Archive for October, 2004
Monday, October 25th, 2004
A scene from Polar Express.
In his Game Engine column in the current issue of Filmmaker, Graham Leggat addresses the covergence of film and games. “The two industries are converging and there’s no turning back,” writes Leggat. “This is a huge kick for the casual observer, but even dispassionate natural historians of contemporary media, seeing the two species gamboling together in the wild, are feeling a sense of excitement, perhaps even liberation. And why not? It looks like progress. It gives you hope. Like anything, though, the novelty of cross-industry adaptation can wear thin. After you’ve watched several dozen ants launch themselves noisily downstream on leaves you start wishing for an ant that can swim. There’s not much to do, however, but be patient and put your trust in evolution.”
Walter Murch, talking with Scott Saunders in the print edition of the current issue of Filmmaker, elaborates: “There’s a bifurcation which has always been part of filmmaking, but has been kind of latent in the process, which digital technology is forcing out into the open. It’s the choice between what I call black-box films and snowflake films. What I mean by black box is a device that gives you absolute control over everything that you do; every pixel is there because you want it to be there. And obviously digital technology allows that to happen. If you force that to its logical conclusion, it becomes a theoretical black box into which you simply think the film. You don’t have to make anything anymore; you just think it and there it is. And if you want to change something you think it different. It’s kind of a bargain with the devil, and filmmakers will have to comes to term with what that implies about collaboration and about film as a reflection of the world as it exists at the moment a film is made. We’re not there yet by any means, but Pixar and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow are waystations in that direction. …
“The metaphor of the snowflake is that a snowflake freezes … Read the rest
Monday, October 25th, 2004
It’s pretty unusual to wake up in the morning and read entertainment industry news detailing benefits specifically targeted towards independent filmmakers. But that’s what this (subscription-only) Variety piece does as it explains provisions in the just-signed American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 that make it more advantageous for investors to invest in independent film.
Writes Susan Crabtree and Ian Mohr, “After years of lobbying, independent filmmakers scored a major victory Friday when President Bush signed a bill that gives a sweeping tax break to movies made in the U.S. Producers believe the measure may draw substantial fresh funds into indie filmmaking.”
They go to note, “Independent producers now may write off a movie in a single year if it has a budget of $1 million-$15 million and 75% of that budget is spent in the U.S. The expensing limit increases to $20 million if the movie is made in a low-income area of the U.S….
“‘Overall, it’s good, it’s fantastic,’ said Tim Williams, production head at New York-based GreeneStreet FilmsGreeneStreet Films, who co-produced Miramax’s 2001 breakout ‘In the Bedroom.’ ‘It’s the same concept as the basis for the U.K. sale-and-leaseback (program). The trick now is for smaller companies to utilize it. Can this (bill) be used to leverage more funding on a state and local level?’
“‘It’s phenomenal,’ said Schuyler Moore, an entertainment industry tax law expert. ‘Once this gets out, it’s going to jumpstart U.S. production in an enormous way. There’s nothing like it in the entire (U.S. tax) code. It’s just astounding.’”
More on the benefits of this law as they become apparent. I already know a couple of New York producers who are huddling with their accountants to analyze the implications of the change. And please post below if you have specific insight into the impact the law will have on film investment.… Read the rest
Friday, October 22nd, 2004
Perhaps you’ve heard that the IFP/New York has retooled its annual Gotham Awards, moving the event out of IFP Market week to December 1 — smack dab at the start of the Oscar push. This week the IFP/New York announced the Gotham’s first two 2004 award recipient: actor Don Cheadle, who has Hotel Rwanda coming out from United Artists, and Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is being honored under the new “Celebrate New York” tag for films shot in New York that “expand the boundaries of creative expression.”
With its December 1 date, the Gotham’s unfold just a day after the IFP/LA announces its roster of Spirit Award nominations, a fact not missed by David Poland in his new Hot Blog. As usual, Poland focuses on the politics of the announcement far more exhaustively than us tired-at-2:00 A.M. types at Filmmaker are able to…
… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 20th, 2004
I stumbled across author William Gibson’s (Neuromancer) online blog today and caught up with the news that director Peter Weir is attached to direct a film version of Gibson’s latest, Pattern Recognition. The novel is a contemporary cybernoir about a “cool hunter” who winds up on the chase for the director of mysterious multi-part Internet film. Locations are being scouted in Moscow, London and Tokyo.
I wound up bookmarking Gibson’s blog as he seems to update it daily and has some interesting political commentary on it as well. In today’s entry he describes the process by which he feels an imaginative collective mental barrier may be working against John Kerry:
“As I took the zeitgeist’s temperature this morning (the hard way, as we professional prescients always insist on doing) I noticed that it was decidedly more difficult to imagine life after a Kerry win than life after a Bush win.
Aside from the fact that, as we professionals know, it’s inherently more difficult to imagine things getting relatively unfucked than it is to imagine things getting more fucked but in a familiar direction, I found myself wondering whether that Bush-as-idiot-shaman essay I quoted here recently might not be literally true, in some ghastly Castanedan way? Could it be that the obscenely comforting narrowing of imaginative bandwith (the real payoff in becoming a Bushite believer) was actually changing the world, or threatening to, via its chilling effect on concensus-reality?”
… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 20th, 2004
MoxieDocs’ Co-Production Award deadline has been extended to October 30, 2004.
MoxieDocs’ goal is to provide select documentaries with asistance in production, postproduction, and theatrical distribution. Since its founding, the MoxieDocs Award has become one of the most valuable production resources available to documentary filmmakers with projects in the work-in-progress stage. Each competition receives an average of 200 submissions, five finalists are then selected for a “pitch” at which projects are presented to a panel of jurors made up of award winning documentary filmmakers and industry executives. Submissions are judged based on subject matter, a filmmaker’s access to the issue at hand and production personnel experience.
Past MoxieDocs Award recipients include Farmingville, which premiered at Sundance 2004, aired on the PBS series P.O.V. earlier this summer, and will open theatrically at the Quad Cinemas in NYC on October 22; Cheeks, which screened as part of the 2004 IFP Market’s Spotlight on Documentaries and which focuses on a Southern New Jersey family as they face despair, suicide attempts, manic depression, schizophrenia, and secret societies trying to ruin their lives; Hart Island: An American Cemetery, about the NYC-based potter’s field which dates back to the American Civil War; and Revolucion: Visions of Cuba Since the Revolution, a feature-length work-in-progress which traces the Cuban Revolution as experienced by three distinct generations of photographers. … Read the rest
Wednesday, October 20th, 2004
Left to right: Kutlug Ataman’s Twelve (detail); Jeremy Deller’s Memory Bucket: A Film About Texas; Langlands and Bell’s The House of Osama Bin Laden
“I Love Jeremy Deller,” Jonathan Jones’s decidely partisan article in the Guardian, handicaps this year’s Turner Prize nominees, each of who produce video work.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004
New Yorkers with a yen for scary movies are going to be in hog heaven as the third annual NYC Horror Film Festival rolls into town just in time for the Halloween season. Running from October 20-24 at the Tribeca Film Center, the festival promises over 45 feature and short films, including rare classics among the newer fare.
Besides the latest offerings from cult directors Tobe Hooper and Joe Lieberman, there will be a selection of cool parties and panel discussions with high-profile industry figures, making this fright fest the place to be for thrills and chills.
For film schedule info or to buy tickets, log onto www.nychorrorfest.com.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004
As Nick Paumgarten reports in the Talk of the Town section of this week’s New Yorker magazine, “In 2001, after a seventeen-year quest, Rudloph Grey, the author of the Ed Wood biography Nighmare of Ecstasy (which became the basis for the Tim Burton film Ed Wood), found [Wood's final film,] the triple-X Necromania in a warehouse in Los Angeles.”
Wood wrote, produced and directed a soft-core and hard-core version of the film in three days under the name Don Miller; the soft-core version was discovered in 1992 and has since been available in limited release.
Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love (1971) — “one of the first skin flicks to have what, technically, could be called a plot,” according to the New Yorker — is now available on DVD. It’s the first title released under the newly launched Fleshbot Films imprint.
As described on the Fleshbot site: “The plot involves a coven of witches, led by the mysterious Madame Heles, who concoct a series of ‘lessons’ for a couple whose sex life is less than satisfying. Their teaching methods involve topless chanting, simulated intercourse with painted skulls, and a lot of oral sex. Madame Heles was to have been played by longtime Wood collaborator Maila ‘Vampira’ Nurmi, who took one look at the script and withdrew herself from the production citing concerns of ‘professional suicide’.”
… Read the rest
Monday, October 18th, 2004
Via the encyclopedic Weblog Green Cine Daily comes this link to an article in Slate about Harry Shearer’s video installation “Face Time” at the Conner Contemporary Gallery in Washington, D.C.
As the exhibiton’s curator, Welmoed Laanstra, writes, “Shearer, who has appeared in such films as Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind and who does the voice for many characters in The Simpsons (including Montgomery Burns), has an eye for contemporary absurdity. He is both commentator and artist, having written for Slate and having produced for 21 years a weekly radio show spoofing the news.
“ ‘Face Time’, a temporary installation pegged to the final weeks of a long and dramatic presidential campaign, will feature television footage of both presidential candidates, the vice presidential candidates, other political figures and media talking heads. Using video footage without any dialogue, Shearer will present all these figures in our national sandbox as artifacts. He will explore the artificiality of political communication. The installation will offer viewers the opportunity to ponder the manner in which politics and news are presented by the mass media and then consumed by individuals. The point will be to remove the viewer from the immediate media slipstream and suspend the from-them-to-you interaction in time.”
… Read the rest
Friday, October 15th, 2004
The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) will introduce three new program sections during its 34th edition (January 26 – February 6, 2005). The new sections will replace the fest’s Main Program Features and its Hubert Bals Fund Harvest. Together, the new sections will include approximately one hundred fiction features and documentaries.
IFFR director Sandra den Hamer explains: “The three sections represent the IFFR’s main strands of interest: young and innovative filmmaking, the commitment to global developments and the ‘cinema d’auteur’.
“Cinema of the Future: Sturm und Drang groups films by promising talents and offers an overview of recent developments within independent filmmaking; Cinema of the World: Time & Tide brings together films that reflect the festival’s social and political awareness or show the human condition in the film’s regions of origin; and The Maestro’s: Kings & Aces section reunites the works of the more established auteurs whose oeuvre has the ongoing interest of the Rotterdam festival.”
In other IFFR news: French cineaste Benoit Jacquot has been selected to receive a Rotterdam tribute program of part of his film and television oeuvre along with the screening of his recent feature film A Tout de Suite (2004).
The thematic program S.E.A. Eyes, curated by programmer Gertjan Zuilhof, will put a “spotlight on the South East Asian region where independent film production is emerging strongly through a new generation of filmmakers,” says den Hamer. “The section will include new films by Lav Diaz (Philippines), U Wei bin Hadji Saari (Thailand) and James Lee (Malaysia), who has already generated festival attention worldwide. But S.E.A. Eyes will go further, introducing more young filmmakers [as it reflects] on a region currently undergoing fast changes in several parts of its societies.”
Finally, Paradise Girls by Dutch filmmaker Fow Pyng Hu has been selected for Rotterdam’s VPRO Tiger Awards Competition.
… Read the rest
