GOTHAM AWARDS SILENT AUCTION LAUNCHES ON CHARITY BUZZ

By Dan Schoenbrun

IFP has partnered with online auction-house Charity Buzz for their annual Gotham Awards silent auction. Between now and December 7^th, you can go here to bid on a variety of film-related items, including one-on-one consultations with industry leaders Ted Hope (Double Hope Films), Sheila Nevins (HBO) and Paul Schnee (Barden / Schnee Casting), as well as a visit to the set of the 3^rd season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

Also up for auction are tickets to the world premiere of David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or, if you’re looking for something a bit more indie-centric, you can bid on VIP passes to The NY Times’ upcoming Times Talk Arts & Leisure weekend, or to the Gotham Awards themselves.

All proceeds raised in the auction benefit IFP, the nation’s oldest and largest organization of independent filmmakers. The Gotham Awards take place Monday, November 29. Head over to Filmmaker’s newly launched Gotham Awards channel for information on nominees and exclusive content.… Read the rest

HOPE, VACHON OFFER MASTER CLASS

By Scott Macaulay

Many years ago Ted Hope called me up and said that I and my partner, Robin O’Hara, should be at his Good Machine office on a Saturday morning at 9:00 AM. He was doing a workshop on low-budget production and, as young producers, he thought we’d find it helpful. That was about 20 years ago, and I still remember — and rely on — stuff Hope taught that day.

A lot has changed in two decades, but both Hope and producer Christine Vachon, who are teaching a master class this Saturday, have kept up with the evolution of independent film and know what the young filmmakers and producers of today need to know.

From their press release:

The veteran indie producers, whose films have won four Sundance Grand Jury Prizes, Critics’ prizes at Cannes, Emmy Awards, and earned loads of Oscar nominations, have previously shared the insights they’ve gained in an ever-changing field with sold out audiences of filmmakers in the UK and Scandinavia. Now they will be offering their knowledge to their hometown NYC filmmaking community. Cantor Film Center (36 E 8th St., New York, NY 10003) on Saturday, November 5 from 10am until 4pm.

Ted and Christine have discovered and nurtured many young directors. They’ve produced the first features of Todd Haynes, Ang Lee, Rose Troche, Mary Harron, Michel Gondry, this year’s Sundance Directing Prize-winner, Sean Durkin and many, many more. Beyond writing/directing talent, they have also mentored and helped build many top producers and executives.

Hope and Vachon will focus on how to get your movie made, how to make it well and make it great, how to get it seen, and how to survive to do it all over again. And again. And again. And again. The Film industry’s creative and business sectors are at an intersection of great possibility – learn how to tap into and exploit these shifting paradigms.

“Traveling the world with Christine discussing the future of film has been a great experience—we’ve gotten to meet and talk to the folks who will be making the good work and leading the industry

… Read the rest

IFP TO STREAM 2011 FILMMAKER CONFERENCE

By Dan Schoenbrun

Did you miss the Filmmaker Conference at Independent Film Week last month?  Me too – I managed to catch a few panels, but I spent most of the week running around, working, and attending other IFW events (as evidenced by my photo blogs here, here, and here).

Luckily, IFP will streaming the entire conference available to members.  One new video will be added to ifp.org every weekday this month.  Membership levels start at $35, which for roughly 30 hours of film industry education (and tons of other benefits) is not a bad deal.

One video is already online – a case study of Sundance Audience Award winning documentary Buck featuring director Cindy Meehl, producer Julie Goldman, editor Toby Shimin, associate producer Sofia Santana, line producer Alice Henty, and co-executive producer and Back Allie Films president Andrea Meditch.

Other panels coming soon:

Keynote addresses from Geoffrey Gilmore (Tribeca Enterprises), Rose Kuo (Film Society of Lincoln Center), Keri Putnam (Sundance Institute), and Josh Braun (Submarine Entertainment).

Case studies featuring the creative teams behind recent indie successes Red State, Terri, Kinyarwanda, and Bill Cunningham New York.

Masterclass: “How to Finance Your Film” featuring Ira Deutchman (Emerging Pictures), Richard Sheehan (HSBC Bank), Jonathan Gray (Gray Krauss Des Rochers LLP), Philipp Engelhorn (Cinereach), Pat Kaufman (New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development), and Nekisa Cooper (Producer, Pariah)

“Is Indie Film a Hobby or Career” Cage Match featuring Ted Hope (Producer, Super, Adventureland) and Mynette Louie (Children of Invention).

Masterclass: “How to Design a Winning Distribution Strategy” with Peter Broderick (Paradigm Consulting)

For the week’s full schedule, check out the Filmmaker Conference website.  To learn more about IFP membership, go here.… Read the rest

INDEPENDENTS AND THE ECONOMY

By Scott Macaulay

Shortly after hitting send on this week’s newsletter, in which I wondered whether our current economic situation is similar to 2008, I came across this Reuters article by Joshua L. Weinstein, which wonders pretty much the same thing. Both he and I riff off this week’s Dow roller coaster ride, and while the Friday close was more optimistic than might have been expected on Tuesday, the macro challenges facing both the investment community and consumers remain. Hence, a potentially rocky road ahead.

From Weinstein:

But Hal Vogel, of Vogel Capital Management and the author of Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, takes a much darker view of the economy’s well-being, and what that portends for Hollywood. He told TheWrap that the industry should prepare for a year or two of difficult times.

Maybe longer.

“It’s not good,” he said. “You know what happened with the indies last time — ’07, ’08? They got pretty much smashed. Blown away. The point here is, it’s dependent on capital, and the capital is going to be tougher to get and it’ll be more expensive.”

He said that when the market plummets, investors get conservative.

“If you think that moviemaking was a risky proposition before, it now looks even riskier,” he said.

On top of that, Vogel said, “when you get to the other end of the food chain, consumers are not going to have the funds to buy as much, whether it’s at the box office or streaming or DVDs.”

An independent producer shared Vogel’s gloomy outlook, predicting that the stock market’s troubles are going to continue, making institutional and individual investors less likely to finance movies.

He predicted that money invested in “affinity-driven projects, like your kid is going to direct something,” will “dry up or at least drop significantly” while larger, private-equity financed companies will rethink how they finance.

For those of you who don’t get our newsletter, here’s my piece. (And if you don’t, why not sign up? It’s free, and each week I try to write something that’s at least a little bit thought out and … Read the rest

IFP’s ANNUAL SCRIPT TO SCREEN CONFERENCE

By Mary Anderson Casavant

Ah, there’s nothing quite like the smell of pitches in the morning. This past Saturday, the IFP kicked off its annual Script to Screen Conference with five brave writers pitching their scripts to a panel of producers and agents.

Although all the panelists agreed that it was useful for writers to compare their projects to other films (a practice known as “using comps”) Peter Van Steemburg, the Director of Acquisitions at Magnolia Pictures, warned against using obvious ones such as “Juno or Napoleon Dynamite,” recommending that if you are pitching something that’s a lot like another movie, you should “immediately say how yours is different.”

Aida LiPera, Director of Acquisitions for Visit Films, encouraged one of the writers not to get lost in the details and to instead focus on “the major conflict” and “the high point” of his story. The panelists emphasized the importance of being specific when it came to both budget and casting ideas. Producer Peter Phok of Glass Eye Pix even recommended coming to a pitch with “visual material,” stating that he “loved it when pitches have art come with it.”

Next up was a case study of Borderline Films, the team behind the recent Sundance favorite, Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin and produced by Borderline’s Antonio Campos and Josh Mond (and exec produced by moderator Ted Hope). After meeting as undergraduates at NYU, the trio quickly realized they all shared a common goal: to use the program as a launch pad for a fully functioning production company. While still in the program, the trio were all set to produce their first feature, only to have funding fall through at the last minute, an experience Campos called, “a huge blow.”

The trio kept working, eventually producing Afterschool (directed by Campos), which premiered at Cannes. Hope praised the filmmakers’ “willingness to fail” and cited it as a major reason that trio was able to “move beyond the page.” Mond explained their all for one and one for all production model: when one of the trio is writing, the … Read the rest

IFP’S SCRIPT TO SCREEN ON SATURDAY

By Jason Guerrasio

It’s not too late to attend the IFP’s Script to Screen Conference, which takes place this Saturday at 92Y Tribeca in New York City.

Highlights include conversations with writer-director Barry Levinson (Rain Man) and Black Swan screenwriter Mark Heyman; a Pitch Workshop in which five emerging screenwriters will pitch their screenplays to a panel of experts (including sales agents, Magnolia Pictures’ head of acquisitions, and a producer from Glass Eye Pix); a case-study with the team from Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene moderated by Ted Hope; a live reading of two IFP alumni screenplays for dialogue analysis with independent film producers; and a panel on new platforms for writers, featuring Carol Kolb, head writer for The Onion News Network.

If you’re an IFP member you will get in with a special $80 discounted member rate.

To learn more about the conference and how to get tickets go to ifp.org/script-to-screen-conference.… Read the rest

THE MICROBUDGET CONVERSATION: SOUNDS GOOD

By John Yost

These past two weeks I’ve been in Rochester, NY working on the Orphaned soundtrack with all the usual suspects and collaborators.  (Let me know if there are issues with the feed. This is an ongoing daily live feed where I will eventually be distributing free content…it is part of my MFA thesis.) I had been trying to write a response to the latest “explosion” of indie film acquisitions, the new world models of indie film financing, and the influx of nobody filmmakers. BUT I found that others with something to say, have already said it best, so I scrapped it. (Although I am interested in any comments or response to some of these links.)

A few months ago I met a fellow micro-budget director through these articles, and an introduction by a mutual friend. Neal Dhand had just finished work on his film Second Story Man (pictured below) when we first started talking. The film had just been accepted to Cinequest. Neal lives, works, and teaches in Western NY. So while I was in town, I took the opportunity to have dinner with him and talk about what was really on my mind…Indie film sound production and recording.

An early conversation with my sound designer, Kevin Kniowski, consisted largely of me making a lot of strange whistling noises. I’m sure I also waved my hands around for emphasis and hit  his radiator more than once. We were nearing picture lock on Second Story Man and gearing up for a full on sound design assault; I was trying to describe what old, rattling pipes sound like. Working with sound, particularly in post, is a much different experience for me than say, working with my cinematographer  in the early stages of pre production. With the latter, I brought a lot of DVDs and artwork, and we talked about them. With Kevin, I could really only find two usable references, and strangely enough, they were both from horror films. So the communication barrier (“What the hell is the sound hermeneutic?” and “It should sound like this. [Insert whistling]. … Read the rest

WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS, 2/20/11

By Scott Macaulay

Here are a few things in my Instapaper this week.

In GQ, Mark Harris looks back at “The Day the Movies Died” and the preeminence of easy marketing over original ideas. An excerpt:

Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they’re now trying to sell.

YouTube has a contest for non-profits making videos.

Boing Boing considers outside filmmaker Neil Breen, “real estate magnate turned sci-fi auteur.” His latest:

I Am Here….Now (trailer) from Cinefamily on Vimeo.

At Shadowlocked, a useful and detailed exploration of the major studio policies on take down notices and YouTube.

Via Paid Content, a report from a publishing industry invite-only “Roundtable on Tablet Subscriptions” held in London. The publishers’ number 1 demand? A reduction of Apple’s just-announced 30% tariff on iOS-delivered content? No. “A fair business partnership” is #4. #1 is:

1. Censorship of content

Freedom of speech is the basis of the media’s existence. Publishers cannot agree with the practices of technology companies that interfere with editorial decisions on what to put into a digital publication. So we appeal to Apple to change its rules and practices that led to the rejection of apps in some European countries regarding content considered legal and appropriate in those countries.

Like a ton of people, I linked to the fantastic reverse-zombie Dead Island trailer this week. A bona fide viral sensation, the trailer has now prompted a movie deal in which the film will embrace the backwards-chronology style of the trailer instead of the more normal forward gameplay of the game title itself. Reports Drew McWeeney at Hitflix:

Techland, the Polish developer for the game, has got to be dancing in the streets right now. This is a game that had been delayed and that had fallen off the radar after being

… Read the rest

TED HOPE PICKS THE TRULY BRAVE THINKERS OF 2010

By Scott Macaulay

Perhaps my most pleasant surprise of 2009 was popping up along with 20 other folks on Ted Hope’s Truly Brave Thinkers list. It was the first list of what I hoped would be for Ted an annual tradition, and today is confirmation that it is. Visit Ted’s Truly Free Film blog for his 2010 edition, one that is even more mindful of film’s need to embrace new business paradigms and audience-development tools. You will find directors and producers mixing it up with executives from both the profit and non-profit/government-funding worlds. Indeed, the list’s swath is wide, encompassing people like Ed Burns and Rainn Wilson with Kickstarter’s Yancey Strickler & Perry Chen and Variance’s Dylan Marchetti.

I was particularly happy to see producer Mike Ryan on the list because of what Ted wrote:

Perhaps no post on indie film initially infuriated me as much as Mike’s Filmmaker Mag piece on the “current preoccupations of the indie film scene.“ I strongly disagree with Mike’s blame-it-on-the-audience and build-it-and-if-it-is-good-they-will-come approach, but as the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months, the necessity of his central message of needing to be driven by the art and not the business resonated in deeper and deeper ways with me. It is a brave thing to say, particularly as a producer, that you do not care if something makes money and that the art comes first. Mike leaves no doubt that he is a man of bold visions and strong opinions; he is not afraid to speak truth to power. He is both rigorous and playful in his thinking, and he invests it in new projects and filmmakers, not because of the business or opportunity, but because he believes that what they have to say and how they choose to say it is important. American Indie would not be the fertile ground it is these days without Mike’s efforts, but his efforts don’t end there: Mike helped to co-found HammerToNail with both Corbin Day, Michael Tully, and myself; Mike helped start an initiative in Memphis to train underprivileged youth in film, and Mike has trained

… Read the rest

WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS

By Scott Macaulay

I haven’t done one of these in a while, so a few of these links are less than current. In any case, here are some links of interest from my Instapaper archives.

First, Instapaper itself, and its founder Marco Arment, got some love from today’s New York Times.

In The Paris Review, filmmaker Michael Almereyda collects largely unseen and uncollected photographs by William Eggleston. He writes:

William Eggleston’s color photographs are among the most widely viewed, and widely admired, in the medium. But I wanted to survey Eggleston’s unseen, unpublished work—his B-sides, bootlegs, unreleased tracks—and to that end I made five trips to Memphis in the course of a year, rummaging through roughly 35,000 digital scans archived by the Eggleston Artistic Trust. The intention was to come up with a book of images rescued from near oblivion. The resulting selection—necessarily partial, narrow, subjective—favors pictures of people, many of them the photographer’s blood relatives and close friends…

Here’s one photo with commentary by Eggleston:

“She used to dance onstage with a hippie band called Insect Trust. Their music, you could say, was too new for me. You could say I never made the mistake of listening to their music. I was studying Bach at the time. I never made a mistake when I listened to Bach.”

Here’s a great post for screenwriters from Carson Reeves at Scriptshadow on writing the perfect script to, alternately, win a Nicholl Fellowship, make it onto the Black List, make a $1-million spec sale, create viral buzz or wallow in obscurity. Reeves ID’s the traits the cause scripts to excel in each category.

The Guardian on Wikileaks backlash and the beginning of the first global cyberwar. Related: at Scripting, “Are We Starting an All-Out War on the internet?” And, Clay Shirky strikes a balanced position in “Wikileaks and the Long Haul.”

At his blog, SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin on why “The Algorithm and the Crowd Are Not Enough.” A post on a promising new tech trend of start-ups that bring expert, curatorial and essentially human voices back to ‘net-based selection processes.

If you, like me … Read the rest