Archive for January, 2006
Sunday, January 15th, 2006
For fans of Jan Wozencroft, the artist whose evocative and mysterious landscape photos adorn CD covers by the likes of Christian Fennesz and others on the Touch label, the folks at the U.K. music company are offering free 20 downloadable Wozencroft pics, formatted for use as screensavers on a variety of differently-sized computer screens. It’s the label’s 20th anniversary and a bunch of other special stuff is planned for the year.… Read the rest
Saturday, January 14th, 2006
There are a lot of screenplay contests and development programs out there, but the Sloan/Tribeca Screenplay Program is one of the more interesting. In addition to a sizable development grant, the program provides mentorship to screenwriters and writer/producers grappling with science and technology themes in their work. An advisory panel of writers and scientists offer a year’s worth of feedback and input to, says the press release, “scripts that have a scientific or technological theme and story line or have a leading character who is a scientist, engineer, or mathematician…. Screenwriters currently participating in the program are Shawn Lawrence Otto (with the story of astronomer Edwin Hubble, Hubble) and Penny Penniston (with the romantic comedy Love is Brilliant). During the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, each project was showcased at a panel and script reading featuring leading scientists, screenwriters, and actors. Advisors for these writers include screenwriter/director Henry Bean, screenwriter/director Nora Ephron, and award winning physicist Brian Greene.”
If you have a project that might fit Sloan/Tribeca’s mandate, you’d better hurry up. The deadline for submissions this year is February 3. Click here for official guidelines and required submission materials.… Read the rest
Friday, January 13th, 2006
I supposed I should take note of the whole JT Leroy thing. I’m referring, of course, to the recent piece by Warren St. John in the New York Times revealing that the shy, diminuitive figure with a floppy hat, black sunglasses, and a smear of red lipstick appearing in public as author JT Petty is actually a woman named Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Geoffrey Knoop, husband of Laura Albert. Albert is the 40-year-old Brooklyn woman who, in a New York magazine piece a few months ago, Steven Beachy asserted was the person behind JT Leroy’s fiction and rapidly expanding cult.
The Savannah Koop revelation has broken over the last few days, but JT’s blog entries haven’t caught up with it yet. In the latest, he frets over the Christmas season, raves Narnia and Deadwood, and promotes his upcoming appearance as a guest DJ at a Starbucks-sponsored Sundance event. But already, the New York Times article has prompted not-quite-equal parts outrage, self-examination and amusement on the internet. Although in a piece titled “Lying Writers and the Readers who Love Them,” Meghan O’Rourke in Slate notes that confusion over JT’s authorial identity was part of his initial mystique (“The fact is, doubts were raised about the accuracy of Frey’s memoir from the start, both in reviews and in cocktail party chatter. And people have long believed that LeRoy was, in some fashion, the invention of another writer”), those writers and editors who helped JT refine his voice are, for the most part, a bit angry. Perhaps, as writer Susie Bright points out, it wasn’t the literary quality of JT’s literary hoax but its hoax-like quality that has enraged some of his early supporters:
“…JT wrote and asked me to help fundraise for his son’s private French immersion school, Lycee Francaise La Perouse — the most prestigious and expensive secondary school in San Francisco…. I had just come from a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser before I opened my mail. JT’s plea to support his dream of higher education seemed… just plain high. In the years since I first knew him, … Read the rest
Thursday, January 12th, 2006
Here’s a link to Current TV’s very smart “Survival Guide” for those who want to make short videos that can get played on the cabler. Lots of filmmakers and celebs, ranging from director Catherine Hardwicke to Sean Penn, tell you in short Quicktime films how to do everything from telling your story to taking good sound to getting the right clearances.… Read the rest
Thursday, January 12th, 2006
One of the more unusual indie film stories forwarded to us as Filmmaker is that of Minnesota producer and writer Christopher Harmon. Profiled here in the Minnesota-St. Paul Star Tribune, “Harmon can’t see, but he has vision. Can’t hear, but has imagination. Can’t move, but in his mind, he can dance and sing and dream about giving the rest of us films with messages of hope and triumph.” Harmon has a rare neurological condition called spino cerebellar degeneration which prevents communication and requires his use of a respirator to breathe.
With writer Doug Klozzner, however, Harmon, who communicates through interpreters, has completed a script for a film called Sparkle, Serena!, “a contemporary version of Shirley Temple’s song and dance films.”
From the piece:
“All the while, the government was fighting him in court over who should pay for the interpreters, who are all that stand between Harmon and total isolation. Eventually, he said, he won the fight, but ‘my family was left almost bankrupt.’
‘I couldn’t face life anymore,’ he said. ‘I remember lying on my bed, asking God for death.’
Instead, he got this: a memory of a Shirley Temple movie, The Little Princess, he’d seen clearly years earlier at a group home.
‘It’s an embarrassing confession,’ Harmon said of this connection of Shirley Temple, God and inspiration. ‘When you’re deaf and blind, you’re a little isolated.’
The key connector in all of this is that for reasons he never has been able to understand, he saw the old black-and-white movie clearly.
That night of despair led to this movie project, now entering its fourth year. The project, to him, is the essence of life.”
Harmon and Klozzner have a website that details more about their idiosyncratic quest to discover a new child star and recreate the charm of the ’30s and ’40s children’s musical.… Read the rest
Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
Brokeback Mountain, which has been the object of such affection for so long, recently experienced its first growing pains of controversy. First the Megaplex at Jordan Commons in Sandy, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City), suddenly declined to screen the film. Now Gene Shalit (the film critic and his moustache) have issued an apology over comments made during his review of the film on The Today Show. In his 5 January review, Shalit called the character of Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) “a sexual predator” who “tracks Ennis [Heath Ledger] down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts.” The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) rightly took exception to Mr. Shalit’s perverse choice of words, and demanded an apology. On January 10, GLAAD received a sort of letter of apology, in which he explains, “I certainly had no intention of casting aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” ( I guess he got someone to look up the phrase “sexual predator” for him.)
While Shalit was backtracking on his comments, Shalit’s gay son Peter went on the offensive, writing a letter to GLAAD (reprinted in advocate.com, in which upbraided the organization for their snap — or maybe three snaps — judgment: “I am hurt by your mischaracterization of my father, a man who does not have a molecule of hate in his being. It does not speak well for GLAAD, and it is not helping our community.” The end result of all this? A responder to the story on Defamer asked, “You mean Gene Shalit’s still alive?”… Read the rest
Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
I linked to Joe Gratz’s legal blog below when discussing the 2257 regulations, but here’s something else interesting from his site: This discussion of the company TVMyPod.com, which will sell you a video iPod pre-loaded with your favorite DVDs (which you have to buy from them along with the iPod), getting around the video iPod’s digital-rights-management system. It’s basically just a company doing for you what you could learn to do for yourself in about ten minutes on the internet, but the idea that a market has sprung up for this is kind of interesting.… Read the rest
Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
Joe Grat, over at his legal and intellectual property-oriented blog, writes about a setback for the Justice Department in its enforcement of the 2257 regulations, a set of record-keeping requirements designed, many feel, to severely hamper and restrict the adult entertainment industry on the internet. As few have pointed out, however, these regulations also regulate content by all manner of film producers, including independents, and, as I’ve been blogging throughout the last few months, the ramifications of these rules needs to be debated in the indie community.
For now, the fight over 2257 is being waged by the adult industry’s Free Speech Coalition, and as Gratz notes, the government received a setback just before the New Year:
“United States District Judge Walker D. Miller of the District of Colorado filed an order Wednesday enjoining the enforcement of certain reporting requirements recently imposed on distributors of pornography while the plaintiffs’ case against the justice department proceeds….
“The Free Speech Coalition, an association of pornographers and disseminators of pornography, sued to enjoin enforcement of section 2257 on three grounds. First, they argued that the Justice Department regulations covered a wider range of activities than the statute allows — in legal terms, that the regulation was ultra vires. Second, they argued that the statute as a whole violates their First Amendment rights. Third, they argued that the statute violates their constitutional right of privacy…
“The judge ruled in favor of the Free Speech Coalition on the ultra vires issue, finding that the statute did not give the Justice Department the power to regulate anyone who does not participate in “hiring, contracting for managing, or otherwise arranging for the participation of the performers depicted.” This finding was not surprising, given that the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (whose jurisdiction includes the District of Colorado) has ruled that a previous version of the regulation containing an identical exception was ultra vires. See Sundance Assoc., Inc. v. Reno, 139 F.3d 804, 805 (10th Cir. 1998). The court enjoined the Attorney General from enforcing the regulation against those plaintiffs whose business “does not involve … Read the rest
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
Imagine, if you will, that Buster Keaton was Asian, grew up playing Mike Tyson’s Punchout on Nintendo, and dabbled in experimental theater. Now watch this. It takes a while to load, but it’s worth it. And yes, it includes the training montage. (Thanks Guy.)… Read the rest
Sunday, January 8th, 2006
The folks at the literary magazine McSweeney’s have launched a DVD zine called Wholphin. The title has something to do with the way we’re supposed to have felt when we learned that “dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it.” Anyway, Volume One is included in the latest issue of McSweeney’s that’s on the stands, and it includes a bunch of should-be interesting stuff: a Spike Jonze film about Al Gore, a David O. Russell film about the first Iraq war, a short-film collaboration between Miguel Arteta and Miranda July, Alison Smith’s short film “The Specialist,” and something with John C. Reilly in it because he’s on the trailer that streams on the site. Oh yeah, some animation too.
Visit the Wholphin site for info on subscribing — you get five DVDs for $40.00. There’s also info on submitting your own films for future issues of the zine.… Read the rest
