EXPLETIVES DELETED

By Scott Macaulay

Two pieces have been published online reporting on the current financial situation at THINKFilm, owned by David Bergstein, who purchased the company along with Capitol Films in 2006. In IndieWire, Anthony Kaufman details the efforts of some filmmakers to receive the overdue minimum advances they are owed by THINK. He also gets a quote on the issue from THINKFilm CEO Mark Urman. From the piece:

A determined, but frustrated, Mark Urman told indieWIRE this week that he’s communicating with his filmmakers and making every effort to get people paid. “I feel terrible if people are hurt by our financial problems,” he said. “We’re not moving forward on other people’s blood, I can assure you. We’re not [EXPLETIVE] people; we’re in trouble. And if people end up getting [EXPLETIVE], we’re [EXPLETIVE], too, and we can all be on the unemployment lines together.”

EDITORS NOTE: After publication, indieWIRE was contacted by Mark Urman who requested that the expletive used in the quote above be removed.

Today, A.J. Schnack has published a story about filmmaker Alex Gibney, who has announced a lawsuit against THINKfilm over the release of his Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. Schnack quotes a press release issued by X-Ray, Gibney’s production company:

“X-Ray asserts, among other things, that THINKFilm did not have the financial resources to properly release the film and fraudulently concealed this fact from the film’s creative team, its investors and the film’s sales agent, Cinetic Media Inc. Further, the demand asserts that THINKFilm’s actions damaged “Taxi,” its commercial reputation and its future possibilities for commercial success. X-Ray seeks damages, payment of legal fees as well as a termination of its agreement with ThinkFilm and a return of its distribution rights.

(…)In conversations with some of the film’s principals, it seems clear that many of ThinkFilm’s problems are the result of actions taken by its parent company, Capitol Films, and its principal, David Bergstein. Glascoff noted that Mark Urman, President of THINKFilm may have been frustrated by his inability to get needed cash flow from Capitol. “Nevertheless,” notes Glascoff, “lack of disclosure was a serious problem.”

… Read the rest

BALLAST LEAVES IFC FOR STRAND

By Jason Guerrasio

According to Variety, Lance Hammer‘s Sundance award-winning film Ballast has dropped out of its deal with IFC and has moved to Strand Releasing.

An excerpt:

“Obviously, we’re disappointed, but how can we not support him if he tries to take control of this himself?” IFC Entertainment veep of acquisitions Arianna Bocco said. “We wanted the movie, we love the movie, and we think that we would have done really well with it. It’s the first time that’s happened with us.”

“The budget was big enough that it would be hard in the current model to see that money back,” Hammer said. “In the old days, when distributors gave a larger minimum guarantee, that would have been a totally different story. Nobody can afford to do that anymore.”

Originally slated for the summer, Filmmaker has confirmed it’s moving to a fourth quarter release.… Read the rest

CECILIA MINIUCCHI, “EXPIRED”

By Nick Dawson

SAMANTHA MORTON AND JASON PATRIC IN DIRECTOR CECILIA MINIUCCHI’S EXPIRED. COURTESY MCR RELEASING.

After observing and learning from some of the best directors around, writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi has put all her acquired wisdom to use in a distinctive and promising debut. Born in Rome, the multi-talented Miniucchi is notable for the number of mediums she has worked in: a prolific maker of documentaries and music videos, she has also written poetry, songs, plays and short stories, and is an accomplished photographer. While in Italy, Miniucchi worked with Federico Fellini and the Taviani brothers, and went on to serve an apprenticeship with Lina Wertmuller. She moved to the U.S. to study at Harvard and the American Film Institute, and then interned with Francis Ford Coppola at American Zoetrope. Miniucchi made a name for herself making arts-related documentaries (her subjects include Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Paul Verhoeven), and has complemented her non-fiction career with more lucrative stints as a music video director, helming promos for such artists as Devo, White Zombie and Gloria Estefan.

Given that Miniucchi made the 60-minute film Normality back in 1990 and has also directed a handful of shorts, her debut feature, Expired, is a long time coming. The film is an unlikely and often unromantic love story: meek meter maid (Samantha Morton) attracts the attention of brutish traffic officer Jay (Jason Patric) and a relationship awkwardly develops between them. Jay is an emotionally crippled loner and good-hearted Claire lives with her ailing mother (Teri Garr), but despite their wildly different personalities, these opposites attract and there seems a small chance they could be happy together. Against the backdrop of a depressing and alienating Los Angeles, Miniucchi presents the dysfunctional central relationship in a blackly comic manner redolent of Neil LaBute. Indeed, Patric plays Jay like he’s the half-brother of Cary, his pathologically unfeeling character in LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors, delivering his barbed dialogue with obvious relish. The interactions between Jay and Claire are often excruciating and Expired is intentionally uncomfortable viewing, however the strength of Miniucchi’s writing and even-handed direction and the … Read the rest

NEWFEST CROWNS ITS QUEEN

By Admin

NewFest wrapped up its 20th year of programming in New York City this Sunday, and at the conclusion of its closing night Gala film Were the World Mine, the festival’s Artistic Director Basil Tsiokos and Administrative Director Kerry Weldon announced its winners. The evening’s big winner, nabbing both the Showtime Vanguard Award and Best International Narrative Feature was The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela (pictured at right) a film that follows a Filipina transsexual prostitute who dreams of a fairy tale life in the West. Winning the Best Documentary Feature prize was Be Like Others which chronicles the experience of Iranian men who transition from male to female in order to abide by their country’s law, which explicitly bans homosexuality as punishable by death. Winning Best US Narrative Feature was The Lost Coast, a character driven drama in which old friends reconnect over the course of one evening in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. The Audience Award for Best Feature appropriately went to Pageant a documentary which had New Yorkers clapping for their favorite candidate for Miss Gay America. For the first time this year the festival held its NewDraft Screenplay Competition, the two winning screenwriters were Rodney Evans for Day Dream and Soman Chainani for Love Marriage. For a complete list of winners click here for NewFest’s website.… Read the rest

DO NOT PRESS…

By Scott Macaulay

… if you want to do anything other than procrastinating what you are supposed to be doing right now.

Actually, do not press here.… Read the rest

“HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD”

By Jason Guerrasio

Highlighted in The New York Times as well as our magazine during it’s impressive run through the festival circuit that included Toronto, Berlin and SXSW, Eddy Moretti and Vice magazine creator Suroosh Alvi‘s documentary on the only heavy metal band in Iraq is a gripping account of survival and the escape that music can bring.

The band, Acrassicauda (English translation: Black Scorpion), is comprised of a group of twentysomethings who learned how to speak English through watching Hollywood movies and listening to bootleg tapes of Metallica and Slayer. Moretti and Alvi first heard of the band soon after the fall of the Saddam regime when MTV‘s Gideon Yago went to Baghdad and came across Acrassicauda practicing. He would later write about them in Vice. The filmmakers stayed in touch with them and went to Baghdad a few years later to see if they were still alive. They were and what they captured would be their final performance in their homeland.

The film then hop scotches from Baghdad to Syria where a majority of Iraq refuges are moving to as we see the band members survive in a world that doesn’t want them. And not because they play loud music. It’s also filled with surreal moments in Baghdad that you won’t find on the evening news like an interview poolside at a hotel next to a man swimming laps, but in the background there’s constant gunfire.

Acrassicauda leaves their families in Baghdad and reunite in Damascus. There they put together a concert at an Internet cafe, the first time they’ve played since the final Baghdad gig. The reaction they get from the crowd, and the support of Vice magazine, motivates them to record three songs in hopes to get a record deal.

The film concludes with the band looking at some of the footage Moretti and Alvi shot in Baghdad and leads to an explosion of emotion from the group when they see their old rehearsal spot in rubble from a U.S. airstrike.

The strengths of Heavy Metal In Baghdad (which is executive produced by … Read the rest

THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA

By Scott Macaulay

If you are a regular — like, hourly — reader of this blog, you know something about In Spring, the short Jamie Stuart piece which was posted on his own site and linked here only to be taken down shortly thereafter. Some (including, I’ll admit, me) wondered if Stuart had, in his continual skirmishing with the confines of publicity in the service of artmaking, crossed some kind of line with this piece, which incorporated a real interview with a misidentified Werner Herzog (who Stuart painted in 2005, shown here) in the THINKfilm office within a fictional mock documentary on the distribution company.

Now, Stuart at his Stream blog writes about the piece, about not only its technical realization but also its conceptual intent. For Stuart fans, it’s as close as we’re probably ever going to get to an aesthetic manifesto from the guy. You can check it out here.… Read the rest

SUNDANCE DIRECTORS’ LAB, EPOCH TWO

Here’s writer/director John Magary’s (pictured here with Robert Redford and Vilmos Zsigmond) second dispatch from the Sundance Directors’ Lab:

This is my first stab at blogging, okay? I’ve never been a self-starting chronicler, never had a personal essay phase, or a journal, or a sketchbook. I’m not wired that way. I don’t really know how to steal away time in bars or cafes, to reflect on my day in an endearingly scruffy little notebook—even a grocery list is a chore.

Long story short, I’m finishing up my second week here, and I have no notes. It’s blurs on top of blurs. Super-blurs, hyper-blurs, and where to go for some peace and quiet and that Alone Time with a hot cup of Sanka? Case in point, this is a Sunday, my “free day,” and here’s how it played out:

2:00-4:30, Screening of Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), starring a swaggering and shirtless Robert Redford, presented by Nicky Katt. Nicky, whom you’ve seen in probably more movies than you realize and who’s something of a mad cinephile, is acting in Daniel Casey’s Lab project Poletown. He keeps referencing movies that I’ve never heard of, severely fraying my adequacy levels.

4:30-5:30, Filmmaker Meeting, wherein we Directing Fellows air out our laundry, talk about the Process, laugh, cry, what have you.

5:30-6:15, Adviser Reception, wherein we meet the new advisers. The advisers, as you can imagine, are tasked with making us better. Among them (again, no notes) this week, Robert Elswit, Fernando Leon de Aranoa, and Michael Almereyda. Talk about your solid bunches, whoa. Last week was Robert Redford, Vilmos Zsigmond, Ira Sachs, Joan Tewksbury, Thomas Carter, Suzy Elmiger, and Christine Lahti, so help was frighteningly abundant. Mr. Zsigmond screened Close Encounters. Ms. Tewksbury, Nashville. Gyula Gazdag, A Hungarian Fairy Tale, which is a more or less impossible-to-see gem. The screenings are mega-awesome-sweet, I won’t lie.

6:15-7ish, Screening of the week’s scenes, wherein we Directing Fellows watch our edits in a room full of crew, staff, actors, and advisers. It’s a sweaty-palm kinda thing. (More about the PUBLIC aspect below.) … Read the rest

PRIDE OF PLACE

By Scott Macaulay

If you are in Chicago this next month — or, perhaps, if you’ve got frequent flier miles or simple wanderlust — then I highly recommend checking out Enter Dream, a photo show by writer, photographer and critic Ray Pride, whose work is well known to readers of Filmmaker as well as those of his own Movie City Indie blog. Ray’s evocative photos are visually stunning and haunted by the idea of cinema — they contain potent traces of storytelling, whiffs of dramatic atmosphere, and suggestions of character.

Here’s the official spam:

The photographs in “Enter Dream” anatomize the geography of Chicago night, forbidding and delicious as these streets might be to a runaway child. Things left behind. Escape routes. Mute facades. Fearful horizons. Landscapes both bright and dark. The creatures that populate threatening places and moments familiar to ghosts, insomniacs and those who fear sleep and dreams to come. A city that does not know you, glimpsed in shards and captured in telling tableaus. The images, large and small, capture specific moments, but also intimately specific moods. William S. Burroughs wrote, “The important fact about urban living: the continued stream of second attention awareness. Every license plate, street sign, passing strangers, are saying something to you.” There are messages in “Enter Dream,” if you were to recognize them, if you were there to decipher them.

Ray’s work has been exhibited in group shows at the Cultural Center and Zolla-Lieberman Gallery and site-specific solo shows at Rainbo Club and Atomix Café. His portraits have been published in Newcity and Cinema Scope, among other places, and he contributes photo essays to Sharkforum and Variety. He is also a writer, film editor of Newcity and an editor of Filmmaker, Movie City News and Movie City Indie.

The show runs from June 13 through July 9 at Medicine Park. The opening reception is tomorrow night (June 13) at 8 p.m. Click on the link for more info.… Read the rest

WERNER HERZOG, “ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD”

By Nick Dawson

WERNER HERZOG AND D.P. PETER ZEITLINGER CAPTURE ANTARCTICA IN ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. COURTESY THINKFILM.

For more than 40 years, Werner Herzog has been redrawing the map, both cinematically and geographically. He started making short films in the mid-1960s, and made an impact internationally with Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), the tale of a mad conquistador’s doomed jungle quest, the first of five collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog and Kinski’s relationship was often turbulent and violent, but the ambitious, outlandish and usually unhinged films they made together over the course of the 70s and 80s – Nosferatu (1978), Woyzeck (1978), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987) – would all become classics, as would other Herzog films of the period such as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Stroszek (1977). Herzog’s narrative features have boldly explored dark, uncharted areas of the psyche as well as the planet, and in his parallel, synergetic career as a documentary filmmaker he has tackled similar themes. His non-fiction films predominantly bear the mark of the fearless adventurer, from his early The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969) through to 1997′s Little Dieter Needs to Fly (which he remade last year as Rescue Dawn) and the recent hit Grizzly Man (2005).

Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog’s latest documentary, proves that at the age of 65 he is still undaunted by the world’s least hospitable places. The film is a typically offbeat travelogue of his visit to Antarctica, a place which fascinates him not only because of its natural phenomena (the active volcano Mount Erebus, the strange world beneath the ice) but also because of its unusual collection of inhabitants, scientists, bohemians and nomads, who have found their way to the base of the planet. The film engages with Herzog’s career-long preoccupation with man’s relationship to savage nature and is ultimately an idiosyncratic vision of the planet’s seventh continent, where the director finds a parade of people with buckets on their heads, disoriented penguins and a woman who transforms herself into human hand luggage.

Filmmaker… Read the rest