Over at Variety's The Circuit, Mike Jones digs up a very helpful article by a director who travelled to Cannes to pitch his project... that happened to appear a couple of years ago in Filmmaker. Producers and directors about to make the trip over would do well to check it out.

An excerpt from Richard Press's Cannes Diary:

A week before I leave for cannes to participate in L’Atelier du Festival, the co-production market of the Cannes Film Festival, I receive an e-mail from the festival reminding me to bring my black tie; without it I will not be allowed to ascend the Red Carpet for the competition screenings. Then, as an aside — a whisper of the protocol to come — they add, “And don’t wear white socks.” I think they’re joking, but in a flurry of good-natured e-mails I’m assured that more than one unfortunate fashion “faux pas-er” has been forced to turn around and head down the steps in sartorial shame.

Soon after my arrival in Cannes it becomes clear that the festival doesn’t shy away from the whole truth of the movie industry. Rather, it embraces and celebrates the glamour, the commerce and the art of filmmaking in equal measure. It’s a heady, over-the-top mix that makes my 10 days at the Atelier an intoxicating carnival.

Read more at the link.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/10/2008 11:22:00 PM Comments (0)

The New Yorker this week reports on a Hollywood job opening in this generally deteriorating entertainment economy. The "Talk of the Town" piece by Lizzie Widdicombe quotes an "unofficial" email about what is apparently a real position: cultural attache to Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer. Here's the email:

This person would be responsible for keeping Brian abreast of everything that’s going on in the world; politically, culturally, musically. . . . They’re also responsible for finding an interesting person for Brian to meet with every week . . . an astronaut, a journalist, a philosopher, a buddhist monk. . . . There is LOTS of reading for this position! Grazer may ask you to read any book he’s interested in. You’ll probably get to read about 4 or 5 books a week and you may be required to travel with him on his private plane to Hawaii, New York, Europe—teaching him anything he asks you about along the way. . . . You will also be provided with an assistant. . . . Salary is around $150,000 a year. . . . You will be to Grazer what Karl Rove was to Bush.

If you haven't already applied, it may be too late. From the piece:

“I’ve met a lot of good candidates,” Grazer said, reached on his cell phone en route to a meeting with the screenwriter for Angels and Demons. He said that he’d been hiring cultural attachés for twenty years, ever since he asked Jonas Salk’s assistant to help him track down interesting people in science. Fifteen or twenty people have held the job since then. (The “attaché” title started out as a joke.) “They have to be really resourceful,” Grazer said. “I like to meet people in dangerous organizations, and my cultural attaché finds out who that person is—who runs the Yakuza, or the Masons, or MI5.” The best attaché so far, Grazer said, has been Brad Grossman, the current one, who is leaving the post, after four years. Grossman is thirty-two; he owned a tutoring business before taking the job, and Grazer said that he is especially good at explaining the things he’s asked to learn about—bacteria or makeup or superdelegates. “I’m looking for a person who has that teacherlike quality,” Grazer said. “Also, it’s good to have a person who is a connector, who is liked by people.”

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/10/2008 04:05:00 PM Comments (0)

Roberto Quezada-Dardon's article on the Red One camera is one of our most widely read articles on the website this month. If you want to read about the Red from a different angle, check out Steve Tammi's piece, "Beta Sight: Red Digital Camera Red One," in the current Millimeter, which is online at their Digital Content Producer site.

Here's his lede:

I have been shooting with the Red Digital Cinema Red One Camera for almost six months now. Although I have been asked to write about my first impression of the camera, it is important to realize that shooting with the Red One camera is a continuous progression of first impressions. New camera accessories, firmware, and production software have been released on a continual basis since I've taken delivery of my camera. Unlike other camera companies, Red Digital Cinema plans to continually upgrade and refine the original cameras — a welcome change to the usual cycle of purchasing new cameras every few years and sending the old model to the auction block or shelf to collect dust. With that in mind, let's talk about what the last six months of first impressions have been like.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/09/2008 07:06:00 PM Comments (1)

Here's Ricky jay, who co-stars in David Mamet's Redbelt, currently in release, performing a card trick alongside his discussion of Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance.



Both Mamet and Jay were interviewed this week, separately, on the XMPR Bob Edwards radio show, and the discussions can be listened to or downloaded here. Both men are fantastic raconteurs and interview subjects, so this is a great hour, with Mamet talking about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, the fight film and noir genres, the link between drama, magic and con games, and his approach to rehearsing film actors. Jay discusses performing, card magic, and The Life, Adventures and Unparalleled Sufferings of Andrew Oehler, an account of a Zelig-like magician who travelled throughout the U.S. territories in the late 1700s where he was continuously jailed by authorities convinced his ghost shows were real.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/09/2008 12:55:00 AM Comments (0)

I've wondered several times on this blog why more filmmakers don't try to make original works for the web, works that challenge and alter the storytelling conventions of their feature or other narrative work. Well, now on the Sundance Channel website comes Green Porno, a series of shorts designed to be watched on computers and cellphones.

Here's what Sundance and Rossellini say about the project:

Green Porno is a series of very short films conceived, written, co-directed by and featuring Isabella Rossellini about the sex life of bugs, insects and various creatures. The films are a comical but insightful study of the curious ways certain bugs “make love”. “Green” echoes the ecological movement of today and our interest in nature, and “Porno” alludes to the racy ways bugs, insects and other creatures have sex, if human, these acts would not be allowed to be screened or air on television, considered instead as most filthy and obscene.

Each film is executed in a very simple childlike manner. They are a playful mixture of real world and cartoon. Each episode begins with Isabella speaking to the camera “ If I were a…(firefly, spider, dragonfly etc.). She then transforms into the male of the species explaining in a simple yet direct dialogue the actual act of species-specific fornication. The costumes, colorful sets and backdrops as well as the female insects contribute to the playfulness of the films. The contrast of this “naïf” expression and filthy sex practices adds to the comicality of Green Porno.

Green Porno is an experiment specifically conceived with the third screen, namely cellular screens, computers and ipods.

Green Porno, directed by Jody Shapiro and Rossellini, is odd, disarming, and, finally, quite charming and wonderful. Click on the link above to watch these shorts.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/08/2008 06:00:00 PM Comments (0)

Variety is reporting the stunning news that Warner Bros. is shutting down both Picturehouse and Warner Independent. Speculation has been running in the indie community about the fate of the companies following the demise of New Line (which was a co-owner, with HBO, of Picturehouse) as a standalone studio and distributor. Observers had imagined a variety of scenarios, but I don't think anyone thought that both companies would be folded.

Here's Warner prez and COO Alan Horn's statement:

"With New Line now a key part of Warner Bros., we’re able to handle films across the entire spectrum of genres and budgets without overlapping production, marketing and distribution infrastructures. After much painstaking analysis, this was a difficult decision to make, but it reflects the reality of a changing marketplace and our need to prudently run our businesses with increased efficiencies. We’re confident that the spirit of independent filmmaking and the opportunity to find and give a voice to new talent will continue to have a presence at Warner Bros."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/08/2008 01:36:00 PM Comments (2)

Adding to the already long list of axed film critics, Glenn Kenny announced this morning on his blog that he's been terminated from his position at Premiere.com. One of the only (if not thee only) survivors when Premiere closed its print edition over a year ago, Kenny's blog has since been a marvelous edition to the blogsphere as his colorful style and almost scary knowledge of film was wonderful to read daily (and the comments were always entertaining to read). Here's his post from this morning:

I've just been informed that my position at Premiere.com is being terminated. What this means for this blog is still up in the air; I've got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks of film critics without staff positions. I very much hope to keep this blog going...and get some good freelance work, quick.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Glenn a little bit when I interned at Premiere and hope things work out for him. We all here wish him the best.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 5/08/2008 01:30:00 PM Comments (0)

CNN is reporting that Weinstein Company head Harvey Weinstein engaged in a "heated phone call" with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in late April in which he pressured her to accept a plan in which he would finance primary revotes in Michigan and Florida.

From the piece:

In a heated phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last month, Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut off campaign money to congressional Democrats unless Pelosi embraced a new plan by the movie mogul to finance a revote of the Democratic presidential primaries in Florida and Michigan, according to three officials who were briefed on the contents of the conversation.

The three officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the private phone conversation, said Weinstein, a top supporter of Clinton’s presidential campaign, appeared determined to buy Clinton more time in her battle against Sen. Barack Obama by pushing for the revote and pressing Pelosi to back off her previous comments that superdelegates should support the candidate who’s leading in pledged delegates in early June.

Weinstein called CNN to deny the report.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/08/2008 11:00:00 AM Comments (0)

Susannah Breslin has a positively surreal interview at Radar Online with Ira Isaacs, the 57-year-old L.A.-based director currently awaiting trial on obscenity charges for his, um... scat videos. Kudos to the photo editor at Radar for the two improbable shots that run with the piece -- one of Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal (voted in 2004 by a group of art critics as the most influential piece of art of all time), and the other of Martha Stewart.

On her own Reverse Cowgirl blog, Breslin had previously written about Isaacs and the novel defense he's mounting against the charges that his videos Laurie's Toilet Show and Hollywood Scat Amateurs 7 are obscene. She called it the "Two Girls, One Cup Defense."

From her blog post:

And perhaps most interestingly, Isaacs and his lawyer, he says, intend to pursue an unprecedented legal defense. The 2 Girls 1 Cup defense, that is. Isaacs explains: "'What it is, is, there's videos all over the internet of millions of people watching this [Two Girls, One Cup] video, and it's a shock video, and people record their reactions...' '[T]he idea is, millions of people are watching this video... and they are not, I think, obviously looking for prurient interest to masturbate. People are trying to shock themselves, because in today's world, everything is shock on TV... People need a lot to be shocked these days... What I've done is, I think, really shocked people, and I think that's why the federal government is on this case.'"

She also links to Boing Boing, which has a similar story. In that piece, a poster named UndergroundBastard offers some legal commentary:

In United States v. Gugliemi (819 F.2d 451), the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals considered the legality of bestial pornography, sided with Alan Dershowitz' contention that the grossness of the events depicted in the defendant's film, "The Snake F**kers" was so extreme as to not appeal to the prurient interests demanded of the pornography standard. In short, it was so gross it was beyond pornography, which is what the defendant here is arguing.

In her interview, Breslin talks with Isaac and discovers that he has the heart of an independent filmmaker;

RADAR: How did you get started making these movies?
IRA ISAACS: When the Internet was happening, I wanted to enter it in some way, and I wanted to do something different. In the past, you needed a lot of money and people to make a movie. Until video cameras were invented. Then the Internet was a big breakthrough for distribution. So, I started making a lot of money with these fetish shock videos. I was distributing shock art films from Europe.

What do you mean by "shock art films"?
You talk about art? What is art? Art is what artists do. If it shocks you, it's art. One of the things art should do is make you think and question things. Shock art has always been something that has been a very popular thing through the 20th century and the 21st century. People used feces as shock art. There was a guy who shit in a can and sold it for the price of gold. [In 1961, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni canned his feces in 90 tins and sold them for the price of their weight in gold.] So, the Internet allowed me to be an artist, to reach a lot of people. It allowed me to be on the edge, to do what I would never do as a fine artist. If you're going to paint, you've got to compete with Picasso. If you want to write a great classical music piece, you're competing with Mozart. I would never write anything like Kafka's The Trial. If I was going to make a mark, I was going to do it in some extreme shock way.

Later in the interview, we learn that Isaac's Kafka reference is not just some random musing:

So you were indicted.
In July [2007], they indict me. This has all been very surreal. I'm a big Kafka fan. I always dreamed to be Josef K. [the central character of Kafka's The Trial, who wakes up one morning to find he is being prosecuted for an unknown crime]. And now I am. I'm rereading the book, and I see the similarities. In fact, the director's credit I use in all my films is Josef K. I am Josef K., the character. Now I get to play Josef K. I get to go to court and do all these things. This whole thing is art. Now I get my 15 minutes of fame.

Isaacs is not the only one facing jail time at the moment on an obscenity rap. Boing Boing rounds up a number of links about the prosecution of John Stagliano, a porn director we featured in Filmmaker in 1993. As the Boing Boing post notes, Stagliano's case promises a constitutional showdown over elements of its prosecution, particularly its reliance on a law that says that the internet can not be used to send offensive material to anyone under 18.

Boing Boing quotes from a piece by Mark Kernes at Adult Video News:

One charge, however, that hasn't been seen before in a case involving adult material accessible from a Website is under Chapter 47 of the United States Code, Sec. 223(d), "sending or displaying offensive material to persons under 18."

That section reads, in pertinent part, "Whoever, in interstate or foreign communications, knowingly ... uses any interactive computer service to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that is obscene or child pornography, regardless of whether the user of such service placed the call or initiated the communication; or knowingly permits any telecommunications facility under such person's control to be used for an activity prohibited by paragraph (1) with the intent that it be used for such activity, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/07/2008 10:01:00 PM Comments (0)

There's nothing like a film getting the Criterion treatment. And having this job I get the privilege of finding out before many what they have next up their sleeves. But the latest announcement doesn't have to do with a film but of the company adapting to new technology. The Criterion Collection is preparing to put several of their titles on Blu-ray. Read below.

The time has arrived! Several titles from the Criterion Collection are set for Blu-ray treatment beginning in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and will be priced to match Criterion's standard-def editions.

Titles lined up at this point include:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

Alongside the DVD and Blu-ray box sets of The Last Emperor, Criterion will also release the theatrical version as a stand-alone release in both formats, priced at $39.95. The Blu-ray release of Walkabout will be an all-new edition, featuring new supplements as well as a new transfer. An updated anamorphic DVD of Nicolas Roeg's outback masterpiece will be released at the same time.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 5/07/2008 07:58:00 PM Comments (0)

In a move that has been rumored for months, Variety reports today that Rainbow Media (which also owns AMC and Independent Film Channel) has acquired the Sundance Channel for $496 million.

According to the story:

Rainbow Media will exchange about 12.7 million shares it owns in GE, tax-free, with a cash adjustment based on the value of the GE shares in relation to the total purchase price. GE will get all of the GE shares, and CBS and [Robert] Redford's entities will get cash for their stakes.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 5/07/2008 01:28:00 PM Comments (0)

(Hat tips: GreenCine and Coudal Partners.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/06/2008 11:08:00 PM Comments (1)

Over at his CinemaTech blog, Scott Kirsner writes about the new Seattle-based IndieShares, which is another one of those "democratize the process" companies that has sprung up around some aspect of the film business. Democracy, of course, is (mostly) good. Filmmaker's mission statement even includes the goal of democratizing the production process for beginning filmmakers. And last week I interviewed Lance Weiler and learned more about his From Here to Awesome festival (which I've concluded is a really cool and good thing, and I'm not just saying that because I know Lance and he's a writer for the magazine), and he also talked about how FHTA is all about democratizing the process of marketing and distribution.

The new IndieShares aims to democratize another aspect of filmmaking: the investor experience. It joins a number of new ventures using the social networking and educational functions of the internet to bring production dollars to filmmakers. But whereas other companies, like IndieGoGo, make their pitch in more holistic terms, promoting their sites as places for filmmakers and investors to discover each other and make movies around shared interests, IndieShares seems primarily about pitching the thrill of the idea of feature-film investing to a mainstream audience.

From the site:

...the independent film revolution is about connecting audiences with movies by more than just buying a ticket. It’s about making you a part of the experience. After all, why spend $10 on a ticket when you can own a piece of the action for the same price?

And from the site's FAQ, here's the answer to "Why should I invest in a film project?"

Because you’ll get to be an integral part of the production process as an executive producer. Not only will you get to see the film come together firsthand, but you’ll also have exclusive access to interactive content such as clips from the shoot, chat sessions with the talent, and bragging rights to your friends. Again, please be aware that there is no guarantee that you will make a return on your investment and there is a risk that you may lose some or all of your investment depending on the success of the individual film. Please review the “Risk Factors” section in the applicable offering statement.

Whenever I've raised private equity for a film project, I've done it the traditional way via a private placement memorandum and subscription agreement given to accredited investors only. (Accredited investors are often individuals with over $1 million in net worth.) And I've also tried to find as few investors as possible. The fewer people, the easier it is to deal with them and to satisfy their desires to really participate in the process.

IndieShares is taking the opposite approach. You don't have to be an accredited investor (that's the democratization part), and shares are priced at only $10. You can buy anywhere from one to 250 shares, meaning that a $5 million film has to have anywhere from 500,000 to 2,000 investors. (I'm not a tax and investment expert, but I'm sure that some of these numbers have to do with securities requirements. I also notice that, at present, the site can only accept investors from 17 states.)

Significantly, as the FAQ responsibly notes, that "integral part of the production process" doesn't include the most standard of investor perks, a ticket to the premiere. (In fact, one of the site's arguments for having so many people contribute to the financing of a film is that investment scheme this will naturally enlarge the paying audience for each produced movie.)

To its credit, the site is clear-eyed about the profit potential of an independent film investment. They repeatedly tell people that they could lose all their money. Still by primarily selling the investor experience and then by diluting down that experience so much (no set visits!), I don't think IndieShares is doing independent film any favors. Let's face it, most one-time-only indie film investors lose their money, and what benefit they do gain from the experience comes from either being closer to the production process than will be possible via the IndieShares model or by enabling a worthy project that they themselves also feel passionately about.

So far, the three pitches on the IndieShares site don't seem so impressive. Furthermore, the site tells you virtually nothing about the writer/directors (I'm assuming the writers are directing, although it's not really clear), nor anything about who the collaborators on the project (d.p., editor, etc.) might be. (There is info about the IndieShares principals. Founder Jay Schwatz has done business development for companies like Nike; CFO George Brumder was a v.p. of finance at Washington Mutual. There's also a small advisory board that includes producer and director Eugene Mazzola, whose company will apparently produce the first selected script.)

How were these initial three films selected? Through a "proprietary Indiescore process" that ensures that only "quality scripts enter the production process." And what goes into that IndieScore? They won't tell you -- that, they say, is "their secret sauce." In other words (and the way I read it), you cede the development process to a small group of executives and their vaguely technocratic process, and then the resulting three projects are uploaded on the site in the form of script summaries and video pitches for you to vote on. The winner then gets fast-tracked into a $5 million production that's bonded with a professional crew and you get to see streamed dailies and participate in web chats with the talent.

But here's what's staggering -- at least in the initial stage, you can't read the scripts! I searched around the site for a link to the screenplays and found none. Anybody knows that screenplay writing is 10% concept, 90% execution. The idea that you are being pitched an investment for a film that you can't read the screenplay for is unfathomable to me. (I must be missing something here. This statement from the site -- "Does he drive off a cliff? Does she get the guy? You tell us—it's Your Movie" -- implies that there is some kind of development process that must kick in at a later date. I wonder how many reshoots these films are budgeted for...)

Online film investment is a really tricky area, and I commend IndieShares for trying to dot all the i's and cross the t's when it comes to their paperwork. Schwartz has a post in CinemaTech's comments thread where he goes into a bit more detail about how the company is complying with SEC regulations. Although here again is something weird. The biggest variable in independent film -- distribution -- is barely addressed on the site. The company simply says it will try to secure distribution for the finished films What if it fails? From the FAQ:

The film’s management has a legal obligation to the preferred shareholders to secure the best sales or distribution deal. In the event that a film cannot be sold or distributed, management has the right to purchase the film from the preferred shareholders at fair market value. This ensures that the sales effort does not go on indefinitely.

Potential investors, I got news for you -- the "fair market value" of a film that, like the majority of independent films produced, is rejected by all distributors could be zero.

Finally, though, my beef with IndieShares revolves not around business issues but around what I see as its simplistic promotion of concepts like "democracy," "It's Your Movie," and even "independent film" as a means of building a company around movies that don't appear to have strong artistic identities. What independent film needs now is not another technocratic financing model, contest, or gimmick-y come-on (does anybody even remember any of the Project: Greenlight films?), but rather ways to build communities linking passionate creators with energized audiences based on shared values and specific interests. That and a saner distribution model that finds ways to cost-effectively place these films in front of these viewers. I don't see IndieShares doing any of this.

But then again, maybe I'm not the target audience. Here's a comment from a respondent to the company's blog: "I like this idea. I could get used to telling people I'm in 'The Biz.'"

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/05/2008 12:40:00 AM Comments (2)

It’s a hard festival to wrap your head around (especially if you’re a New Yorker), with too many sections with vague names and programming sensibilities that begin to bleed together, but after awhile, the internal logic of the Tribeca Film Festival, which just wrapped its seventh and probably its best edition, begins to become clear. Although they would never refer themselves thusly, TFF is beginning to resemble a smaller, more hype-centric, less sales activated, Spring bound cousin to the Toronto Film Festival, another sprawling, premiere-savvy Metropolitan fest in a North American cinema capital that offers far too many riches for any single moviegoer to behold in one stretch and basks in both star wattage and high art in equal measures. In general, critics and observers seemed more pleased with the size and quality of the selection than in year’s past, although very few movies bowing at Tribeca, especially among the world premiere narratives, seemed to draw impassioned or universal praise. I caught around twenty features or so at this year’s festival, a small sliver of the 121 on display. I missed a large swath of films I wanted to see. Many of the films I did catch I had anticipated from earlier fests, while several took their initial bows in Tribeca, by filmmakers both new and old. Perhaps most fortunately, as you always hope for at any film festival, even big, almost but not quite market fests like this, I happened to catch a few movies that seemed to materialize out of nowhere and take my breath away. The whole thing just makes you want to whip out your American Express card and make a movie with it. The parties aren’t bad either.

From the hyper-cute, pseudo-satisfying, “gee wouldn’t it be great to have a kid”, studio delivered opener Baby Mama to the magnificent revival of Ethiopian cineaste and professor Haile Gerima’s didactic and frenetically lefty, post-Salassie, 1974 would be student feature Harvest: 3000 Years, to the uncompromising, sober eyed American historical gaze of John Gianvito’s experimental doc Profit Motive and The Whispering Wind, Tribeca had just about something for everyone. Everything about the festival seems to be a mish-mash, a stream of contradictions. The small cadre of titles playing Tribeca which were released commercially during the festival, such as David Mamet’s terrific dip into Los Angeles’ Mixed Martial Arts world Redbelt, Harmony Korine’s ethereally beautiful and oddly touching Mister Lonely and Errol Morris’ chilling account of the truths buried within the photos from Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure, are each excellent products by true auteurs and couldn’t be more different from each other.

Personal favorites would have to include five of the six titles I mentioned above (I’ll let you guess which one to scratch), along with a number of titles that upon reflection seem to represent a cross-section of what the festival had to offer. Nina Paley’s fantastic animated feature Sita Sings The Blues, which marries the tunes of obscure 30’s blues songstress Annette Hanshaw to a retelling, by three hip, Gen-Y Indians, of the Indian myth Ramayana and a mildly autobiographical story of a Seattle based female cartoonist loosing her husband to his job in India, is both heartfelt and consistently witty, the type of low-fi animated musical that puts Disney to shame. Paley’s animated stylings are rich and constantly shifting, making it all the more impressive that she did the intricate and amusing animations herself. It is another terrific western made film kicking around the festival circuit with Indian themes and locales, following titles as varied as Ritchie Mehta’s Amal (Toronto 07’), John Jeffcoat’s Outsourced (Toronto 06’) and Chris Smith’s The Pool (Sundance 07’), none of which have the indiewood distribution muscle behind them that glossy yet blander titles like The Darjeeling Limited and The Namesake bring to the table.

82 year old Pole Andrzej Wajda, whose early masterpiece Ashes and Diamonds turned fifty last year, was back with his Academy-award nominated and Berlinale approved Katyn, a harrowing, multi-layered account of the massacre of captured Polish officers by the Russians during World War II and the beginnings of the repressive state of denial which they imposed upon the Polish people in its aftermath. Wajda has been ruminating on these very same themes since Kanal, but more seems to be at stake for him then ever before (his father died in the Katyn Forest massacres, which aren’t depicted until the film's harrowing closing passages) and the picture is certainly as powerful as anything he’s crafted since Man of Iron.

Plenty of marital strife was on display amidst the world and international premiere narratives. Irishman Declan Recks’ Eden, from Eugene O’Brien’s play, takes an almost comedic look at the dissolution of a marriage in the run-up to the couple’s tenth anniversary. Aiden Kelly and Eileen Walsh are both very good and the pic has a legitimately dynamic visual style that manages to transcend the smallness of its stage origins, but the inevitable betrayal and attempts at betrayal never sting as much as Recks wants them to and its not saying anything especially novel about the state of modern love. Walsh deservedly walked away with the fest’s best actress prize for her portrayal. Aussie Christopher Weekes’ un-ironically titled Bitter and Twisted, much buzzed about by certain critics during the festival, does have a host of serviceable performances by people who look like real life, exurban Aussie losers, but its visual style, with a few exceptions, is pure TV movie and the whole thing is staged at a lighter weight pitch than the material, which has shades of The Sweet Hereafter or Snow Angels in it, seems to want it to be. Meanwhile, the divorcee female truck driver confronted with the son she never wanted, as portrayed by svelte Michelle Monaghan in Trucker, isn’t even capable of maintaining boyfriends, favoring half night stands in seedy motels instead. Writer-Director James Mottern has a terrific script and he clearly has a keen visual eye, his HD lensed pic full of sumptuous visual treats, but in Monaghan and Benjamin Bratt, both of whom act with conviction and nuance, he casts people who don’t fit into the world he’s creating – their collective in-authenticity bounces off the walls of the screening room. He probably would have been bettered served by casting the sandpaper voiced Joey Lauren Adams as the title character and reserved Monaghan’s soaring cheek bones for the dying man’s new belle.

Two of the three titles swallowed up by Sony Classics at Sundance and subsequently screened (in secret, sort of) at SXSW, both of which are second films by promising filmmakers, Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness and The Duplass Brothers’ Baghead, failed to rouse me upon there New York debuts, although the starlets of both pictures, Olivia Thirlby and Greta Gerwig, clearly have big things ahead of them. Both are likable enough, with strong casts (I could watch Jane Adams read the phonebook. For a week.) and plenty of humor, but are underserved by formulaic writing in the former’s case and mediocre directorial execution in the latter’s. Now if someone set a mumblecore tinged, tongue in cheek horror movie among depressed, Jewish, pot dealing, hip-hop obsessed, ice cream salesmen in 1994, they’d have one helluva picture.

Among a largely disappointing field of world premiere narratives was Richard Ledes’ snoozer private dick/corporate corruption thriller The Caller, which inexplicably took home the “NY,NY” narrative prize. I guess it’s a step up from last year’s winner, ex Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst’s Jesse Eisenberg vehicle The Education of Charlie Banks. Robert Celestino’s Chazz Palminteri/Christine Lahti dice hustling with an autistic son movie Yonkers Joe would have been a more appropriate choice, with its earnest, attractive performances and fairly predictable but satisfying cadences, yet that’s not saying much and I’m sure the jury was as psyched as I was to see Elliot Gould play a private detective again, even if The Caller was never going to be a worthy successor to Robert Altman’s classic Philip Marlowe deconstruction The Long Goodbye.

Winner of the World Narrative Competition and soon to hit screens via Mark Cuban’s Magnet, Swede Tomas Alfredsson’s grisly and sensual Let The Right One In is easy to like for a movie in which middle aged men drug, string up and drain innocent, dog walking teenage boys to feed the twelve year old vampire they shack up with. Uber-stylish, teeming with long lense shots that would make Tony Scott envious, Alfredsson gives his vampire girl a love interest in the form of an awkward blond kid who lives across the courtyard in a quaint apartment complex and occasionally, when not being bullied by near homicidal middle school hooligans, is stabbing trees and asking them why they aren’t squealing. Alfredsson deftly imposes the angsty alienation of adolescence onto a vampire coming of age narrative and thus makes it okay for us to take pleasure in the beheading of middle school bullies. Great. This is a beautiful, engaging movie that has cult classic written all over it, but its not quite as smart (or, shall I say moral) as Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess, Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day or Larry Fessenden’s Habit and left me kind of cold thematically. It's teeming with life though and at least the word vampire isn’t used until the second to last reel.

The narratives definitely bottomed out for me with The Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick’s horrendous The Objective, a not so slick, seemingly made for Sci-Fi Channel Predator rip-off that plunks a horrifyingly similar scenario (to both that film and his previous movie) in the middle of our troubles in Afghanistan. As one of its producers is known to say, it has more implication than drama, but its deeply embedded derivativeness, wooden performances and generally unspooky 90’s revival of The Twilight Zone vibe wear thin real quick. It has the makings of a camp classic if viewed in the right circumstances. Call the kid from The Wackness.

The legacy of John McTiernan’s imminently quotable Schwartznegger vehicle (“If it bleeds… we can kill it”) also factors prominently in Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster, a terrific look at the intersection of 80’s popular culture and steroid use, in Bell's family as well as in the worlds of bodybuilding and professional team sports. Its one of the pair of docs, along with James Marsh’s wonderful Man On Wire, that Magnolia scooped up at Sundance and NY Premiered at Tribeca. These will both figure heavily in year-end award buzz among the doc set.

Perhaps the doc that lingers in my film battered brain the most is Brazilian Paula Gaitan’s Days In Sintra, her chronicle of returning to the Portugese city she and deceased husband Glauber Rocha, a major figure in Brazilian cinema of the 60s, exiled themselves too in the midst of Brazilian’s political implosion. Mixing contemporary video footage of the beautiful if mildly decaying city with archival film footage of her final years with Rocha in the late 70s/early 80s, the film is a minor marvel, lyrical and tedious in equal measures, but a nonetheless gorgeous and mature work by someone searching for truth and beauty among the shards and fragments of her former self, using this thing we call memory to illuminate the personal and the political-historical. In its loose, jazzy rhythms, meticulous traveling shots and romantic eye it recalls the work of avant-gardists Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, particularly Brakhage’s monumental Anticipation of The Night. You know, the one where he was going to hang himself at the end and then didn’t.

So if I learned anything at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, other than the fact that producer Mike Ryan drives something akin to a pimpmobile (so cool), actress Natasha Lyonne is in a bowling league at The Port Authority (equally cool) and multi-hyphenate Melvin Van Peebles has the ass end of a VW Bus coming out of his living room wall (the coolest of them all), its that there’s no place to see a movie quite like New York. Only our town could put on a festival quite like this one. Even at its trimmest and classiest level yet, it still is a big bad metaphor for our love of the loud, profane and massive. I can’t wait until next year.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 5/05/2008 12:16:00 AM Comments (0)

With the demise of New Line -- one of the two partners behind the creation of Picturehouse (HBO is the other) -- speculation has arisen over what's going to happen to the specialty shingle now that it, like New Line, has been absorbed into Warner Brothers. Warner, you remember, has Warner Independent already on its lot. Anne Thompson penned a piece in Variety stating that WIP head Polly Cohen and Picturehouse head Bob Berney "are likely to accept a bicoastal co-head arrangement." Stu Van Airsdale at Defamer ran his own story, saying that there are rumors that Berney will be "starting fresh at a new company underwritten with hedge fund cash." Now, at the end of the weekend, Jeffrey Welles at Hollywood Elsewhere posts his own piece on the rumor that Berney is leaving that contains the choice phraseology headlined above:

Now I've been told by someone very close to things that the latter scenario is not true. Berney has "been open to Warner Bros. proposals, but they actually haven't made any real decisions yet on how much they want to be in this 'indie' part of the business." They haven't made any real decisions? In my experience that means they've made a decision but lack the character to express it...no? "So this thing may drag on for some time," the insider comments.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/04/2008 09:55:00 PM Comments (0)

The Hollywood Reporter hosts a roundtable on the economics of independent production with five noted players: Newsweek film critic David Ansen; Kirk D'Amico, president and CEO of Myriad Pictures, a production and sales company; Cassian Elwes, co-head of William Morris Independent; Mark Gill, CEO of finance and production company the Film Department; and Avi Lerner, co-chairman and CEO of Nu Image/Millennium Films. Stephen Galloway leads a conversation that, by my read, offers a pretty accurate and succinct take on the American independent film market at the moment. They discuss overproduction, the demise of New Line, foreign markets, the plight of the Sundance film, and more. I was particularly taken by this exchange at the end, when, after a discussion of the rise of local production abroad, Galloway asks, "What should America do to protect its own independent film culture?" Elwes and Lerner both suggest the kind of non-free market solutions that European governments have embraced and that may be necessary to preserve a more vibrant indie sphere in America:

ELWES: I would love to see the government help small distribution companies and subsidize them so that they can grow and allow the independent cinema to be vibrant in this country.

LERNER: They should make a law that the television networks have to buy a certain amount of movies from the independents. All the basic and pay television, 99% is from the studio -- it is like a cartel. Otherwise, at the end of the day, it will all be controlled by the studios.

The full conversation can be found at the link above, and a video excerpt can be watched here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/03/2008 08:23:00 PM Comments (0)

Although the festival does wrap until Sunday (and feels like its lasted about a month), The Tribeca Film Festival announced its winners last night. Here they are:

The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature – Let the Right One In (Lat den rätte komma in) directed by Tomas Alfredson (Sweden). Winner receives $25,000 cash and the art award "Maternal Nocture: Clearing Storm” created by Stephen Hannock.

Best New Narrative Filmmaker – My Marlon and Brando (Gitmek) directed by Hüseyin Karabey (Turkey, Netherlands, UK). Winner receives $25,000 cash, sponsored by American Express, and the art award “Bonfire,” created by Ross Bleckner.

Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film – Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello in Somers Town directed by Shane Meadows (UK). Sponsored by Delta Air Lines. Each winner receives a business elite ticket voucher for anywhere Delta travels.

Best Actress in a Narrative Feature Film – Eileen Walsh in Eden directed by Declan Recks (Ireland). Sponsored by Delta Air Lines. Winner receives two business elite ticket vouchers for anywhere Delta travels.

Best Documentary Feature – Pray the Devil Back to Hell directed by Gini Reticker (USA). Winner receives $25,000 cash and the art award “Liza Minnelli,” created by Timothy White.

Best New Documentary Filmmaker – Old Man Bebo directed by Carlos Carcas (Spain). Winner receives $25,000 cash, sponsored by American Express, and the art award “Maquette for Primary Compass,” created by Don Gummer.

“New York LOVES Film” – Zoned In directed by Daniela Zanzotto (USA,UK). Winner receives $5,000 cash, sponsored by New York State Governor's Office for Motion Picture and Television Development, and the art award “Table Odeon,” created by Donna Ferrato.

Special Mention: Hotel Gramercy Park directed by Douglas Keeve (USA)

Best Narrative Short – New Boy directed by Steph Green. Sponsored by Edelman Studios. Winner receives $5,000 cash and the art award “Air” created by Francesco Clemente.

Best Documentary Short – Mandatory Service directed by Jessica Habie. Sponsored by Edelman Studios. Winner receives $5,000 cash and the art award “The Screamer,” created by John Alexander.

Student Visionary Award – Elephant Garden directed by Sasie Sealy. Sponsored by Apple. Winner receives an Apple Mac Pro Desktop with a 15" Display and Final Cut Studio 2 and the art award "Harmonium" created by Clifford Ross.

The Jury Award will be announced on Sunday. This years jurors were:

World Competition Categories:

The jurors for the 2008 World Narrative Competition were Peter Hedges, Gregory Hoblit, Callie Khouri, Oliver Platt, Christine Vachon.

The jurors for the 2008 World Documentary Competition were Jared Cohen, Whoopi Goldberg, Ross Kauffman, Padma Lakshmi, Jose Padilha.

New York Competition Categories:

The 2008 “Made in NY” Narrative Feature Award jurors were Peter Dinklage, Fred Durst, Greg Mottola, Stephen Schiff, Annabella Sciorra.

The 2008 “NY Loves Film” Documentary Feature Award jurors were Liya Kebede, Doug Liman, Esther Robinson, Josh Schwartz, Jay McInerney, Andre Leon Talley.

Short Film Competition Categories:

The 2008 Narrative Short jurors were Mario Batali, Christine Lahti, Molly Shannon, Lili Taylor, Zac Posen.

The 2008 Documentary and Student Short jurors were David Bowie, Red Burns, Matthew Modine, Lee Schrager, David de Rothschild.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 5/02/2008 02:08:00 PM Comments (2)

Remaining Screening Times: May 2nd, 10:30pm (AMC Village VII), May 4th, 11:00am (Village East)




John Magary is having a good year. Fresh off winning a prize at SXSW and a run at the Student Academy Award with his powerful short film The Second Line, which debuted last year in Edinburgh, he finally has a chance to screen in front of a hometown crowd. His newest project, Blood Abundance, or the Half-Life of Antoinette, was workshopped at the Sundance's January Screenwriters Lab and was recently accepted into the June Directors Lab for his newest project. John, whose girlfriend Myna Joseph (Man) is a terrific filmmaker in her own right, was part of a dynamite 2006 MFA Film class at Columbia that included 07' 25 New Faces Fellipe Barbosa Gamarosa and Moon Molson, both of whom will also be at the June Director's Lab with there projects.

Filmmaker: Tell us about the genesis of The Second Line - what initially inspired you, what the writing process was like, how you raised money, etc...

Magary: I went with my brother Jim and girlfriend Myna to New Orleans a few months after Katrina. While we grew up in Dallas, my brother and I had never been there before, and we figured--I don't know what we figured, that we would see it for the first time at its lowest, and maybe do something to help out. We got in around New Year's Eve, and volunteered briefly with a now-legendary activist recovery group called Common Ground Collective, gutting a house in Plaquemines Parish, which is a drive out of the city.

We also ate a bunch, drove through the okay neighborhoods and the ruined ones. We saw Ray Nagin twice; the first time he was eating beignets at Cafe du Monde and the second time he was ushering in the New Year at a very foggy Jackson Square. We were not impressed with Nagin then, and we aren't now.

Still, I fell hard for the city. We all did. It was a remarkable few days. The act of gutting a house is pretty grueling, pretty unpleasant. You're basically tossing someone's material life away, which you have to, because it's all been rendered useless and harmful, covered in molds and muds. Story ideas don't come very easily to me, but I knew I wanted to shape a short narrative around this act of house-gutting. Ripping out the innards of a stranger's house.

I'd written a feature script with two side characters named Natt and MacArthur, and decided, on Myna's advice, to base the script around them. The writing process took months and months. The first drafts don't much resemble the last ones. I got a great deal of help from friends at Columbia, and my friend Jeff McMahon in LA. My teacher Eric Mendelsohn was exceedingly helpful with the script.

Geoff Quan, another Columbia student, agreed to produce it--it would be his thesis, as well. We got an initial grant from HBO Films, one given through Columbia--that made the whole thing seem real. Then it was a matter of writing desperate letters to family and friends, and taking out heaps of student loans. Geoff and co-producer Myna Joseph worked some very good deals in New Orleans, and in Dallas. (Myna, who had more experience with production than Geoff, was indispensable--we couldn't have made it without her. Seriously, she saved us.)

We had to fly in some key crew positions--oddly enough, as a money-saving tactic--and got the rest of the crew from the area, mostly through the University of New Orleans. We scored a great local AD, Matt Paul, as well as an amazing local production designer, Mara LePere-Schloop, who's gonna be a Captain of her Field and must work with me always. All in all, our crew was great.

In earnest, pre-production was about four to six weeks. Shooting was seven days, in total. Post-production seemed like seven years. For a twenty-minute film. Who'd 'a thunk it.

That was such a long-winded answer. I'm sorry.

Filmmaker: Post Katrina New Orleans is often portrayed in the news media as a cesspool of misery and violence - what was your experience like shooting there?

Magary: Well, shooting was relatively smooth, partially because--and this is a sad reason--it was so empty in parts. We shot in a FEMA camp at UNO, which we were very nervous about--you're dragging track around someone's front yard, and they're not exactly happy to be there in the first place--but it was close to Christmas, so most of the students were gone. Also, and this was hilarious, but college students in general have such low expectations for housing that some of these guys were absolutely digging their new trailers. And they had a point: it was just them! Their own pad! Pretty funny. All in all, though, just being in those trailers can wear hard on you. They're cramped, and they smell weird. And some have been found to be toxic.

The other location was an ungutted house, and what you see in the film is what is was: a flooded house, full of muck. There wasn't much design there, beyond shifting piles around. Of course, there were safety issues. Black mold is toxic, so we were careful to supply the cast and crew with masks and Tyvek suits. We shot all the gutting scenes in one day. It was not a pleasant day.

The violence issue is tricky in New Orleans--part of it is perception, that you're in this notorious city, where, as we've seen on TV, everyone just walks around shooting at cops, who are usually too busy looting Wal-Marts to notice. Some of those perceptions have a lot to do with race, and the fact that a lot of white people are scared of black people.

The other part of it, sadly, is statistics: the murder rate is very high there, as is the rate of handgun ownership. Add to that poverty, struggling public education, criminal government negligence, and sweltering humidity. I don't want to overstate it, but there's certainly a more off-kilter vibe in the city. It's smart to keep your wits about you.

On the flipside, and this is a big part of why I love the place so much, New Orleanians don't just say hi on the street, they ask how you're doing. There's more hugging, more compliments out of the blue, more dancing with strangers, and in general, a hell of a lot more fun. It's a warm place, leisurely, but also socially complex in a way that very few places are. In his stage directions in A Streetcar Named Desire, sixty years ago, Tennessee Williams called New Orleans a "cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town." As far as I can tell, it's still like that.

Another long-winded answer. Two for two. I guess I'm lonely.

Filmmaker: What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?

Magary: I edited the film myself, which presents its own psychological challenges--why did I write that? Where are the takes? Why did I say cut?

It took a few solid weeks, and again I had great notes from my peers at Columbia. A constant struggle to sharpen the narrative.

My old college roommate Kai Gross did the music. I'm very proud of his score, all played by friends individually in Kai's home studio, then mixed together beautifully by our sound editor Paul Bercovitch. Scoring and spotting and sound mixing are processes I really, really love.

The worst challenges ended up being pretty boring. Issues with HD transferring, and timecode errors, and on and on. We shot on Super 16--Chris Teague, an amazing DP who has worked with me on most of my films, shot it--but knew we probably wouldn't have the funds to make a 35mm print, so we finished on an uncompressed HD tape. We were lucky to be able to use a new HD facility at Columbia, and got a lot of crucial help from the post supervisor at Columbia, Cecil Esquivel-Obregon, who has a zen-like patience. The room enabled us to cut uncompressed HD, but we were guinea pigs, so...as I said, many days lost to a boiling sea of 1's and 0's.

Filmmaker: Al Thompson and J.D. Williams, who, despite their relative youth, both seem like veteran New York actors, are terrific in your film - tell us about working with them.

I'd seen their work, and made heartfelt offers to them, and bizarrely enough, they accepted. It's funny, originally, of course, I wanted to work with all local talent--wouldn't anyone shooting in New Orleans?--and we have two great local actors, Dane Rhodes and Karen Pritchett, at the heart of it. But we just couldn't find the right guys for Natt and MacArthur.

Al and J.D. have been in a lot--commercials, features, shorts. They were relaxed and professional, which was crucial, because we weren't able to do much in the way of rehearsal. With the help of another actor in the film, we'd gone through some very cursory dialect work, some cadences of New Orleans. And then we just went from there. They're pretty unfussy: they've waited around before, they've had the home cooking, they've been in odd locations--neither was happy about eating muffalettas, but we got through it. We set them up in the French Quarter--I think everyone had a pretty great experience, honestly. Geoff and Myna and Nelson kept them very happy. No pretensions, no huffs.

I'm not sure I threw them any curveballs, really. J.D.'s performance is right out there--he's not swallowing anything up, really, because Natt's a bit of a hothead. Al was trickier--he gives such a muted performance, there were times, I admit, when I'd turn to Chris and whisper if he's seeing anything. It was one of those cases--when I was cutting it together, I saw exactly what Al was doing. He's quiet, but there's a growing disturbance. I was so happy with his performance.

And then there were these little unexpected bonuses from their past work. At the climax, J.D.'s character is required to do some minor stunt work. Of course, from his days on The Wire, J.D. is stunt certified, so he's really orchestrating it all there. We were in good hands.

And they were patient when I sometimes gave them mumbling paraphrases instead of useable actions. And they let me know when some of my stabs at African-American dialect were goofy. God bless 'em.

Filmmaker: Your film was made in conjunction with the MFA Film Program at Columbia and clearly was not cheap. If you hadn't been working toward a degree, would it have been feasible to make this kind of short? With very little infrastructure to support non-feature, artisanal film work, are shorts worth making in and of themselves?

Magary: No, it wasn't really cheap, though you'd be horrified to know how much cheaper it was than some shorts, especially some from schools. We didn't waste money, that's for sure.

These are great questions, really. Would I have made the film if I didn't have that thesis deadline? I've asked myself that a bunch. Motivations and deadlines help me out a great deal--ask anyone who's worked with me. I need a deadline.

Without Columbia breathing down my neck, I would've made something in New Orleans, but probably not on this scale. Film school is a horrible money-suck, but while you're in the thick of it, you're getting loans and you're using their facilities. On top of that, we got a grant that ended up being over a third of our budget--without Columbia, there's no grant, without the grant, we're probably not making a twenty-minute short on Super 16 1300 miles away from our apartments. Because how would we?

There's the added pressure, too, of this being Your Final Short Film ever, which is a mistaken perception, but that's the way it's set up as you grind into your last years of school. You do want to make it count. You've learned a lot (hopefully), you've formed relationships with teachers and peers, and you just want to make something...I want to say "good," but "good" doesn't require a budget. I wanted to make something better, certainly, to tackle something I hadn't tackled before, in the framing or in performance or in the whole conception. I wanted to shoot on film, for whatever reason, as did Chris. My shot design often required a good, fluid dolly. We needed lights, we needed a good central crew. We couldn't fake the locations. I'm sure someone could've shot this script in two days handheld on DV, and done it well. But I couldn't, and moreover, I didn't want to. So you scrape up the money, and you ask your mom if she'll cook food for everyone. Which she did. And it was tasty.

Are shorts worth making? Of course! Some expressions are short--that's that. A million things can dictate length: character, plot, formal requirements, pace, tone. Beyond that, budget, format, interest, someone's schedule. Shorts only seem like an inferior form because we never get to see them. That's our loss.

What you can do with a short--where you can show it, how you can show it--is another issue entirely. There are markets for shorts, but they're mostly in Europe. Here, you just hope they can be seen in a theater with a nice audience at some festival somewhere. If someone wants to see a DVD, you send it to them. Maybe some day it'll be on PBS or HBO Zone or whatever, or, less preferably in my case, the web. Humble goals for a short, really.

In any case, if you've never made something, and you want to, a short is as good a way as any to learn. Smaller cost, smaller risk, smaller regret when you inevitably fuck it up.

Filmmaker: You've had a tremendous festival run so far, with stops at Edinburgh, Sundance, San Francisco, Clermont-Ferrand and the Student Academy Awards, along with prizes at SXSW and AFI Dallas. What advice would you have for short filmmakers about to embark upon the often dizzying festival trail?

Magary: Oh man. I might be the wrong person to ask. I miss deadlines all the time. Sarasota? Boston Independent? They sound great, but yeah, I forgot to apply. Next year--

There are so many festivals. I would advise you pick the ones you might actually want to go to, and check on their infrastructure, their taste. Do they program good stuff? Because if you've made a good film (or you think you've made a good film, anyway), you're not going to get into a festival with dumb programmers, because they're dumb and they'll pick a dumb film. Nothing more annoying than getting rejected by a festival run by half-wits.

I would also advise, ALWAYS, asking for a fee waiver. Just write the festival a nice little email, stating your case, saying if you've gotten into anything, and asking if they might waive or reduce your fee. Otherwise, you might be spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars just to enter festivals, which is absurd. Most of them will say no; some will take pity.

It's looking more and more like an industry, a festival industry. Every city and town each needs their own six opposing festivals, and regardless of their history or taste, they'll charge you forty bucks just to look at your eight-minute film. Then you fly to it, and they don't do a Q&A, the projection's crap, the other movies are crap, there are six people in the audience, and you're out another five hundred bucks. And you're staring at a cash bar.

Don't get me wrong, some festivals are great. You interact with people, you talk about the process, you talk about the work, what you could possibly have been thinking when you did X, etc. Those kinds of festivals give you the brass to keep going.

But yeah, it can get overwhelming and frustrating. If I were you, dear reader, I'd apply to a slew at the outset, see what happens, don't get discouraged, but also don't drag it on forever. There's no point. Make another film. Also, if you do get into some festivals, but you can't afford to go, then don't go! Your film will be seen either way, and that's what matters most--you're reaching a new audience.

Filmmaker: Tell us about your new project.

Magary: I have a feature script set in New Orleans, tentatively titled Blood Abundance, or the Half-Life of Antointette. How's that for convolution? It's about a mother raising seven kids.

I was really lucky to get the script into the Sundance Screenwriters' Lab, and now it's going into the Directors' Lab in June. it's been a great experience. They're tremendously supportive, Ilyse McKimmie, Michelle Satter, Mike Mohan, all of them. Their reputation precedes them, of course, but seriously, to phrase it with a dated urban slant, their shit is for real. They want me to make the movie I want to make, and I am eager to oblige.

So, yeah, I want to make the feature, I desperately want to make it. The scale of the thing's a little large--it's a period piece with approximately eight gazillion characters--so I want to write a back-up script, something much smaller, much closer, something totally different. To keep my motor humming, in case things develop slowly, and then POW, I make another one. POW.

And there's a short I'd like to make in the summer sometime. And maybe some specs or sketches or whatevers, with friends. You know, for giggles. Things we can afford. We all keep saying, a bunch of us from Columbia, we don't MAKE enough films. Why aren't we making more? Are we scared? What the hell's our problem?

I'm also planning on writing even longer answers to blog interviewers. You know, REALLY getting into it.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 5/02/2008 01:27:00 PM Comments (0)

In a post below, we noted Matt Zoller Seitz's decision to abandon print journalism -- and that includes blogging -- in order to concentrate on filmmaking. Now, at GreenCine, David Hudson draws attention to one other blogger calling it quits and another who is contemplating an exodus as well. Over at Flickhead, Ray Young issues a simple farewell, reprinted here in its entirety:

"“It was more than being holy and it was less than being free”

All things must pass...I’m outta here...

A more detailed explanation is found buried in his comments thread, when Young responds to the various posters with this:

The Walmart-style overdevelopment of film blogs, however, has left a bad taste for me. There are just too many, and my antiquated method of concentration can no longer keep the pace nor adequately process what little I’m able to read.

Plus, I feel this proliferation has divided a lot writers and readers into segregated camps — academics and intellectuals, pop culture and nostalgia mavens, etc. I rarely sense a middle ground.

As an example of one of my misgivings, here, in this comment box, I should be providing some long-winded and exact explanation of my actions. (Many bloggers favor run-on sentences and bloated paragraphs, and will jump on the tiniest crack in one’s beliefs.) But the subject is vast, and by the time I could formulate a proper evaluation everyone will have long since moved on to The Next Thing.

However, I’ve sensed the so-called blogosphere has slowed somewhat; is my blog’s demise part of a dawning exodus?

I’ve already started doing other work that you may eventually find online.

This was fun for a while, but, like I said, all things must pass. Thanks again for your support.

As Hudson notes, one of the posters on that comments thread is Tim Lucas from Video Watchblog. Over at his own blog, Lucas writes his own admission that film blogging isn't what it used to be. The entire post is very much worth reading, but here's an excerpt from the ending:

As this world of ours continues to place all its hopes for information and community like so many eggs into this ether basket, people ought to know what I am not ashamed to admit: that, sooner or later, it becomes the secret wish of all bloggers to stop blogging. The instant gratification of this format is nice, but it only lasts for an instant. It wouldn't surprise me if all the blogs I check each day -- rather than reading some of the acknowledged great writers whose works I've never read, finishing Thomas Pynchon's most recent book, or starting in on Alexander Theroux's new and forbiddingly long novel -- disappeared off the face of the net within the next year or two. One thing I can promise you about published writers, and generally about any writer of quality: once they have tasted publication, they are in it for keeps, and they will swim upstream toward maintaining that livelihood as long as there is breath left in them. As for Matt Zoller Seitz, to whom I send my best wishes and highest hopes, he's jumping into another stream with stronger rapids -- filmmaking -- but it's still a form of writing and, these days, perhaps the ultimate form of publication.

No, I'm not resigning this blog yet, but, like the wretch who lives in a small room containing nothing but a chair, a table and a loaded revolver, it's something I contemplate every day. For better or worse, so far, other contemplations have won the upper hand.

Filmmaker planned in the last issue a piece on the changing face of film journalism that focused on blogs, but when we thought that everything that could be said had been said, we decided to postpone it. Shortly after that decision, there have been a slew of articles and news about blogging and the blogosphere, and we certainly didn't predict that the tone would be so downbeat. But, honestly, I get it. I mean, I keep up this blog, but I am nowhere near the kind of daily poster that many of the stars of the blogosphere are. And I don't write much criticism because I have a hard time writing snap judgements of things hours after seeing them at festivals. I tend to like to stew on them a bit and then, in Filmmaker style, maybe talk to the director, weave in quotes, etc. So, I greatly admire those who are able to get those instant reactions up on the internet so quickly. But I do enough posting on this blog to greatly appreciate those who write with greater volume or greater depth on theirs.

And because we recently added Google Analytics to this blog, I also now understand the kind of anxiety the writers above allude to with regards to traffic stats. It's easy to become obsessive about analyzing your traffic reports, seeing who is linking to you, seeing what the top key words are. You can be bummed out that an old blog post that Steve Gallagher wrote titled "Nazi Porn" (about the cancellation of the publishing of a German book due to the notoriety of its claims of secret SS porn movies) regularly sends more traffic to this blog than a great article like, for example, Lance Weiler's digital distribution DIY tutorial in the Winter Issue (and then realize as you are typing this that you have cynically goosed your numbers once again, albeit at the expense of your bounce rate.)

I'll have more on this later, and there will undoubtedly be more commentary around the blogosphere on Young, Seitz and Lucas's posts. We'll keep you posted.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5/01/2008 09:12:00 PM Comments (6)

With Steven Soderbergh's two Che films on deck at Cannes, Tribeca had the perfect appetizer with Chevolution. This impressive doc chronicles the unlikely journey this image of Che Guevara from the La Coubre explosion funeral march in 1960 evolved into a beacon of capitalism.

Directed by Luis Lopez and Trisha Ziff, the doc, which is making its World Premiere at Tribeca, is produced through Netflix's Red Envelope Entertainment.

Starting off with a brief history of how Ernesto Guevera became "Che," the doc then examines the man who took the famous shot, Alberto Korda. A fashion photographer turned news photog during the revolution in Cuba, not until the '90s was he recognized as the person who took it. Filing away the film negative after the newspaper didn't run the shot, it stayed hidden from the world until the late '60s when the shot appeared in a French magazine after Che fled into the Congo. Though the image wasn't appropriate for a news piece at the time Korda shot it, his fashion photography background made the image perfect for reflection, especially for a man who after his death would become immortal.

Considered the most reproduced image in the history of photography, a major reason for that is because Korda never had a copyright on it. This lead the Che shot in public domain (until recently) and evolve through the decades from being on posters at rallies to sparking inspiration for artists like Jim Fitzpatrick to create pop art out of it (right) and inevitably used for corporate gain as it gets plastered on T-shirts, coffee mugs, cigarette packs, beer bottles and even bikinis.

Interviews in the film range from people who knew Che, like his motorcycle diaries mate Carlos Calica Ferrer, Korda's daughter Diana, photographers who knew Korda, and Che historians. Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello even tells how Diana's lawyers went after the band for using the Che image on the cover of one of their singles.

But Lopez and Ziff don't ignore the awfully large elephant in the room: Che's controversial reign in Cuba. Known to be a violent disciplinary, many interviewees speak out how youngsters should learn about the Cuban revolution and the acts of Che before idolizing the man by wearing a T-shirt or get his face tattooed on your arm, as one person does while being interviewed.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4/30/2008 09:35:00 PM Comments (0)

Here are a few noteworthy links from the last few days.

First, a must-read (or must-listen) is an interview with Matt Zoller Seitz on his blog, The House Next Door. (The hour-long talk is available as a transcript or as a download.) In the piece, Seitz discusses his decision to abandon print criticism and concentrate on both moviemaking and things other than movies. Here's how he opens:

Well, the short of it is: I’m out of print criticism. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and for a variety of reasons. One of them is that I’ve been doing it for seventeen years now as of May of this year, and I’ve done it for a variety of different outlets in a variety of different forms. I’ve enjoyed it… I’ve always enjoyed it, but I just don’t want to do it anymore. Part of the reason for that is that I don’t write as quickly as I used to and I don’t have as much time to do it as I used to. But the more important thing is that, according to the actuarial tables, I’m probably about halfway through my life, if I’m lucky. And there’s a lot of things that I would like to do, and I haven’t done them yet. And I want to get started on it.

Scott Kirsner at his Cinematech blog lists and has commentary on five internet sites that help filmmakers raise funding for their films.

Over at FilmInFocus, the site has one of their periodic "Five in Focus" lists. This time, over the course of the next week five designers list their favorite feature films from the standpoint of design. First up: Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz.

A click away at the Filmmaker home page, we reprint David Gordon Green's essay on Todd Rohal's The Guatemalan Handshake, which is included in the new Benten Films-released DVD. The essay is entitled "Outrage the Rooster: Words about this Film."

Finally, there seems to be only one mainstream entertainment story today: the release of Rock Star Games' Grand Theft Auto 4. The pre-sale of this game hit $60 million before it's release. We don't have the game yet at Filmmaker, but our new gaming columnist, Heather Chaplin, has checked it out and contributes her report to "All Things Considered" at NPR. If you've been hiding under a rock and haven't read about the game, then you may not be aware that the latest installment is set in a scuzzed-out, nostalgia-confirming version of New York City. Here's an excerpt of her piece, in which she takes the game for a spin with one of its writer/directors, Lazlow Jones:

But the game is more than merely satire. Video games have never been known for expressing the finer points of human emotion. But I took a turn at the console with Jones, and the more I played GTA IV, the more I felt I knew Niko.

He's haunted by violence. He walks slowly, and every action is deliberate, as if he were conserving energy. When he steals a car, he matter-of-factly pulls the driver out of the seat and deposits him on the road. There's no joy in it; it's just what needs to be done.

And everything about Niko feels uniquely Niko — like when a great actor disappears into a character. It's just not something you see that often in videogames.

The key, Jones says, is storytelling — "fundamental storytelling that becomes so engaging that you find yourself emotionally involved with polygons. None of this exists, but we've made a living, breathing world."

Related: Over at the Bowery Boys, the bloggers trace the history of New York City in videogames, considering everything from Mario Brothers to the recent Warriors.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 4/29/2008 06:57:00 PM Comments (1)

From Portishead's excellent Third, "The Rip," one of the album's best songs performed live on Jools Holland's U.K. tv show.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 4/29/2008 05:58:00 PM Comments (1)

The BLDGBLOB has a great post entitled "Hotels in the Afterlife" that is very J.G. Ballard -- a series of shots of abandoned hotel exteriors on the Sinai peninsula, "monuments to failed investment." Based on a photography show that opened last week in Vienna by Sabine Haubitz and Stephanie Zoche.

From Geoff Manaugh's blog post:

The hotels now look more like "architectonic sculptures" in the desert, the photographers claim, or derelict abstractions, as if some aging and half-crazed billionaire had constructed an eccentric sculpture park for himself amongst the dunes.

The billionaire goes for long walks at night alone amongst the ruins, sweeping dust from recent sandstorms off windowsills and open doorways.

At night, when the stars come out, different constellations are framed by unglazed windows, as if justifying these concrete forms from above with the poetic force of celestial geometry.

Or, for that matter, five years from now these deserted monuments simply disappear – but because they've been put to use, finally, enwrapped with drywall and plaster, fitted out with drapes and marble floors, and you can sleep inside them for $300 a night, never even dreaming that these hotels were once ruins, temporarily abandoned to the sand and only recently reclaimed.
The empty swimming pool is now full – and you dive into it, unaware that you're more like a ghost than a tourist, haunting the afterlife of these sites in bleaching sunlight.

Make sure to read the great comment thread, in which various responders discuss the reasons for the abandonment of these structures as well as other similar spots around the world.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 4/28/2008 04:39:00 PM Comments (0)

As Tribeca's first weekend passes, most talk has been on the admission by Errol Morris that he paid -- or paid the expences of (depending on what story you read) -- some of the prison guards interviewed in his latest film, Standard Operating Procedure. But Anthony Kaufman raises a much more pressing question in a story on indieWIRE: "Can Standard Operating Procedure Break the Political Doc Deadlock?"

Though it's not just political docs that are in trouble, films that I and many others thought would take hold on audiences (My Kid Could Paint That, Zoo, Manda Bala) never took off, the political docs have taken the biggest hits.

An excerpt:

2008 duds include "Chicago 10" ($156,000), "Taxi to the Dark Side" ($248,200) and "Body of War" ($32,000). Morgan Spurlock's "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?" opened in 102 theaters with a per-venue average of just $1,401 and dropped significantly this weekend. Compare that to the 41-theater debut of "Super Size Me," which garnered a $12,601 average, one can see how different the landscape is nowadays.

"Everyone is uninterested," said Roadside Attractions' Howard Cohen, who worked on the release of "Super Size Me" as well as this year's "Chicago 10." Even in markets where Oscar-nominated director Brett Morgen's super-energized retelling of the Chicago 1968 rabblerousers got four-star reviews, such as Washington D.C. ("the first great film of 2008," wrote the Washington Post), audiences were "absolutely indifferent," explained Cohen.

According to Variety, SOP grossed an estimated $14,916 from two theaters for a per screen average of $7,458.

There are a few more political docs in the pipeline over the summer, but what may get docs out of its funk are titles like Sundance favorites American Teen, which follows the senior year of a group of high school students in Indiana, and Man On Wire, which recounts tightrope walker Philippe Petit's illegal high-wire routine between the World Trade Center towers in the '70s. Two superb docs without a hint of war.

Though I have been wrong before...

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 4/27/2008 10:12:00 PM Comments (1)

Screening Times: Apr 27th, 8:30pm (Village East), Apr 29th, 3:30pm (AMC Village VII), Apr 30th, 1:30pm (19th St. AMC), May 4th, 7:45pm (19th St. AMC)



Brazilian filmmaker Paula Gaitan's ghostly part memoir, part experimental doc Days In Sintra chronicles her return to Sintra, Portugal, where she once lived in exile with her husband, famed Brazilian director Glauber Rocha (1938-1981), a notable figure in Brazil's Cinema Novo movement of the 1960's.

Filmmaker: At what point following your husbands death did you begin to ruminate about this film?

Gaitan: 25 years later. I have realized many films and documentaries before carrying out Days in Sintra. I thought it was important to have this distance from the historical moment so that it could become reminiscence, forgetfulness, poetry, art.

Filmmaker: What initially provoked you to return to Portugal?

Gaitan: The possibility to create a movie with new perceptions and to see in what way the emotions would transit through the labyrinths of the unconscious.

Filmmaker: Have your children seen the film? What do they think of it?

Gaitan: They have just seen the film after it was ready, in an opening session of the Rio de Janeiro's Festival, with five hundred people in the room. They got visibly moved, as the whole audience did... it was a special night.

Filmmaker: What, if anything, surprised you about the film as you constructed the movie in the editing room?

Gaitan: This film is a film of composition, of language construction in the edition room, and also a kind of craftwork film, as if it was being weaving images, ideas. I did the photography in super 8, in 1981, and also in my returning to Portugal in 2007. The composition was happening slowly, in an impressionist way, by associations of ideas, composition of memory layers, involuntary memory. It was a discovery of a memory's topography.

Filmmaker: How has the film been received in Brazil? Como o filme foi recebido no Brazil?

Gaitan: It was not commercially launched yet, but will happen yet in this year. In the critics sessions it was well received, and in the Rio's Festival and in Sao Paulo's Exhibition the audience got really amazed for it was not a journalistic documentary, but a reflexive documentary, of an inner travel, in first person, that evokes Glauber. The audience really liked it.

Filmmaker: If you could make this picture again, what would you do differently?

Gaitan: Nothing, perhaps I would create a longer version. This film has the rhythm of breathing. It is a sensorial movie.



What's next for you?
I have just accomplished a short film, Monsanto. I am preparing a film sequence of a fiction movie, Sobre a Neblina, to be realized in co-production with Argentina, and also preparing a short film about the work of the poet Marcio-Andre, entitled Intradoxos.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 4/27/2008 06:04:00 PM Comments (0)