SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES JUNE LAB PROJECTS

By Scott Macaulay

Indiewire has posted the writers and directors participating in the Sundance June Labs. Here’s the list and the descriptions of the projects:

“A Breath Away”/Kit Hui (writer/director), U.S.A./China
As a typhoon approaches Hong Kong, the residents of a high-rise apartment explore their need for human connection, family, and cultural identity in their increasingly isolated worlds.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kit Hui immigrated to the United States at age 16. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program. Her short film “Missing” screened at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and she was recently selected to participate in the 2006 Hong Kong Asian Financing Film Forum (HAF) and the Cannes Residence du Festival de Cannes with “A Breath Away”.

“Free In Deed”/Jake Mahaffy (writer/director), U.S.A.
In order to tend for his own ill son, an intensely religious man secretly returns to his hometown where, years ago, his attempted miracle became a criminal act. With complexity and emotional power, “Free in Deed” explores faith and redemption in rural America. Born in Ohio and currently residing in southwest Virginia, Jake Mahaffy has made a handful of short films and the feature-length “War”, which screened in the Frontier section of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Mahaffy studied filmmaking in Russia and co-founded the Handcranked Film collaborative in Boston in 2001. Mahaffy has received a grant from Creative Capital and is the recipient of Sundance Institute’s inaugural Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship for “Free In Deed”.

“My Habibi”/Kirsten Johnson (writer/director), U.S.A.
In post-9/11 New York, a Moroccan immigrant finds his reckless past catching up with him just as he is falling in love with an American photographer, forcing each of them to choose whom they must betray. Kirsten Johnson’s most recent film, “Deadline”, (co-directed with Katy Chevigny), premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on NBC, and is the winner of a Thurgood Marshall Award. Her cinematography is featured in “Fahrenheit 9/11″, the Academy Award-nominated “Asylum”, and the Sundance Film Festival documentaries “American Standoff”, “Two Towns of Jasper”, and “Derrida”.

“Sin Nombre”/Cary Fukunaga (writer/director), U.S.A.… Read the rest

NET NEUTRALITY, GRADUATE STUDIES

By Scott Macaulay

A few posts below I linked to a short video clip that is something of a primer on Net Neutrality. Here, via Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly begins what in this post is the grad school version — read up ’cause you’ll be tested on this tomorrow.

First off , Drum offers a long discussion of the problems inherent in the Barton-Rush bill currently working its way through Congress. Drum starts off a little bit dubious that the issue is as big as some are saying, but he works his way through the pros and cons. He starts by asking how bad the bill really is, and he ends with the following:

The key issue in the Barton-Rush bill is adjudication vs. rulemaking. I’m sure everyone else arguing about this issue is an expert in regulatory law, but I’m not and I can’t immediately tell how big a deal this is.

Basically, the argument is whether Congress should mandate some kind of net neutrality regime and task the FCC with making rules to implement it, or whether they should set out general principles, let things unfold, and allow the FCC to adjudicate complaints if and when they’re submitted. Rules have the virtue of being proactive, but also have the potential to hammer something into place that will turn out not to make sense. Adjudication is more flexible, but it’s also a lot slower. It allows telcos to stretch Barton-Rush’s net neutrality principles far enough to (possibly) put competitors out of business, safe in the knowledge that it will take years for the FCC to tell them to cease and desist.

He then comes up with four reasons to oppose the bill, ending with:

Finally, here’s probably the most convincing argument in favor of net neutrality: the telecom industry is against it. As near as I can tell, most telecom CEOs would sell their mothers into white slavery if they thought it would help them keep one of their competitors at bay for a year or five longer, and their record of bending, breaking, and twisting the rules in order

… Read the rest

WES IS MORE

By Admin

Wes Anderson now joins the other film figures hired by American Express to connect creativity with credit card debt, albeit his My Life, My Card is classic Wes Anderson.… Read the rest

AUDIENCE WANTED — APPLY WITHIN

By Scott Macaulay

Over at his blog,, Anthony Kaufman cuts loose on what he calls the “woefully underpublicized” Indiewire/Emerging Pictures Undiscovered Gems series, which I blogged about a few posts below. The series opens tonight with a 9:30 screening (repeated tomorrow) of Jem Cohen’s debut fiction feature, Chain.

He writes:

I wouldn’t have even known of the showing myself had I not received an email directly from the director. Emerging Pictures’ web address http://www.emergingpictures.com/undiscovered_gems.htm doesn’t even work; indieWIRE has no mention of the showing on its website, and the Sundance Channel, another sponsor, gives it no props. Maybe it’s just the crowded New York market. Maybe it’s just bad timing: how could indieWIRE’s little series go up against the press-devouring monster, Tribeca, which also opens tonight?

Perhaps in other cities these movies will get some traction where they’re more of a rarity, but from a New York stand-point, it seems like they don’t have a chance. Anyway, since no one I know has a ticket to Tribeca’s opener, check out Chain, which London’s Daily Telegraph called “vital, boundary-pushing film making… An uncategorisable hybrid of social critique, poetic essay and haunted travelogue.”

… Read the rest

GREEN CINE SPEAKS

By Scott Macaulay

Over at his blog, 40 Years in the Desert, Daniel Nemet-Nejat interviews Green Cine’s Jonathan Marlow. We all know Green Cine for its incredible daily blog, but Marlow is the company’s director of content acquisitions and business development and he discusses Green Cine’s distribution activities, including their VOD efforts. Check it out.… Read the rest

SMALL SCREEN WOES

By Scott Macaulay

The Wall Street Journal has a piece up by John Jurgensen about declining budgets in the music video industry, a development that has something to do with both music business economics as well as new modes of viewing and distribution.

From the article:

But music executives also say the big video budgets of the 1990s are generally unnecessary, now that videos are most often watched on small screens like laptops and video iPods. Reality TV programming and the success of amateur “viral” videos that viewers watch and email to friends have changed the expectations of young viewers, says Monte Lipman, president of Universal Republic Records. Better and less expensive video technology has also helped keep costs down. And a big budget doesn’t guarantee wide TV exposure. “For every video you’d see on MTV, there were 10 more that didn’t make the cut, and that adds up to millions,” Mr. Lipman says.

Instead, labels often now focus on creating Internet-friendly clips that could take off as viral videos. They reduce budgets by shortening shooting schedules, using young directors hungry for work and often filming bands in front of a green screens, so that settings can be added later, rather than filming in multiple locations.

“I can say that a lot more of the money is going into low-fi production,” says Michael Nash, Warner Music’s senior vice president of digital strategy.

Directors, producers and musicians have responded to changing music video landscape in a variety of ways. Some have modified their production routines. Hype Williams, a music-video director best known for his big-budget videos for hip-hop stars like Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes, says he’s reduced his typical video crew from about 40 members to about a dozen in recent years. He also now designs his videos to be watchable on small screens like video iPods. “In the last four months, it’s all been close-ups,” he says. “You have to think like that now.”

… Read the rest

LOOMPANICS, RIP

By Scott Macaulay

In a time in which plans for building a nuclear bomb or engineering a bio-terrorism attack are scarily available on the internet, let’s take a moment to note the closing of Loompanics, the Washington state publisher run by Mike Hoy whose titles were once deemed downright dangerous. Now, however, as the company announces a going out of business sale, Loompanics’s books seem, paradoxically, like quaint mementos of a more innocent time. I say “paradoxically” because there’s no doubt that the publisher, which experienced its share of First Amendment battles, suffered after passage of the Patriot Act when people reading books about homemade bomb production were suddenly the public’s business.

Loompanics, which sold their books in underground bookstores, novelty shops, and through mail order and the internet, may have disseminated some questionable information, but their main stock in trade was a more generalized notion of societal rebellion. For those who felt that there was something wrong about modern living, Loompanics seemed to offer hope that something could actually be done about it — and on one’s own terms. (That “something” often had to do with offshore banking accounts, phony birth certificates, or tanks of methane gas.)

Here’s what writer Claire Wolfe has to say about Loompanics on her blog:

Loompanics has long called its book catalog the best in the world. And in a weird way, it is. It’s certainly been the bravest and most eclectic book catalog. If you wanted to know how to change your identity, build a meth lab, cook with cannabis, or find kinky sex in Thailand, Loompanics would sell you a book about it. (Some of these books were of dubious reliability, while others were the real deal; but that was part of the fun. Caveat emptor. Freedom doesn’t come with guarantees.) Loompanics would also sell you books on living off the grid, homesteading on a budget, or protecting your privacy. Truly useful stuff. And then there were the books that simply seemed to reflect Mike Hoy’s own wide-ranging interests. Books of little-known facts, religious controversies, political conspiracies, and historical oddities.

The Loompanics catalog

… Read the rest

NET NEUTRALITY 101

By Scott Macaulay

Alex Curtis at Public Knowledge created a short two-minute clip explaining just some of what’s at stake in the upcoming battle for “net neutrality.” And here’s from Save the Internet, a new website launched by a coalition supporting net neutrality.

From the site:

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to have its Web site open quickly on your computer.

Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.

This isn’t just speculation — we’ve already seen what happens elsewhere when the Internet’s gatekeepers get too much control. Last year, Canada’s version of AT&T — Telus— blocked their Internet customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to workers with whom Telus was negotiating. And Shaw, a major Canadian cable company, charges an extra $10 a month to subscribers who dare to use a competing Internet telephone service.

Surf over to the site for more, or visit the group’s new MySpace page.… Read the rest

DON’T FEED THE TROLLS

By Scott Macaulay

Over at Caveh Zahedi’s blog, the director of I Am a Sex Addict ponders the downside of posting one’s daily thoughts as a way of promoting a film:

One of the interesting things about having a blog is that anyone can attack you anytime and can do so anonymously. At least with film critics, their names are on their reviews. But with a blog, anyone can post a hostile comment, without any kind of accountability. In short, a blog, like a personal film, can serve as a lightning-rod for free-floating cyberspace aggression.

I’m not sure what to do with these anonymous hostile comments. Should I delete them or is it better to leave them up? I’m not sure what the protocol is, or if people would rather see them than not. I personally find them to be bad vibes, and I am tempted to delete them. But I’m curious to hear what other people think.

In the comments section, a poster named “Chatty Cathy” comes up with some advice and in the process describes a ficticious movie that I’d like to see:

It’s a natural and inevitable byproduct of increasing discorporealization, and unfortunately it can’t be “deleted.” Imagine a Bresson film about blogging. There would be a righteously innocent young girl who blogged righteously and innocently, and the world would anonymously abuse and terrorize her until she died from some blog-related complication.

And then she ends with a book recommendation:

I would recommend reading Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated, which investigates the cultural imperative that begat the blog. The central thesis concerns the Flattered Self and the ways in which the Flattered Self needs to see itself reflected. In summary it sounds like New Age hooey, but the book is intellectually rigorous and surprisingly pragmatic.)

… Read the rest

I POD

By Scott Macaulay

The distribution panel I moderated last week is now a podcast. (If I had known this was to be archived on all of your hard drives, I probably would have been more concise in my questions…)

Click on the link above to hear Caveh Zahedi, Jay Duplass, Susan Leber and me discuss the treacherous shoals of DIY distribution and offer some hard-earned advice to all of you aspiring directors and producers out there. For a print preview, here’s what Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez had to say about it.… Read the rest