ETIENNE! PREMIERES AT NEW YORK’S reRUN

By Scott Macaulay

I loved Jeff Mizushima’s delicate, entirely charming, and vaguely emo-ish Etienne! when I saw it last year after its CineVegas premiere. I wound up putting Jeff in our “25 New Faces” simply because the film’s sensibility seemed so different to me. I also loved its formally-bold second-half narrative shift and director Caveh Zahedi’s last-reel appearance in a scene that could have been taken from a Peter Handke novel.

The film receives its East Coast premiere at the Brooklyn gastropub theater reRun beginning tomorrow for a one-week run. You can reserve tickets here. Here’s what I wrote last year:

Writer-director Jeff Mizushima won the Filmmaker To Watch Award at CineVegas this year for Etienne!, an oddly sweet art film about loneliness, affection and loss that, as part of its ending, features the director Caveh Zahedi extolling on the workings of a pinhole camera. But if you ask Mizushima

… Read the rest

LIXIN FAN, “LAST TRAIN HOME”

By Damon Smith

Not many first-time independent filmmakers land a coveted spot in the Sunday arts section of The New York Times and an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show. But 33-year-old Lixin Fan, a Chinese-born Canadian immigrant who splits his time between Montreal and Beijing, has generated a lot of interest among editors at major dailies and business publications alike for his documentary Last Train Home, a film about the annual New Year’s pilgrimage of 130 million migrant workers from Guangzhou province to their homes and seldom-seen families in the rural provinces. China’s status as an economic powerhouse regularly makes front-page news, along with stories about the country’s ongoing struggles to manage crises that seem to grow directly out of frustrations among its most disenfranchised. Recent docs have explored the heady, often devastating changes wrought in China by warp-speed industrialization and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam (the largest civil-engineering… Read the rest

“GET ME MY F*CKING SOY BURRITO!”

By Scott Macaulay

Producer Gavin Polone’s presumably ex- current assistant has made one of those Xtranormal videos where you submit text and use the service to make a robotically-voiced animated short. This was sent to me this week by a friend who attested to its validity, and now, Nikki Finke gets confirmation from Polone (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Zombieland) himself. He is quoted, “Sadly, it isn’t altogether untrue. People seem to like it. Maybe it will inspire an HBO series about me?”

Some enterprising curator should assemble the best of these Xtranormal videos. They’d make an oddly compelling full-evening show.

DO THE YAM: ASTAIRE & ROGERS, THE COMPLETE WORKS |
By Livia Bloom

“I wanted to be a dancer,” says Fred Astaire, wheezing out a tune on a harmonica with his gangly frame draped casually over a medical couch. “Till I was psychologized.”

Astaire plays doctor—a shrink, of all things—in Mark Sandrich’s Carefree (1953), a little-known screwball comedy gem as antic and goofy as Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) with dance. And what dance! Accompanied by an Irving Berlin score, Astaire and Rogers are at the top of their game in the tale of a therapist (Astaire) who must find the root of the commitment phobia that plagues his new patient (Rogers). “She’s probably just another pampered, maladjusted female,” opines Astaire into his doctor’s recorder, prescribing her a good spanking. Until he meets her, that is. Then a playful game of one-upmanship, and eventually love, ensues.

In a dance number for the ages, Astaire first tries to impress his patient on the… Read the rest

WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS

By Scott Macaulay

Here are some links that caught my eye this week.

The Workbook Project has a new Transmedia Talk Podcast. Topics include “The Web is Dead,” Foursquare, and the Transmedia panels at SXSW 2011.

Also at the Workbook Project, Mark Harris on why he shot his forthcoming The Lost Children fiction feature as a doc.

Sarah Kessler at Mashable: “New Neutrality — Seven Worst-Case Scenarios.”

There’s been a lot of interest in NYC writer Tao Lin over at The Rumpus. I haven’t read him, so I can’t comment. But here’s an intro at Salon that also discusses the new ways he’s figured out how to monetize his work. An excerpt:

In early November 2009, Lin held an “experimental contest” on his blog that invited users to bid a certain amount of money via Paypal — any amount they chose — on a prize package of Tao

… Read the rest

FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: FALL, 1996

By Scott Macaulay

Al Pacino, Robert Young, Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky, Cheryl Dunye, Curtis Charm, Nina Menkes, Alexander Payne, Steve Buscemi, Eric Bogosian and Nick Cassavetes were all featured in our Fall, 1996 issue, an edition that was dominated by one feature: our “50 Most Important Independent Films.” What makes one film more “important” than another? Here’s a portion of my intro:

When we sent a letter out to several dozen critics, curators, distributors, and producers asking them to pick the most important American independent films of all time, we received a slew of responses ranging from the excited to the confused. Many of our respondents welcomed the chance to take a critical look back at indie film history while others were perplexed by our lack of clear guidelines. “What’s the difference between ‘best’ and ‘important’?” some respondents asked, while others brought up the age-old question of what constitutes an

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SUNDANCE DOC CREATIVE PRODUCING LAB DIARY #2: RACHEL LIBERT

By Scott Macaulay

Here is part two of Rachel Libert’s diaries from the Sundance Labs. Read part one here.

The busloads of people arriving at the Sundance Resort for the Creative Producing Summit signaled the end of the Creative Producing Lab. Twenty narrative producers, twenty documentary producers and dozens of high-level industry representatives are sequestered in the privacy of the Wasatch Mountains. We’re participating in an information marathon. We are a think tank in which our collective brainpower evaluates the industry and its future. For the Documentary Creative Producing Lab fellows there’s a palpable shift from our tight knit group discussions about the impact of our films to the business of financing and distribution.

Like many documentary producers I am also directing my project along with my co-director Tony Hardmon. When I’m with other documentary filmmakers our conversations gravitate toward subject matter and production anecdotes, not line items and complex financing… Read the rest

SUNDANCE DOC FILM CREATIVE PRODUCING LAB DIARY: RACHEL LIBERT

By Scott Macaulay

Here is the first of two diaries from Rachel Libert, a producer and director who brought her project Semper Fi: Always Faithful to the Sundance Doc Film Creative Producing Lab.

I’m on my way home from the Sundance Documentary Film Creative Producing Lab and Summit and struggling to describe the experience.

Nearly four years ago I was researching a documentary film about a public health organization and, while the idea was intriguing, it was becoming increasingly obvious that it was an impossible film to make. Before I graciously made my exit from the project I went to lunch with the Communications Director of the organization. At lunch she told me that her brother was in the process of exposing a Marine Corps cover-up of a toxic water contamination and asked me if I knew any filmmakers who might be interested in his story. As we sat at the… Read the rest

SOLVE A HUMAN MYSTERY, PRODUCE A FILM

By Scott Macaulay

Since I was a teenager, one of my favorite science-fiction writers has been Norman Spinrad. Of course, to call him a science-fiction writer is tremendously reductive, because his writing has encompassed historical fiction, political commentary and cultural critique. But when I encountered him, he was part of a renegade group of science-fiction writers who were pushing the genre’s boundaries of form and content. He was collected by Harlan Ellison in his Dangerous Visions series, which is where I first read him. Later I stumbled across a signed copy of Norman’s excellent and now astonishingly prescient tale of the media and government conspiracy, Bug Jack Barron (once set to be adapted by Costa Gavras starring Jack Nicholson!) in a used bookstore, and I was hooked.

Spinrad has a blog, and in a posting this week he posed a human mystery. I’ll let him explain, and if you can help solve… Read the rest

SUNDANCE CREATIVE PRODUCERS LAB DIARY: AMY LO, PART 2

By Scott Macaulay

Here’s part two of Amy Lo’s Sundance Creative Producer’s Lab Diary. Part One can be read here.

Back in New York, a director I’d just met the other day told me, “You’re really nice for a producer.”

Have we sunk so low? He was surprised that I was…nice?

In fact, at the Sundance Creative Producing Summit, there was nothing but niceness all around. It began on Friday; specifically, after lunch. Pre-lunch, we were still ensconced in our intimate, small-group sessions for the Feature Film Creative Producing Lab, which had started five days prior.

The Summit, in its second year, would be three more days on the mountain, but instead of us five Fellows being the center of attention, there would be a broader agenda examining the state of the independent film industry with 40 some-odd folks.

We had been spoiled at the Labs, and now we were… Read the rest