Archive for October, 2005
Thursday, October 13th, 2005
When designer Tom Ford left Gucci a while back, he seemed to sink into a mid-life crisis with a series or morosely reflective interviews and then talked about going into the film business, becoming a director. It’s been a couple of years and no film is on the horizon, but Ford has just teamed with photographer Steven Klein, whose recent photos consciously draw upon the visual tropes of film narrative, to take off his clothes and do a W portfolio timed around the release of a makeup line for Estee Lauder.
Style.com has a preview in which Ford, who, from the photos seems to have been hanging out with David Cronenberg and the members of Kraftwerk, discusses his vision of today’s society:
“We’ve become plastic, objectifying the human body. We’re no longer animals. Women and men are so waxed and polished and buffed and shined up and manipulated. We don’t age. We’ve got these weird lips that don’t really look like lips. We’ve started to lose touch with what a real breast looks like; we’ve started to lose the animal side of our nature. It’s time to somehow pull it back to something more human. We treat women almost like cars. It’s happened over the last 25 years. When we were kids, it was lift and separate. Now, of course, Victoria’s Secret pushes it all together.
W: You’ve always said that looking good requires work — polish and a certain fakeness.
TF: But I’ve also always talked about why the Seventies were such an important moment to me — because there was a relaxed quality; bodies looked real. I think it had to do with the fact that back then you really could have sex. We used to watch sitcoms where people had one-night stands all the time, and we grew up thinking that that was okay. Today we have a more perverse look at sexuality, but stylized and almost fake. If you watch a porn film today versus a porn film from the Seventies, there’s something much sexier about the Seventies film because it’s more natural. Today it’s … Read the rest
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005
Ray Pride posted this link to the new videoblog by the makers of the indie film Four-Eyed Monsters (which, given how hard I’ve been trying to get a screener DVD from the filmmakers, must be the hardest-to-see film of all this year’s hard-to-see pics without distribution).
While I wait… and wait for a screener, I’ll content myself with the videoblog, the first clip of which is a totally charming ode to being a broke filmmaker without a deal.… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005
… about the article by Stephen Beachy in this week’s New York which argues that author and sometime Filmmaker contributor J.T. Leroy is actually not a young former teen hustler turned novelist but rather a 39-year-old mother from Brooklyn. To see what Leroy himself might have to say about the piece, I clicked over to his site and found the photograph, at right, on his homepage with the caption “The J.T. Leroy’s hard at work on the next novel.” An admission of truth or an ironic riposte? You decide…… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005
Back in July I posted this blog about the Federal Government’s new “2257″ regulations and wondered why the independent film community, which can mobilize armies at the withdrawal of promotional screeners, has had so little to say about this bill which, while targeting the adult entertainment industry, looks to spread quite a bit of collateral damage. A week later I posted again after some readers added their own comments to the end of my original article. Now, today, finally, I read in The Hollywood Reporter a piece by Brooks Bollek which describes a ‘buried clause” in the regulation that could affect studio and independent movies.
For anyone who has looked at this regulation, its implications on non-adult media have been pretty clear from the outset, and I’m surprised it’s taken so long for an industry publication to note that many mainstream producers are probably unwittingly violating this bill right now. For those in the dark, the rule requires producers of films containing sex scenes — even, possibly, scenes in which the actors are clothed — to adhere to absurdly cumbersome recordkeeping requirements. The bill seems clearly an attempt to do with rules and regulations what courts reviewing obscenity cases have been unwilling to do.
From the article, which quotes unnamed Hollywood execs:
“The provision, written by Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., could have ramifications beyond simply requiring someone to ensure that the names and ages of actors who partake in pretend lovemaking as compliance with Section 2257 in effect defines a movie or TV show as a pornographic work under federal law. Industry sources say the provision was included in the bill at the behest of the Justice Department. Calls to Pence’s office and the Justice Department went unreturned Tuesday.
Industry executives worry that the provision, which is retroactive to 1995, will have a chilling effect on filmmakers. Faced with the choice of filing a 2257 certificate or editing out a scene, a filmmaker might decide it’s not worth getting entangled with the federal government and let the scene fall to the cutting-room floor, the executives said.
“From the creative side … Read the rest
Tuesday, October 11th, 2005
I haven’t been posting much recently due to an overall work crunch — the putting to bed of the new Fall issue of Filmmaker, and two new films my company is producing both going into production. Hopefully I’ll get back into the blogging swing of things in the next few days, but I couldn’t help posting this piece in Variety about Paul Dinello’s film Strangers with Candy. According to the trade, Warner Independent is not releasing the film, which was slated to open October 21, “out of concern that the producers didn’t secure all the needed rights, including for such items as posters and props.”
As a producer, arguing with directors (usually first-timers) about clearances is something I do all the time, with directors being angry that they can’t just “show the world.” Stories like this are my ammunition to enforce the accepted rules of rights and clearances within the industry. Of course, studios have been known to nitpick clearances in order to drop films they feel won’t perform or that they overpaid for. I have no idea whether that’s the case here or not, so hopefully soon they’ll be word on what items of set dressing are preventing Strangers with Candy from hitting the theaters.… Read the rest
