THE MADNESS OF “FULL METAL JACKET”

By Jamie Stuart

“Matthew, don’t allow yourself to ask “Why is he doing this to me?” Wonder why is he doing this to himself.”

The blown-to-hell chaos of productions like Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo and Jaws are often evoked as legendary examples of disasters turned into classic motion pictures, but after reading Matthew Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary, I get the feeling that was par for Stanley Kubrick.

It’s one thing to hear stray anecdotes about life on his films, but it’s something quite different to swim through a first-person account of an entire project — an account that isn’t even a memoir but a digested arrangement of actual diary entires written as it all went down.

I recently grabbed a copy, one of only a few hundred remaining, from the original 2005 run of 20,000, and devoured it in one night. It’s not a rigidly detailed portrait like Taschen’s The Greatest Movie Never Made, but more an impressionistic experience mixing text and photos taken by Modine on set and elsewhere. That said, between these two books, you couldn’t ask for a better example of how Kubrick operated as a filmmaker from pre-production through shooting; the first phase seemed ruthlessly controlled and pedantic in his acquisition of research, the second was completely freeform.

Full Metal Jacket was in production from August 1985 through September 1986, including a 3-month break while Lee Ermy recovered from a car accident. Those who recall reading about The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut in newspapers know it went the same way on those films too. Full Metal Jacket took so long to make that Oliver Stone was able to convince investors to fund Platoon based on Kubrick making a Vietnam film, and he beat Kubrick to the punch, sucking a lot of air out of FMJ‘s release six months later.

Considering that Modine is a true ambassador for FMJ, regularly conducting Q&A’s at screenings and even developing a FMJ iPhone app, the most revelatory aspect about his experience on the film is how utterly miserable he seemed while making it — it dragged … Read the rest

BIG NEWS FOR DOC MAKERS: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS GRANTS DMCA EXEMPTIONS

By Scott Macaulay

Big news from the Library of Congress today. In their three-year annual review of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, restrictions on documentary makers related to the fair use of copyrighted materials were significantly eased. Attorney Michael C. Donaldson, who assembled the coalition lobbying for these changes and provided pro bono counsel, commented, “Documentary filmmakers have been freed of the high price extracted by rights holders, or the high price of possible criminal prosecution, when they need to reach public domain material or material to be used pursuant to fair use. All they have to do is follow a few simple rules and they can copy such materials from commercially available DVDs.”

Here is a summary of the new regulations provided by Donaldson’s publicists:

Today the Librarian of Congress approved the recommendations of the Copyright Office granting relief to all documentary filmmakers. It granted the International Documentary Association’s request for an exemption from the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that made it a crime to rip a DVD.

The exact language is that if you are engaged in documentary filmmaking, you can copy a DVD without violating the DMCA as follows: “solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use…”

In order to qualify for the exemption you must meet all of the following criteria:

1. You must have lawfully acquired a lawfully made DVD. In other words, don’t buy a pirated copy. Don’t steal a legitimate copy.

2. You may only copy short portions of material for a “non-infringing use” which essentially translates into material in the public domain or material that you plan to use pursuant to the doctrine of fair use.

3. You must be making the copy to use in a documentary.

4. You want to be sure that you are well aware of public domain and fair use laws.

5. You must be a

… Read the rest

SOFT SELL

By Filmmaker Staff

Filmmaker and its friends recommend our favorite apps, programs and Web services.

WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER (SUNDAY MORNING LINKS)

By Scott Macaulay

Here are a few links I sent to my Instapaper account and have been reading this weekend.

* When we queried a few filmmakers for a column on software and apps in the new issue of Filmmaker, I noted the number of respondents who had migrated to the Android operating system. I recalled meeting an Android developer at SXSW this year, and he told me he was planning for the platform’s rapid rise. He also said that he was an Apple fan too, and he felt the competition would be a good thing for both platforms. There’s an exchange along these lines going on between Robert Scoble at his Scobleizer blog (“Why I Can’t Kick the iPhone Habit”) and Louis Gray (“Why I Turned in My iPhone and Went Android”). For those interested in the future of mobile platforms and how choice is playing out in the marketplace, they are worth a read. (Related from Barrons: “How Google’s Android Could Overtake Apple’s iPhone.”)

* Via Derren Brown’s blog, night owls are smarter than other people.

* I’m just starting Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, his book on videogaming, and noted Chuck Tryon’s blog post about the history of Roger Ebert’s relationship to the medium and what that has to say about media criticism. (For those who don’t know, Ebert has recently stirred up a lot of debate in the blogosphere over his since revised statement that “Video Games Can Never be Art.”)

* At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow notes Brazil’s copyright law, which levies fines against rightsholders who prevent fair use of their materials through implementation of DRM.

* This is from nine days ago, but if you missed it, the attempt by a law firm and group of producers, including those behind The Hurt Locker, to sue filesharers, has hit legal roadblocks.

* I recently watched Lucy Walker’s well-made and compelling documentary on nuclear weapons, Countdown to Zero. As a kid I was terrified by nuclear war — I still remember watching Fail Safe on TV. As a political science major in college Graham Allison’s … Read the rest