Archive for October, 2009
Friday, October 30th, 2009
According to Variety, Miramax president Daniel Battsek has been let go. This is on the heels of parent company, Disney, scalling down the specialty division’s staff and release schedule. Under Battsek Miramax released award-winning titles The Queen and No Country for Old Men.
And according to Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood, Miramax’s New York office is closing down and its LA office will move to the Disney lot in Burbank.… Read the rest
Friday, October 30th, 2009
As a genre that’s all about keeping the audience on its toes, the horror movie naturally needs a regular injection of fresh talent, and writer-director Ti West is the latest to give it a shot in the arm. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1980, West spent his adolescence watching as many movies as he could catch on TV or rent from his local video store. Though he made stop motion movies with his G.I. Joe action figures, he didn’t give much serious thought to filmmaking until he decided to make a short film to indicate to colleges that he had more to offer than his grades suggested. He ended up at New York’s School of the Visual Arts studying film production and was introduced by one of his professors, director Kelly Reichardt, to low budget horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden, who became a champion of West’s short films, such as The Wicked (2001). In 2005, Fessenden acted as producer on West’s first feature, The Roost, a 1970s throwback horror about a group of friends on their way to a wedding who get stuck on a creepy farm. West also continued his working relationship with Fessenden and his Glass Eye Pix production company on his sophomore feature, Trigger Man, a low-key, pared down thriller about a hunting trip gone wrong. West’s next directorial effort, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, is awaiting release, and he has also just completed the web series Dead and Lonely for IFC.
West’s latest movie, The House of the Devil, is a lovingly made, 80s-set horror movie that further underlines the writer-director’s considerable talent. The plot is simple: impoverished student Sam (Jocelin Donahue), desperately trying to scrape together money to pay the deposit on her new apartment, accepts a babysitting job advertised by the unsettling Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan). It later transpires that it’s not a child that Sam will be keeping company in the big, old house, and – as ever – things are much more sinister than they initially seem. As in Trigger Man, West’s strategy here is to fashion a … Read the rest
Friday, October 30th, 2009
In September we put up a survey on our site that aimed at getting input from filmmakers about some of the issues that impact the making and preservation of their films.
Below are the results of the survey. These stats have been passed on to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their final report which they will be publishing sometime next year.
The only results that aren’t posted below are the ones where a written answer was required.
And for those who aren’t familiar, read the story that inspired this survey.
Thanks to those who participated.
Please check all boxes that apply to you
Director – 72 (77%)
Producer – 64 (69%)
Production company owner – 28 (30%)
Production company executive – 5 (5%)
Executive producer – 13 (14%)
Writer – 51 (55%)
Editor – 44 (47%)
Cinematographer – 37 (40%)
Post-Production supervisor – 19 (20%)
Other – 9 (10%)
People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.
Do you work principally in
Theatrical features – 41 (46%)
Documentaries – 24 (27%)
Other – 25 (28%)
Are your projects photographed principally in
35mm – 11 (12%)
16mm – 12 (13%)
Digitally – 71 (76%)
Hybrid (mix of film and digital) – 15 (16%)
People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.
Does the choice of post-production processes influence your image capture decision?
Yes – 56
No – 36
How are your projects edited?
Final Cut Pro – 75 (83%)
Avid – 24 (27%)
Other – 15 (17%)
People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.
How are your projects finished?
Digital intermediate finish – 37 (42%)
Tape to tape color-graded – 16 (18%)
Filmed-out and release printed on film – 13 (15%)
Cut negative and answer print – 9 (10%)
Electronic finish only – 54 (61%)
People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.
Do you have created content stored on different formats? If so, … Read the rest
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Producer Gill Holland forwarded me a link to this provocative interview by Eric Garland, whose company Big Champagne reports on filesharing activity for its customers — the major studios and broadcast networks. A lot of people talk about the relationship between what’s happened to the music business and what’s happening to the film business, but Garland effectively points out not only the similarities but also, promisingly, the differences. That said, he is not predicting that the mainstream film business will be able to maintain its revenue figures in a time of migrating audiences and technological change.
An excerpt from the CNET article:
CNET: But it doesn’t appear that Hulu is making the kind of money that will satisfy content owners, at least those News Corp. and NBC Universal (Hulu’s backers).
Garland: The cute answer, which is probably the truest answer, is that growing a sector is a privilege and not a right. There is no right size. There is no correct or God-given size for any sector. Why do we get to make movies that cost $300 million to make? Because we have found venues where people will spend more than $300 million on the result. If people spend only $50 million then the price of a movie must be $49 million or less.
I think in today’s dollars no one could make “Gone With The Wind” because at the time this movie was made when everyone went to the movies. It was something like 79 percent of the population. The cute answer is that movies will get smaller.
I know people are tearing out hair and spinning in graves, but maybe “Transformers” has to be made for $75 million next time.
Oh my God, what am I saying? Put the words back in your mouth. That is just a pretty plain faced observation. One outcome might mean that in the Digital Age the return on investment on a major International tent-pole franchise is not a billion dollars. It’s a quarter of that or a third. Therefore we have to get our costs in line with the market value.
… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Young producers should seriously think about applying for the IFP/Rotterdam Lab Fellowship. I go to Rotterdam every year, and for U.S.-based producers it’s a great place to learn the ins and outs of the global market for arthouse and specialty film. The deadline for this year’s program is Friday, November 13. The official word is below.
Through its No Borders’ partnership with CineMart, IFP will select and provide travel assistance to two American producers to participate in the 2010 Rotterdam Lab Fellowship.
The Rotterdam Lab is a four-day training workshop which runs concurrently with the CineMart Co-Production Market. Designed to build up the international networks and knowledge of producers in its professional panels and speed-dating sessions, lab participants will enjoy formal and informal meetings with colleagues and numerous representatives in the international finance, production, sales and distribution sectors.
Recent IFP/ROTTERDAM Lab Fellows include: Paul Mezey, Karin Chien, Noah Harlan, Jamin O’Brien, Anish Savjani and Mynette Louie.
Those interested in consideration for the program should apply with a letter of interest and a resume to Amy Dotson,Deputy Director IFP at adotson AT ifp.org by Friday, November 13th. Applicants should have at least one feature-film credit and be a current IFP member.
For more information on CineMart and the Rotterdam Film Festival go to the International Film Festival Rotterdam website.… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
We here at Filmmaker have been big fans of Alexander Olch‘s experimental memoir/documentary The Windmill Movie since seeing it at the New York Film Festival in ’08. If you missed it in theaters over the summer it will premiere on HBO2 tonight @ 8pm.
For those who don’t know about it, the film is about the 300 hours of autobiographical footage left behind by filmmaker/professor Richard P. Rogers after his death in 2001. Olch (who was a student of Rogers’s) was calling in to look over the footage and finish the film his mentor never could. What he delivers is a fascinating essay filled with Rogers’s footage (including beautiful landscapes of the Hamptons), audio recordings, actors like Wallace Shawn playing Rogers, and Olch’s narration.
Scott Macaulay interviewed Olch for the Spring ’09 issue. Here’s an excerpt from it.
Was the conceit of you making his autobiographical film there from the beginning? Or was it originally more of a third-person portrait? I was not particularly interested in just executing somebody else’s idea. What was actually compelling about the project was that there was this mix of elements in it. It was a story about a guy who’s trying to figure out how to make this movie that in some ways is about how he can’t figure out how to make the movie. And so I’m them constructing a story that really had very little to do with the material that he left. I mean, some of the tricky parts of producing their project [involved] negotiating the fact that I was really kind of dancing around the edges of what you probably would think were his intentions if you looked at the footage. His plan was definitely geared much more toward a piece about the community, about his history in Georgica, in the Hamptons, and was not very much concerned with his process of making a film. However he did not finish it, and he left behind some very key interviews with friends where he talked about the film and said, “Well, the only way I could make it is if
… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
The Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF) wrapped up its 29th incarnation this past weekend with encore screenings of its award-winning films and a closing night honoring of actress Maggie Q, who was on hand to introduce her newest film, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s fantasy swordplay epic The Warrior and the Wolf.
A successful Hong Kong fashion model who morphed into a film career there and later in China and Hollywood (she’s appeared in such diverse films as Gen-Y Cops, Rice Rhapsody, Three Kingdoms, and Live Free or Die Hard), Maggie Q (nee Maggie Quigley) is actually not from Hong Kong at all, or even Chinese; in fact, she’s half-Vietnamese and Polish/Irish, and was born and raised in Hawaii. After graduating high school in Honolulu she left to pursue a fashion career in Japan and Hong Kong, but quickly found herself switching from still images to moving ones; unable to speak Cantonese for her first film appearances, she learned her lines phonetically. Ironically, having re-relocated back to the U.S., she’s now often forced to convince casting directors that she’s American.
Q received HIFF’s Maverick Award, given to “honor a a cinema artist who defies the rules, forging a unique film career, transcending labels and thresholds to vacillate between Hollywood and global cinema,” as executive director Chuck Boller notes. Q’s certainly an appropriate choice, one made even more fitting by her deep Hawaii roots (“Class of Mililani High ’95,” noted festival director Anderson Le, to a few shouts from the crowd).
The accompanying screening of The Warrior and the Wolf was also an appropriate choice as a cinematic vision; director Tian, best known for his controversial 1986 Tibet-set masterpiece The Horse Thief and his 1993 The Blue Kite, began his career as part of China’s revered 5th Generation filmmaking movement along with Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and others, with films that directly or indirectly questioned China’s past, present, and future. Now that his colleagues are now making big-budgeted, candy-coated costume-drama epics (Zhang Yimou with swordplay fantasies Hero and House of Flying Daggers; Chen … Read the rest
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
You may have noticed that I’ve been posting in our Web Exclusives a number of first-person pieces by filmmakers discussing their distribution saga. We have already had producer Jake Abraham on distributing his film, Lovely by Surprise, and then writer/director Rob Perez on making the transition from studio distribution to DIY distribution with his nobody. The latest in our informal series is from Zachary Levy, director of the documentary Strongman. His piece, “Making our DIY Moment Matter,” is a refreshingly thoughtful take on what the trend towards alternative distribution should mean for our filmmaking. Check it out, and look for more of these first-person pieces in the coming weeks.… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Though Oren Peli‘s Paranormal Activity was number one at the box office last weekend and has a total gross of $62 million since its release late last month (and is primed for a big upcoming Halloween weekend), The New York Times reports that the film’s overnight success hasn’t impressed Hollywood as Peli’s next film, Area 51, a $5 million horror set at the infamous UFO site, is still looking for a distributor.
An excerpt:
At least six companies, including several major studios, have expressed interest in the film, according to people associated with the deal for “Area 51,” who spoke on condition of anonymity because bidding is still open.
But it has been easier to find those who are not buying than those who are. Paramount, for instance, is out.
“We are not in active discussions to buy ‘Area 51,’ ” said Katie Martin Kelly, a Paramount spokeswoman.
Similarly, DreamWorks, whose executives brought “Paranormal Activity” to Paramount during their tenure there; Overture Films, which has a modest hit with “Law Abiding Citizen”; and Lionsgate, which has made money on lower-budget movies like the “Saw” series, have not been active bidders for “Area 51,” according to people who are involved with the sale but spoke on condition of anonymity to minimize interference with bidding.
Spokesmen for Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox either declined to comment or did not respond to queries.
So far, excitement over a potentially hot property is being tempered by caution at seeing traditional industry economics quickly push the price, and perhaps lower the profit potential, of what on the surface appears to be another guerrilla-style property from Mr. Peli.… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Here’s the new episode of The Burg, directed by Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist). Visit the show’s site for more, including previous episodes and behind-the-scenes clips.
… Read the rest
