Archive for January, 2006
Tuesday, January 31st, 2006
In a rush to summarize this year’s Sundance Film Festival, an article this weekend in the local paper The Salt Lake Tribune by Christy Karras ’s proclaimed “Sundance Comes Out: 40 films with gay themes show festival’s blooming acceptance of sexual diversity.” What an odd thing to say. In 1992, B. Ruby Rich coined the term “New Queer Cinema” from films screened at Sundance. And each year, gay films and filmmakers have shown up. What was remarkable this year is how gay and straight films and filmmakers were so well integrated. Malcolm Ingram’s documentary Small Town Gay Bar was executive produced by Kevin Smith. Wash Westmoreland & Richard Glatzer’s Quinceanera, which won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, is so much more about the LA Latino neighborhood of Echo Park than it is about the gay couple who are gentrifying it. Indeed Westmoreland and Glatzer (who are a couple) spoke up in Indiewire about working with the community: “we didn’t want this film to feel like it was made by two white boys peering in. It had to be insider. We cast people from our Echo Park neighborhood and constantly looked to them to let us know if we were on target.”… Read the rest
Tuesday, January 31st, 2006
Yahoo News is reporting that pioneering video artist Nam June Paik has died at 73. The Koren born artist was known for his multi-monitor sculptural video pieces, his various video happenings, and collaborations with artists like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others. When I worked at The Kitchen Center right out of college, Paik was a grand master of the video art realm, someone whose belief in the untapped power of this new art form fueled both is pieces as well as the innovative manners in which they were presented.… Read the rest
Saturday, January 28th, 2006
For those attempting to parse the business climate at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, today’s piece by David Halbfinger in the New York Times is pretty on the money.
Also, I should note that I was a trifle embarassed to have been called by Ann Thompson one of the passionate bloggers who would be reporting from Sundance and then not to have written anything. Well, I was there more in producer mode this year rather than daily reporting mode, but I did catch a bunch of films I’ll be writing about during the year. And, I am heading to Rotterdam now where I look forward to catching up to a couple films I missed, including Old Joy, and will be hopefully posting a couple of times from there.… Read the rest
Saturday, January 28th, 2006
In Filmmaker this issue writer-director Andrew Bujalski interviews Caveh Zahedi, whose I am a Sex Addict won the new Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” award at the Gotham’s this year. As a sidebar to the piece, Zahedi penned a “Self Distribution Manifesto” explaining the moral imperative behind his decision to distribute his film himself. Zahedi started the piece by admitting that he had always dreamed of getting big distribution deals for his film and that none were forthcoming for Sex Addict. But midway through he turned what could have been a sour-grapes rant into a rousing call for filmmaker self-actualization, even quoting Hegel in the process:
“The truth is that self-distribution is fun, and not only is it fun, it’s empowering. Which brings me to the heart of the matter: whether an outside distributor would do a ‘better’ or a ‘worse’ job releasing the film is immaterial. The real question is: why are we making films in the first place? The answer for me has something to do with wanting to humanize the world. Hegel teaches us that we make the world our own by altering it, by leaving our own imprint on it, by reshaping it in our own image. This is the crux of my argument for self-distribution. It’s less alienating. It’s more organic. And it’s more human.”
So, I was a little surprised when, shortly after our issue hit the stands, I read in Indiewire that Zahedi will not actually be self-distributing his film. Following the Filmmaker/Gotham award, I am a Sex Addict was picked up by IFC as part of its new “First Take” program, in which indie films will receive simultaneous theatrical and video-on-demand releases.
Figuring that there were perhaps some situational ethics at work here — quote Hegel until a real distributor pops up for your film — and perhaps feeling a bit embarassed to have run such a passionate “call to arms” from a filmmaker who has just saved himself months of licking envelopes and sticking screeners into FedEx packages, I decided to … Read the rest
Saturday, January 28th, 2006
In the print magazine this issue Rupert Chiarella writes a short piece about Turn Here.com, a new website that streams short films created specifically about neighborhoods all over the United States. I figured some interesting filmmakers might be tempted to contribute to the site, but the site’s layout makes it hard to identify the directors behind the various clips. So, I was glad to get an email today from Chris Kenneally, a veteran NYC post supervisor (he post-suped Patrict Stettner’s Sundance pic The Night Listener) and also a director/producer (with co-director Danielle Franco he directed the doc Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating). If you go to the Turn Here site and click on “New York” and then “Hell’s Kitchen” you get Kenneally’s film about Mark Nilsen. Go to “Lower East Side” and you get Franco’s tour of the nabe with their former subject, Crazy Legs Conti.… Read the rest
Saturday, January 28th, 2006
The generally excellent Boing Boing website posts this link to a news release from the Association for Psychological Science that answers a common question about actors and acting: how actors learn all their lines. Cognitive psychologist Helga Noice (Elmhurst College) and her husband, cognitive researcher, actor, and director Tony Noice (Indiana State University) have studied the subject and hope that their results can be used to counter cognitive decline in the elderly.
From the piece:
“According to the researchers, the secret of actors’ memories is, well, acting. An actor acquires lines readily by focusing not on the words of the script, but on those words’ meaning — the moment-to-moment motivations of the character saying them — as well as on the physical and emotional dimensions of their performance.
To get inside the character, an actor will break a script down into a series of logically connected ‘beats’ or intentions. Good actors don’t think about their lines, but feel their character’s intention in reaction to what the other actors do, causing their lines to come spontaneously and naturally. The researchers quote the great British actor Michael Caine: ‘You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face.’
The key, the researchers have found, is a process called active experiencing, which they say uses ‘all physical, mental, and emotional channels to communicate the meaning of material to another person.’ It is a principle that can be applied off-stage as well as on. For example, students who studied material by imagining conveying its meaning to somebody else who needed the information showed higher retention than those who tried to memorize the material by rote.”… Read the rest
Friday, January 27th, 2006
Brian Brooks and Eugene Hernandez post upsetting news in Indiewire today that filmmaker Julia Reichert who, with her partner Steve Bognar (together pictured), directed Lion in the House, a Sundance Competition doc about children dealing with cancer, was herself diagnosed with lymphoma. She received the news just after arriving in Utah for the film’s premiere. After her third screening she flew back home to Ohio where she is now hospitalized and receiving treatment.
Julia’s work has been covered in Filmmaker and she has a long association with IFP. We send her our best wishes for her recovery, and friends and colleagues can find her hospital address in the Indiewire piece linked to above.
Lion in the House will be broadcast on PBS this June.… Read the rest
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006
The winter 2006 issue of Filmmaker (or part of it — you need to buy the print edition to experience the full goodness of it all) is online. Sorry for the delay, but we’ve also redesigned the site and the blog, which now appears on the main page as well. Many thanks to our brilliant, obsessive Web designer Jonathan Thirkield, who has put countless hours into what we feel is a great new site.… Read the rest
Tuesday, January 24th, 2006
After I posted Ted Hope’s movie pitch, 1000 Red Pieces of Sarah, below, Hope received this email alerting him to a fictional competing project from someone who prefers to be referred to as “an anonymous source”:
“Hate to blow your bubble, but (off the record) Michel Gondry is directing the almost exact same movie as a co-production between Palm, Res Magazine, and Tokion Magazine, who has a first look deal with Nathan Hornblower, who controls the underlying rights to the autopsy reports of Eric Red’s victims.
Additionally, Governor Schwarzenegger and Ed Pressman are still squabbling over Conan royalties, and the Governator has vowed to give Eric Red the death penalty. Ethan Hawke just wrote a very moving poem about Red’s plight, which will be read at Housing Works during their annual ‘Screenwriters With Scurvy’ post-Sundance benefit.”… Read the rest
Thursday, January 19th, 2006
Producer Ted Hope, who travels to Sundance this week with two films — Friends with Money and The Hawk is Dying — emailed to say that he’s been reading this blog and noticing certain subcurrents linking the various posts, observing that people, things and ideas are shape-shifting between fiction and fact within our cultural landscape. He’s come up with a fictional movie pitch encapsulating his thoughts which he forwarded to me, and I’m reprinting it below:
“Okay it goes like this: A screenwriter who alleges to be Eric Red’s unevil twin is hired to adapt a story of a drunk in rehab written by a former yard lizard child prostitute imposter who may not exist.
Chain of Title:
Charlie Kaufman’s brother writes it based on an outline of unprinted L.A. Weekly article that Paul Cullum read on a blog and wrote on a napkin to Jeffrey Hatcher about Oprah Winfrey endorsing Jeff Levy-Hinte optioning a former movie idea by Gus Van Sant about Kurt Cobain’s body hair that was initially optioned by Ed Pressman for Steve Shainberg without having any of the rights to Mark Romanek’s photographs of Tamara Jenkins. I think there were also notes of it in Steve McQueen’s trunk, but they were burned by Johnny Depp at Hunter’s funeral.
You can print it, but you’d have to produce it with me, Christine, and Caroline Baron at Artisan. Phil S Hoffman will play Toby Jones portraying George Elliot. Music by New Order in the trailer we did for Sofia’s new Marc Jacob’s scent.
Starbucks will sponsor a reading at the Seattle party for GenArt at Slamdance (the owners of the indie’s indie indie brand) and Nathaniel Hornblower will give all audience members cameras to film it as a Spike Jonze anti-globilization ad for the new MoveOn.org remix collectible sneaker downloadable user sponsor non-competitive contest now on the iTunes site. But I am waiting for the vinyl release signed and numbered by the person who bought the last Lego brick pixel on that website auctioned off on Ebay that Boing Boing linked me to…”… Read the rest
