham is a compelling performer, both on stage and screen (from "Matewan" to "Old Joy" and "The Guatemalan Handshake"). In "I Am Goodbye," Mr. Billy strolls through the streets of Los Angeles, grinning and bouncing and singing his heart out. It's a joyous walk, a perfect evening, and it's near impossible to take your eyes off the video's bushy-bearded, crescent-wearing star.

# posted by James Ponsoldt @ 3/09/2009 04:08:00 AM Comments (0)

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to find myself in Columbia, Missouri, for the fantastic True/False Film Fest.

True/False is one of the premiere documentary film festivals in the world, and it's distinctive not only for the inspired programming and thoughtful panels, but also because the filmmakers and audiences alike are treated really well. How many other film festivals feature a parade through town, buskers performing before each film screening, and a thank you video?



Centered around the beautiful Ragtag Theater in downtown Columbia, this year's festival killed.

In the next few days I'll add posts about some of my favorite films from the festival (like "Loot," "Glastonburykids," and "O'er The Land"), but for now, here's the magical, inspired "documentary" video that played before screenings at True/False.

# posted by James Ponsoldt @ 3/09/2009 02:57:00 AM Comments (1)

Mann, Depp, Bale, French Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard, and digital cinematography by Dante Spinotti... what do you think?

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/08/2009 07:24:00 PM Comments (2)

Here are a few links that have caught my eye in the past week:

Barack Obama is doing his small part to cut back on federal spending by regifting an AFI box set of the "25 Greatest American Films of all Time" to visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As The Guardian reports, the British press is up in arms by the chintzy perceived snub, noting that Brown previously gave Obama a pen carved from the sister ship the White House desk is made from and a first edition of a seven-volume Churchill biography. The gift has also turned political commentators into cultural theorists as they parse the possible meanings of the exchange. From The Guardian:

It's difficult to resist reading political messages into these films. Like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, could Brown have been "a contender ... a somebody" if the US Congress had shown a little more interest in his global New Deal? Like Luke Skywalker on the Millennium Falcon, is Brown's history of support for light-touch financial regulation in the City of London now endangering the mission?

The 25 films also include two from the end of the Great Depression: the Grapes of Wrath (recommended to Obama on this blog a while back) and the Wizard of Oz. Perhaps there is something here. A 1990 paper in the Journal of Political Economy argued it could be read as monetary allegory: in this interpretation the yellow brick road represents the gold standard (a return to which is not US policy).

The set also include three of Obama's five personal favourites, according to his Facebook page: Casablanca, The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia (omitted are the second Godfather film and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

In a second wave of Sundance '09 acquisitions, two docs have been picked up for theatrical release. Oscilloscope nabbed Burma VJ, with HBO getting pay cable rights, and Lion's Gate/Roadside Attractions has bought The Cove. The latter deal features even more partners, with Participant coming aboard to do "outreach to non-profit and community groups" and the U.K. sales co The Works doing foreign with the Quickfire Films Fund.

Interesting discussion between pioneering video artist Dara Birnbaum and the inventive younger media artist Cory Arcangel in Artforum. The two discuss a moment I remember well -- a time in which artists felt that emerging technologies would create spaces in the popular culture for a kind of referential pop post-modern art. An excerpt:

CA: I swear I saw your MTV “Art Break” when I was a kid. I was glued to MTV.

DB: You had to be glued to see it, it went by so fast. But I think what’s more significant in all these examples is that one is getting inside popular culture as opposed to the frameworks of institutional art spaces. I used to talk about how Bertolt Brecht would refer to mediums such as the newspaper, radio, or television and how they had the tendency to fulfill themselves and then become overinflated. All of a sudden there are holes within their structures, and then other substances could penetrate. That’s what happened with cable, for instance. Artists believed that they had finally found a spot within which they could operate; holes opened up and they inserted work into them.

CA: I think I’m definitely in a parallel situation today when it comes to the question of context. You made videos and found it interesting to place them in clubs; my videos go on view in galleries, but I’ll also put them online. And just as the galleries weren’t interested in your video work because they thought it was just TV, they weren’t so interested in my work at the beginning. They just didn’t see it as art.

DB: I initially avoided galleries like the plague. I didn’t want to translate popular imagery from television and film into painting and photography. I wanted to use video on video; I wanted to use television on television. A lot of us who went into video at the beginning did so because we thought art shouldn’t be made in limited editions, and in video we finally had an eminently reproducible medium that could get out into the hands of many. It was a populist form, and our great hope was to do something that made it to Kim’s Video store. You know? I didn’t want to be collected. I wanted to talk. Looking back, there were different test runs to promote this way of distribution for artists, but nothing ever truly supported that vision.

Len Klady looks at the uncertain profitability of Watchmen.

Sue Zeidler at Reuters writes about another shoe dropping: with hedge fund-backed studio slate deals underperforming, hedge funds are pulling out, selling their positions to specialty investors who are buying these assets at discounts ranging from 30 to 70 percent. On the one hand, this development signals the belief that film assets have a long-term value. On the other, it points to the fact that another source of movie financing is retreating (not surprising, given the economy). The article says that the next round of studio financing may wind up being asset-backed (meaning, studio film libraries will form the collateral).

A great new feature at Hammer to Nail: The Blueprint, in which a director discusses the specifics of his or her moviemaking process. The debut column features Mike Ryan discussing with writer/director Ira Sachs his 40 Shades of Blue.

Finally, as you may have noted from a previous post, Filmmaker now has a Twitter account. I signed up with more than a hint of anxiety about the process, worrying that the microblogging service was going to become just another attention-distracting time-waster and that I'd get little out of it. So far, though, I'm enjoying it. It's less frivolous than I thought. This article by Julia Angwin at the Wall St. Journal Online entitled "How to Twitter" does a good of explaining how a brand -- a film, a publication, or a pundit -- might begin to engage with the platform. Related: Tony H. at Zappos on "How Twitter Can Make You a Better (and Happier) Person."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/08/2009 04:50:00 PM Comments (0)

Having long been interested in compositional mash-ups (from Stockhausen to the Beatles, Holger Czukay, Byrne/Eno, John Oswald, Christian Marclay and myriad hip-hop artists), I guess I am late to the party when it comes to Israeli producer Kutiman, who has become an internet star by remixing the work of musicians who have uploaded their own work to YouTube. He has created a video album, Thru You comprised entirely of unrelated YouTube clips. It's pretty great. Here Kutiman explains his approach:



And here's probably the flashiest of the clips, but check out the album link above as I actually prefer some of the slower, more soulful selections.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/08/2009 03:07:00 PM Comments (0)

Entertainment attorney Steven Beer of Greenberg, Traurig prepared the below in advance of his presentation this weekend at the IFP's Script to Screen conference, and he was kind enough to let the blog publish it. For those attending the conference, Beer will discuss these points further tomorrow at the New York Film Academy, 100 East 17th Street, New York, New York 10003. The "Tips from the Pros" panel will be on Sunday, March 8, 2009 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.


I am excited to address this topic. From my experience, not enough attention is paid to packaging and pitching projects. When done artfully, there is no better way to pitch yourself. The following are some of the tips I will be presenting at the Script to Screen Conference on Sunday, March 8.

Tip #1 - Be prepared.
Use your best industry contacts and Internet research to understand your audience. What project has he or she worked on recently? What aspect of the market interests him or her the most? Like the prince in Cinderella, your goal is to find the shoe that fits.

Tip #2 - Pitch franchises, not projects.
Industry executives seek projects with broad opportunities for derivative and ancillary works that can succeed independently while marketing each other. While the quality of your package is critical, a user-friendly and complimentary business plan can be indispensable.

Tip #3 - Be short and sweet.
Prepare materials that are concise and easily digested. Dispense with dense materials. While information is important, your job is to raise intrigue. Don't play all your cards at once. Like your screenplay, your pitch should have a beginning, middle and end, so that you will leave the executive wanting more.

Tip #4 - Be the Yankees.
Pick proven All-Stars to make up your team. Choosing experienced and successful individuals and entities to support you will establish your credibility in the industry.

Tip #5 - Be protected.
Register your materials with the Writers Guild of America and the United States Copyright Office. Where appropriate, use non-disclosure agreements to avoid theft of your intellectual property. Where possible, resist signing documents that require you to waive prospective copyright claims as a condition of your pitch.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/07/2009 01:17:00 PM Comments (0)

Philippe Petit's brief bit of coin sleight-of-hand and Oscar chin-balancing when James Marsh's Man on Wire won the Oscar was one of the more entertaining moments at this year's Academy Awards. Now, on his website, New York magician David Blaine posts a video of a kind of magical face-off that occurred when he ran into the French tightrope-walker on the street.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/06/2009 10:07:00 PM Comments (2)

With two of our favorites, Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche, New York, coming out on Blu-Ray and DVD next Tuesday, we're going to hold a contest with the first person to e-mail us the correct answers to our questions receiving a Blu-Ray or DVD of the films. Check back to the blog next Tuesday at 12:00pm (EST) for the questions.

(DISCLAIMER: Contest is only available for those living in the U.S.)

The answers will be found in our stories on the films in the Fall, 2008 issue. We are only giving away 1 Blu-Ray and DVD for each film.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3/06/2009 09:00:00 AM Comments (1)

"Everything is over 6" -- meaning budgeted millions -- "or under 1," a producer friend says. "There are no 3s." "Everything's 3 now," an agent counters in an unrelated conversation. "3 is the new '6 - 8.'" "1 - 3 is impossible -- it's the union/non-union no-man's land," I paraphrase another producing friend. Meanwhile, more than one financier says to me, "1.2 is the number."

How to keep it all straight?

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/05/2009 02:26:00 PM Comments (2)

In addition to a spectacular weekend of New York City movie-viewing opportunities, which Michael Tully has thoughtfully laid out for you at Hammer to Nail, the writer/director/artist/performer Miranda July will be participating in the second annual Brainwave Festival at the Rubin Museum in Chelsea. July will be joining a line-up that includes Paul Simon, Lewis Black, Darren Aronofsky, Eric Fischl, Mario Battali, Tom Wolfe and Laurie Anderson. The various talks and presentations all, according to the website, deal with "intersection of mind and matter" and many pair artists with neuroscientists.

July's event, which takes place Saturday, March 7, at 6pm, is described thusly: "Indie-filmmaker and writer Miranda July discusses the spontaneity and planning of performance in creating her film Me You and Everyone We Know and writing the short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You with Columbia University psychologist George Bonanno."

July is interviewed today by Billy Parker at the Gothamist, and she discusses one of her favorite places to stay in New York:

When I was promoting the book, as I mentioned, I often stay at the Chelsea Hotel. So when the publisher was putting me up, I think they probably would have leaned towards somewhere a little nicer than that. But when I insisted on the Chelsea, I think someone just said, "We'll get her the best room there, which is probably still not that much." But you know that place is run by sort of insane people so they have a place that I think no one ever rents which is essentially like a house, that is many bedrooms and bathrooms. So that's where I stayed and I was there for like more than a week and I had a couple of friends stay with me in the other bedrooms. It was a very bizarre New York experience. And actually I think my birthday happened or something and we decorated with balloons and streamers so it got even weirder. The extra funny part was when we were checking out it was actually extremely expensive, like more than the fanciest room anywhere. So that ended up being a humbling moment because it wasn't clear yet that my book was going to sell at all and I was like, "Well, I hope it's just enough to pay for this room."

(Photo: RJ Shaughnessy)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/05/2009 10:55:00 AM Comments (1)

If you believe in the trend presaged by this week's rumble between Facebook and Twitter (briefly, after failing to buy the microblogging service, Facebook is redesigning its home page to incorporate more of the immediate news and info-streaming features that Twitter has made popular), then we are moving towards an always-on, always-connected social reality. We will no longer "log on" or "check our email." Bytes of data will be like air, a digital cloud the intake of which we won't really think about.

Of the Facebook change, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says, "As people share more, the timeline gets filled in more and more with what is happening with everything you're connected to. "The pace of updates accelerates. This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it."

The problem with all of this is that a kind of offline time -- those in-between moments in which the mind is freed to contemplate and do the mental work required to sustain long-term projects -- is going away. Jack Cheng, a web designer who blogs at JackCheng.com, has a lovely post, "In Praise of Lo-Fi," that discusses just this issue:

Whenever I travel, I feel a remarkable sense of clarity on the return trip. It usually hits me as I’m staring out the window of the airplane cabin or train car. I think it happens because on the way there, you have all this pent-up anticipation—you’re looking forward to seeing old friends or new cities, and chances are you’re still worrying a bit about hotel confirmations. And whether all your stuff made it through airport security.

But it’s different on the way home. You know exactly where you’re headed and what’s happening once you set foot on solid ground. If you’re coming back from vacation, you’re probably not in any hurry to return to the chaos of everyday life. If there aren’t any crying babies or stray pigeons, you’re happy where you are, taking in the now of things.

Plus it helps that there’s no wi-fi or cell coverage on that plane, am I right?

“For your information, the Internet—if you’re connected to it— automatically turns off at 10,000 feet during descent.”

I heard those words for the first time on my way back from LA last week, thanks to the inflight wi-fi service on my American Airlines jet. Scary. If you’re reading this site, it’s likely that having an instantaneous, always-connected, accessible-everywhere pipe of information is already the rule, rather than the exception. And the way we’re headed, disconnectedness is turning into even more of an anomaly.

It’s scary because I don’t think we’re properly equipped to deal with the new choices technology offers us. In the grand scheme of things, the way our brains are wired hasn’t changed much over the past few centuries—we’re running new software on old hardware.

So what happens when the situations that once forced us to disconnect start to disappear? What happens when the entire globe is blanketed with wi-fi and iPhones don’t run out of batteries? What happens when we have to consciously decide to switch things off?

Cheng goes on to discuss the extreme measures that some have gone to to create their own digital-free Walden Pond. One person is the writer Rob Long, who booked passage from Seattle to Shanghai on one of the few passenger compartments on an industrial freighter so he could finish his screenplay free from wi-fi, on-demand, pay-per-view, hotel room porn, Twitter, Facebook and the like. The blog's comments thread has presented other, less-radical solutions, like the software program Freedom, which disables the internet for up to eight hours at a time from one's laptop (an unsatisfactory solution -- one can re-enable it by re-booting), cancelling cable, getting rid of TiVo, and going on a self-imposed media fast. There's this 1998 quote from William Gibson:

As for myself, I feel more connected to the entire planet sitting alone out in nature than I do connected to the Internet supposedly "connected" to millions of people. The more connections the more noise. Thus I find the less but more meaningful connections I have, the more connected I feel. In other words, there's a really big difference between "connected" and "distracted". :)

For those who are not ready to accept the pastoral come-on of online shutdown, and who simply wanted to be prodded to focus , there's Dr. Wicked's Writing Lab. From their site:

The idea is to instill in the would-be writer with a fear of not writing. We do this by employing principles taught in Introduction to Psychology. Anyone remember Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement?

Negative Reinforcement "strengthens a behavior because a negative condition is stopped or avoided as a consequence of the behavior."

Consequences:

Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.

Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.

Kamikaze Mode: Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself

These consequences will persist until your preset conditions have been met (that is, your time is up or you've written you wordcount goal or both)

This text box is not a word processor, it is not for editing, the way to save is to select all of the text, copy and paste into your own text editor. The idea is to separate the writing process and the editing process as much as possible.

This is aimed at anyone who wants to get writing done. It requires only that you recognize your own tendency towards self-sabotage and be willing to do something about it. If you're sick of saccharine writing advice that no one could honestly follow and you want a real method to getting work done.

Hat tips: Ted Hope and Alex Johnson.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/05/2009 09:32:00 AM Comments (2)

There's a superb interview with Michel Gondry by Nick Bradshaw up on The Guardian's film page. It's great because what starts off as a straightforward dialogue about Gondry's judging of a short online film competition for Babelgum riffs off into a wide-ranging discourse on the problems with contests, censorship vs. self-censorship, the siren call of the web's dark places, the challenges involved in music video creation, and why his short Rubik's cube videos got him more props from Kevin Spacey than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

An excerpt:

I think you should be able to censor yourself. If you allow censorship then it's always going to be used to give more power to people who already have power. I think your brain goes in waves – sometimes you feel strong, like in the morning, and at these moments you could make a decision that stops you being weak another time. Like drink dialling, that's terrible. They should have systems on your computer: you'd have to do mathematical equations before you go on the net. Then you could not email your ex-girlfriend and tell her how much you love her, which is the last thing you want to do when you're sober.

Or let's say I go to this dirty website and do my dirty business, whatever it is: then I regret it, and I should be then able to censor myself. Then the next time I want to go, I'd have made a decision when I was in a better place in my mind. That's how censorship should work, but no one's going to bring out the tools to do that. It's too bad because I think it would be a good idea. That's my new policy – self-censorship.

By the way, Michel Gondry's third of the anthology film Tokyo (pictured), which opens soon, is absolutely lovely. The story of a couple crashing in a very tiny Tokyo apartment while searching for both work and artistic fulfillment, it unfolds with the uncanny logic of a dream both disquieting and comforting. Highly recommended.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/03/2009 02:55:00 PM Comments (2)

Via the PrepShootPost blog comes news of the Panasonic new Lumix DMC-GH1, which is the latest in the new still cameras that have great video recording capabilities. From the blog's Eric Escobar:

Pretty awesome next generation HDSLR hybrid still/ video camera from Panasonic (f' yeah Panasonic!). Shoots 1080P/24 and 720P/60, if it's priced like it's predecessor expect it to be for around US$1200 with a standard zoom lens. And it's got way more options for manual controls in video mode than the Canon or the Nikon.

Click to his blog post for an update with a few relevant details (like the fact that the camera writes its files as 60i).

Panasonic's press release is here, and the original Engadget post is here. From Engadget:

Not even a year after its Lumix DMC-G1 got all the glory as the first Micro Four Thirds camera on the market, Panasonic is back with a slightly tweaked version in the DMC-GH1. We say slightly tweaked since the exterior is more or less the same, but under the hood the camera has 1080p recording at 24 frames per second, or 720p recording at 60 fps, which the camera stores to AVCHD format. Panasonic has also included continuos auto focus, something lacking from most DSLRs with video capability. Users can set the shutter speed and aperture manually, and record stereo audio -- with an optional external mic if they so choose. The camera shoots 12.1 megapixel stills just like the G1, and now offers iPhoto-style Face Recognition in addition to Face Detection to make sure particular people are well exposed and in focus. No word yet on price or availability.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/03/2009 01:43:00 PM Comments (3)

Via Boing Boing comes this info-age definition of chutzpah: one of the owners of P2P site The Pirate Bay, currently on trial in Stockholm for "complicity to making copyrighted material accessible," fixed a server problem on the site remotely from the courtroom by using his laptop while his lawyer was making arguments.

From the post:

Thepiratebay.org was down during the best part of Monday, which had a good deal of file-sharing folks worried that the website might be down for good this time. Thankfully for them, he had his trusty laptop at hand and could restart the server remotely, so that eager fileswappers could get back inside.

-We have Internet access [in the court room] so it was no problem, Neij told Expressen today (Tuesday);

-Besides, I’m keeping up with the coverage of the trial.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/03/2009 12:25:00 PM Comments (0)

After a four year absence from shooting in his beloved New York City, Woody Allen's latest film Whatever Works -- starring Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr -- will open this year's Tribeca Film Festival.

In a press release sent out today, the festival announced the film, which will be released by Sony Pictures Classics in the summer, will screen at the festival on April 22.

The festival will run from April 22 - May 3.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3/02/2009 03:12:00 PM Comments (2)

Via Pitchfork comes this unexpected but delightful news that Iggy Pop is making an album of New Orleans-styled jazz songs inspired by the French writer Michel Houellebecq's quite excellent latest novel, The Possibility of an Island. Entitled Preliminaires, the album is an outgrowth of a songs Pop made for a documentary about the French author's making of his novel into a film.

Pop has made a wonderful video trailer for the album, which can be seen here.

From Pitchfork:

A bulletin sent out via the Stooges' MySpace page says that Preliminaires is "NOT a rock album, more jazzy stuff." In the trailer, Pop himself says "it's a quieter album with some jazz overtones."

Allow him to explain: "At one point, I just got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music, and I was starting to listen to a lot of New Orleans-era Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton type of jazz. And I've always loved quieter ballads as well." He also enthuses at length about the book c and shows his tiny white dog off to the camera.

The video ends with a song called "King of the Dogs", which really is Iggy Pop singing about his "smelly rear" over a New Orleans jazz funeral march. Judging by that, this could easily be the best jazz album that a punk legend has ever made about a French novel.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/02/2009 12:22:00 PM Comments (0)

While in San Jose to attend the Cinequest Film Festival I got a chance to hang out with one of our more eccentric "25 New Faces" alumni, M dot Strange. The Bay-area native has been hard at work on his next feature animation project. He didn't want to go too in depth about it with me, but if you've seen his first feature, We Are The Strange, you know it will stretch the limits of DIY filmmaking. One tidbit I can give out is the film's score will be done by Endika, a San Jose musician who is a moving force behind the "Nu Class" movement, which stands for Neo Urban Classical Music and melds classical music with urban grooves, electronica and jazz. Below is Endika with his band, Panthelion, performing last weekend (M dot did the visuals).



In the mean time, M dot fans can get their fill with the shorts he's been making, like this one, M.O.B.B., which he shot with a camera phone in one night. He says the inspiration came to him after the young girl featured in the short approached him and asked if he would film her inside a box. (Now that's what I call a lead in!)

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3/02/2009 10:21:00 AM Comments (1)

Greg Mottola's forthcoming Adventureland is set in a slightly run-down 1980s Pennsylvania amusement park, and, as this link demonstrates, amusement parks have come a long way in 25 years. In a creepy application of the surveillance state, visitors of U.K.'s Alton Towers have the opportunity of paying extra to have themselves recorded during their day on the various rides by the park's surveillance cameras. The park developed software capable of tracking each of its wristband-wearing visitors and then dumping footage of them onto a DVD that's available when it's time to go.

From the amusement park's site:

What did we do to create YourDay at Alton Towers?

Firstly, we dug 6 km of trenches to hold 24 strands of fibre optic cable...

We installed and linked up 140 computer servers, 36 cameras and over 100 RFID antennae to create a data network across the 550 acre park - a big place to wire up!

After storyboards and scripts, we spent 13 days filming a huge cast of actors, including 80 extras, on the big rides and attractions, smiling and screaming in all the right places.

Plus we spent the equivalent of 3 'man' years to develop all the YourDay software.

Pull all these together and you get YourDay at Alton Towers!

(Hat tip: BoingBoing.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/01/2009 07:28:00 PM Comments (1)

Citing the uptick in theatrical box-office receipts led by hits like Gran Torino, Taken and Coraline, there have been a number of articles recently on the movies and the recession. Like this one in the New York Times. The upshot: in depressing times, people flock to escapist, cost-effective fun at their local cineplex.

One can of course pick apart this thesis -- in fact, David Poland just has -- but most people in the movie biz prefer to cling to the reductive takeaway that our business is recession proof.

However, as this post on screenwriter and director John August's blog observes, the movie business is not just a single business. It's comprised of many different sectors, each of which intersect which each other differently at different times. The post (which is based on notes by August's assistant Matt) is specifically directed at studio screenwriters (and those who want to become studio screenwriters), and it has some relevant observations about the ways in which trends in its various sectors are affecting greenlight decisions.

From the piece:

Yes, but movies are doing well, right? Box office receipts are on the up and up.

True, but the motherships (Time Warner/GE etc.) suck out that revenue and use it to prop up other flagging sectors. So that money doesn’t go back into development or the pockets of writers. Also, Navid McIlhargey notes that while theatrical has made a comeback, DVD sales have dropped by roughly 30%.

The post, which is a recap of a WGA-sponsored "Script to Greenlight" panel, offers a lot of very practical advice about the Hollywood writer-for-hire biz. It discusses the role of marketing departments in development decisions, the rise of "pre-branded material," whether or not a writer should make a YouTube short, and the thorny subject of whether writers should do unpaid rewrites. (The advice given on this one will surprise you.)

A section:

What does this all mean to the writer with hopes of getting a studio movie made?

Concept is king. Write Big Ideas, well executed.

The executives were eager to argue that Hollywood’s not entirely a dehumanized assembly line, regurgitating and repackaging ideas.

Beaubaire believes that just because you’re reworking ideas from the past doesn’t mean it can’t be fresh, good and entertaining. In order for a movie to go forward, “I have to love the script,” Beaubaire says, adding that it must contain a “universally relatable idea” with better-than-stock characters.

Derek Dauchy requires a connection with the material before he tries to make a movie of it. He needs to feel there’s a good reason to make that movie, to put it out into the world.

McIlhargey cautions that with so many other options, there has to be a sense of immediacy behind making that movie at that time. There’s plenty of good material. Immediacy is, “The number one thing we look at before we pass it up.”

There's also a great comments thread.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/01/2009 06:38:00 PM Comments (0)

Over in our Festival Ambassador section, Jason Guerrasio reports from Cinequest, where he sat in on an interesting panel discussion entitled "The Marriage of Television and the Internet." In the piece Jason relays comments from reps of Intel and Move Networks from subjects like Hulu and emerging internet ad models, but he also reports on an independent filmmaker who is making real money online where others have failed.

From the piece:

One filmmaker during the Q&A pointed out his success on the Web. Christopher Cannucciari, who has is debut feature premiering at Cinequest, New Brooklyn, talked how his Web series, Great Depression Cooking With Clara, is making him a good chunk of change, and attention. "After putting ads by Google on the page I started making money overnight," he said. The Web series, which highlights his Sicilian grandmother making meals from the Depression era while telling colorful stories, has been highlighted on numerous food blogs and Cannucciari was recently booked on Good Morning America.

I met Cannucciari last night, and he told me Rachel Ray wants him on her show and he's pitching the series to The Food Network.

For more on the panel, click on the link above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/01/2009 12:13:00 PM Comments (0)