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

“AMERICAN SPLENDOR” AT STRANGER THAN FICTION

By Mary Anderson Casavant

At last night’s Stranger Than Fiction, a weekly documentary series at the IFC, host Thom Powers paid tribute to underground comic icon Harvey Pekar, who died in July of this year, by screening American Splendor, the dramatization of Pekar’s celebrated autobiographical comic series about his life as a file clerk. A comics fanatic who became friends with the writer while working in the underground comic scene, Powers described discovering Pekar’s work as “a truly transformative experience.”

Powers almost did not attend a screening of the film at Sundance in 2003, terrified it would do something horrible to something “so precious.” To his and the festival’s jury great delight (it won the Grand Jury Prize that year), directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini embraced Pekar’s philosphy that “ordinary life is pretty complex stuff,” weaving documentary footage of the morse Pekar into the more traditional scenes of Pekar as embodied by Paul Giamatti. The result is a surprisingly playful film with an affecting emotional texture — a reflection and an enhancement of Pekar’s work.

After the screening, directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini were on hand to pay tribute to Pekar as well as actors Paul Giamatti and Judah Friedlander, producer Ted Hope, production designer Therese DePrez, and Dean Haspiel, the only one of Pekar’s several illustrators who bears the distinction of having introduced Hope to Pekar.

Like any good wake, the evening quickly devolved into a series of anecdotes. Springer-Berman and Pulcini recollected Pekar’s recommendation for a “fantastic” hotel in Cleveland, neglecting to mention that it was a hotel that catered to cancer patients. After all, Cole Porter had composed “Night and Day” on the upstairs piano, who cared if there were people getting chemo in the lobby?

Giamatti remembered that Pekar was always himself and remained unimpressed during the entire filming. He’d never seen any of Giamatti’s movies except for Planet of the Apes. When Giamatti explained that he had played the orangutan, Pekar exclaimed, “You were the Jewish one, man.” Later during filming, Pekar went on to … Read the rest

INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER CONFERENCE EMBRACES THE FUTURE (AND THE PAST)

By Ingrid Kopp

Along with Labor Day, IFP’s Independent Film Week marks the end of Summer for me. It is a time to get back into the work groove and make plans for the year ahead. In this vein, the Independent Filmmaker Conference started yesterday with a day of panels dedicated to the future of film. Joana Vincente, Executive Director of IFP, opened the conference by noting a flurry of acquisitions at the recently completed Toronto International Film Festival and suggesting that things may be starting to look a little rosier for the independent film business. There were certainly some notes of optimism during the first day of the conference. Greenberg Traurig lawyer Steven Beer moderated a panel on packaging and financing and said, “I don’t want to hear any whining. We are going to get things done!”

This year IFP have introduced a daily Cage Match at the end of each day of the conference, pitting two individuals with divergent views against each other to duke it out on stage (verbally). This is a great idea because it gets around the panel ennui that can sometimes result when you have three or four people sitting together on a stage trying to be reasonable and polite. The first Cage Match featured Ted Hope and Jeff Lipsky discussing how to bring youth audiences to theaters to watch independent films. Hope and Lipsky were mostly on the same side (except when they got on to the subject of the relative merits of Mumblecore), both passionate about figuring out how to make independent film an exciting theatrical experience for people who don’t skew older, white and female (Hope said that this is the current demographic for independent film). Hope wanted to know why there was no Clockwork Orange for the younger generation. He stated that there are no really cool, young elements in independent film, no film equivalent of Public Enemy or The Clash, and no film critics who speak to a youth audience, “How do we make sure we are not relegated to the land of dance and chamber orchestras?” Lipsky argued that we … Read the rest

FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: FALL, 1995

By Scott Macaulay

A number of cool things about our Fall, 1995 issue. First, the cover portrait of Tim Roth was an original by Nan Goldin, which was a pretty amazing coup for us at the time. Roth was one of the stars of Four Rooms, a now barely-remembered omnibus film all set in a hotel with segments helmed by Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. Roth had shaved his head for a part when this photo was taken, so he was kind of unrecognizable, but we were still thrilled to have an original of Nan’s. L.M. Kit Carson did the interview with all the directors. The film? Well, the standard deal with most omnibus films is that one segment is great, one is terrible, and the rest float somewhere in the middle, making the completed films somewhat lumpy viewing experiences. This one was no different.

Here’s the entirety of the Tarantino interview. (The bracketed parts are from Carson.)

Carson: Want to talk about Four Rooms?

Quentin Tarantino: [Laughs and laughs.]

Carson: Say “No.” Just say “No” so I can quote you.

Tarantino: No. [Laughs.] You gotta get famous. [He is scrambling through boxes of free merchandise sent to his office.] Look, they just give you all these things. Free shoes. [He holds up a pair of oversized fire-engine red tennis shoes.] Odd fact is: I had co-producer slot on a small studio movie (a whole other story) shooting at the same time back in December. And I’d drive, 12 minutes from this small set, to the big studio lot for meetings. And driving through the studio gates was like driving into a Magritte painting. The place was motionless. Stop-frame. Semi-surreal. Echoing footsteps. Maybe some lone figure standing insecurely in a long slanting shadow. Like: nothing going on here. Except the feeling of gigantic corporate secrets hatching someplace deep inside this joint.

[Fact is, corporate-land was making big changes. Disney/ABC. Westinghouse/CBS. Time Warner/Turner. And they tell us: this is the Future.]

But I’d go back and forth from the ever-more-monolithic studio to this rackety rolling-and-tumbling Four Rooms

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THE NEW BREED L.A. #7: “SCREENING THE CUT”

“Don’t make your festival premiere your first test screening,” I always say to the filmmakers who take the IFP Narrative Lab. It’s sounds basic, but you’d be surprised at how many filmmakers I’ve come across who never properly screen their cuts with an audience before taking them out into the world. In this final episode of The New Breed‘s series on filmmakers and their creative process shot at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Marwencol director Jeff Malmberg and producer Ted Hope discuss their late-edit screening processes.

Thanks to Zak Forsman and Kevin Shah of Sabi Pictures and to the Workbook Project for their work and collaboration with this series.

Go back and watch all the episodes here.

NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 7 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.… Read the rest

FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: SPRING, 1994

By Scott Macaulay

Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Spring, 1994.

The first ticking clock….

Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner’s Go Fish was our cover story, Spring, 1994, and I think may have been our first original piece of cover photography. Holly Willis’s story was a comprehensive account of the film’s production and sales process, charting the film’s beginnings as a no-budget feature begun alone by Troche and Turner to one produced by Christine Vachon and Tom Kalin and sold by famed producers’ rep John Pierson to Goldwyn in a Sundance bidding war. (The lesbian feature would go on to be the “dykes” in Pierson’s memoir, Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes.)

From Willis’s piece:

“One of the best things that happened to Go Fish was that we ran out of money,” claims Troche. “It was August of ’92 and we had to close up shop. We had hit rock bottom. But then we hooked up with Christine [Vachon]. We were able to take the film and do a rough edit so we could look at what we had and see where the holes were. It was like Swiss cheese; there were holes in the narrative galore.” Additional scenes were shot, and the voice-over commentary was added….

For executive producer Christine Vachon, the project was love at first sight. “Rose and Guin sent me a videotape almost a year ago. It was 20 minutes of rough scenes and a letter saying, “We don’t have any money and we don’t know what to do.” I saw that the film was something that I wanted to get involved in. The writing was very strong and the performances were good and I saw that there was a quirky sensibility to it that I found very interesting. I also saw that it was the lesbian movie that I had been looking for. It had the potential to go very far and I knew that the so-called community was looking for this kind of movie. At that point I started trying to raise money.

… Read the rest

NEW BREED L.A. #6: “THE INTEGRITY OF STORY”

Here’s the latest of our videos by Sabi Pictures in collaboration with the Workbook Project on L.A. Film Festival filmmakers and their creative processes. This installment: “The Integrity of Story.” The final episode in this series will be up Monday, so if you haven’t caught up with the others yet, check out the links below.

NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 6 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.… Read the rest

FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: FALL, 1992

By Scott Macaulay

As Filmmaker approaches its 18th birthday, I thought I’d fill the dog days of August with a series of posts taking you through our history. For the next few weeks I’ll be revisiting an issue a day, pointing towards significant pieces from our archive and commenting on interesting correspondences between independent film’s past and its present day.

Of course I’ll start with our debut issue: Fall, 1992. Filmmaker was actually the spawn of two magazines, The Off-Hollywood Report and Montage. The OHR was the IFP’s publication, Montage was published by IFP/West (then IFP/Los Angeles and now Film Independent). The original crew consisted of me as Editor, Karol Martesko as Publisher and Holly Willis as our West Coast Editor, and the IFP and IFP/West jointly published the magazine. (Filmmaker is now solely published by the IFP.) The goal was to create a single new national magazine “by filmmakers, for filmmakers,” one in which content was driven by the voice of people working in the film industry. We also strove for an expansive definition of independent film. Our first issue featured producer Andrea Sperling (most recently, Mark Ruffalo’s Sympathy for Delicious) on no-budget shooting in Los Angeles; me interviewing Paul Schrader about his Light Sleeper; Jeff Scher, in the days before the digital intermediate, interviewing film color timer Don Ciana; and our cover story, a conversation between directors Hal Hartley, whose third feature, Simple Men, was opening, and Nick Gomez, about to debut with his first pic, Laws of Gravity. The two directors would seemingly be an odd couple. Hartley’s work was more mannered in its approach, while Gomez was gaining attention for a realer-than-realism style in which the camera always seemed to be catching up to the action. (Indeed, d.p. Jean de Segonzac became in-demand after this picture; his jittery camerawork would soon be a staple of TV shows like Homicide.) Both directors hailed from SUNY Purchase film school, though, and Gomez edited Hartley’s second feature, Trust. And James Schamus, who had been first the Editor of the OHR and then its Executive … Read the rest

NEW BREED L.A. #4: “ELEMENTS OF CASTING”

“Elements of Casting” is the title of the fourth New Breed video from the Los Angeles Film Festival. Look for two more next week, on Monday and Thursday.

NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 4 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.… Read the rest