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A Tech Writer’s Appreciation of Scott Macaulay
Scott Macaulay’s remarkable three-decade-plus tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Filmmaker, a magazine by and for indie filmmakers, coincided with momentous changes brought on by tech: the almost total supplantation of a century’s worth of film technologies—production, post-production, distribution, exhibition—by digital systems conferring high-end capabilities upon low-cost cameras and PCs, along with the birth of internet websites and online streaming.
Scott, with his roaming intellect, taste for experimental theater and film, and open spirit, was the right person at the right time to captain Filmmaker magazine through these epochal transitions. I know, because my association with Filmmaker, the print magazine, and Scott started early in the first reel, so to speak. Let me explain.
Over a long career producing, directing, and DP’ing indie documentaries and dramas, I’ve entertained a significant side hustle: chronicling the art, craft, and business of independent filmmaking. This began with a tech column, “In Focus,” that appeared 1981-1992 in the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers’s The Independent.
I created “In Focus” because, as Director of New Technology at New York’s DuArt Film and Video in the early 1980s, I had a privileged seat at the table when it came to new production and post-production technology. I therefore felt an obligation to share my insider’s insights with other independent filmmakers. I wrote about Super 16, 35mm blow-ups, improving lens performance, advances in color negative, film-to-tape, tape-to-film, and what was then called “electronic cinema.” I interviewed and befriended trailblazers like Jean-Pierre Beauviala of Aaton and vérité innovators Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines.
In 1989 I began a 23-year stretch as Senior Contributing Editor of Millimeter magazine. My Millimeter beat included all things post: telecines, PCs in the “edit suite,” how to conform film from video edits, video projection, as well as festivals, filmmaker interviews, and coverage of the latest analog and digital video cameras. Occasionally, I also contributed to The Off Hollywood Report, RES, In Motion, Variety On Production, DV, Post, Documentary, Video Systems, and Digital Content Producer. (Almost all of these print magazines are history.)
But it was Filmmaker—launched in 1992 to merge the Independent Feature Project’s Off Hollywood Report and IFP/West’s Montage print magazines—that was closest to my heart. This was due to years of my involvement with the IFP in New York. I had served on the Independent Feature Film Market Committee 1989-1993 and was technical director of the Independent Feature Film Market for eight years. As a member of the planning committee for the first Gotham Awards in 1991, I had produced the film clips used in the awards ceremony, including a video tribute to the recipient of the first Gotham Award for Lifetime Achievement, DuArt’s Chairman, Irwin Young. I wrote, shot, and edited a tongue-in-cheek testimonial by Michael Moore with clips from indie films Irwin had produced, including his brother Robert M. Young’s Nothing But A Man.
I recall Scott visiting me in a DuArt telecine suite while I was assembling the Nothing But A Man clips. (Non-linear editing was a decade in the future.) It’s possible I had met him earlier, when he interviewed me for an article on Irwin Young for the Fall 1991 issue of The Off-Hollywood Report. Maybe he was first introduced to me at the 1991 Independent Feature Film Market by Karol Martesko-Fenster, who co-founded and ran RES, IndieWire.com, Silicon Alley Reporter, and a year later, Filmmaker. Karol had once produced, and I had shot, a whatever-happened-to documentary for Austrian TV about extant von Trapp family members of Sound of Music fame. I was more than aware of Karol’s print-magazine ventures.
Whatever the case, it’s safe to say I met Scott in the fall of 1991 prior to Filmmaker’s launch. However I didn’t contribute anything at first. For me, in active production, time was always a scarce commodity. Over the years I had to constantly struggle to keep up my writing side hustle. It wasn’t until Filmmaker’s Spring 1994 issue that my byline appeared above an interview with Aaton’s Jean-Pierre Beauviala, essentially a 10-year update to my earlier Independent interviews with him. The Spring 1995 issue contained my lengthy article on the history and current state of cinema lighting, “Sculpting With Light,” later reprinted in the prestigious Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers Journal.
My first camera round-up appeared in the Summer 1995 issue. It contained a brief history of film cameras and covered the latest 16mm and 35mm offerings from Aaton, Arri, Panavision, and Moviecam, including Russian and Chinese knockoffs. My next camera round-up, in the Spring 1996 issue, skewed digital for the very first time, covering the arrival of both the DVD disc format and the DV tape format (introducing FireWire!) along with pro variants DVCAM and DVCPRO. I also disclosed new “prosumer” MiniDV camcorders from Sony and Panasonic. The times, they were a-changin’… at warp speed!
Over the coming decades I contributed over 80 articles to Filmmaker, and I always wrote long, as I had cut my teeth as a writer before internet instantaneity and website analytics. These pieces included not only interviews and production profiles but coverage of key advances in our basic tools: cameras, lenses, compression algorithms, recording formats, projectors, nonlinear editing, computers, and monitors.
Sometimes I covered the big annual NAB equipment exhibition in Vegas. For instance, I was at DALSA’s unveiling of Genesis Origin, the very first 4K digital camera, at 2003 NAB. It was as big as a mini fridge, and it didn’t even record. I sat with the Kodak guys, slumped in their chairs. They possessed all the digital camera patents, but Rochester had forbidden them to develop a 4K digital motion picture camera that would undermine Kodak’s color film cash cow. I first recounted this anecdote in Filmmaker.
I also wrote reports from the New York Film Festival, the Berlinale, Camerimage, Sundance, Slamdance, and Tribeca. Occasionally I wrote one-offs about multimedia installations, film restorations, even the effect of tariffs on indie filmmakers. Plus, of late, an obit or two.
But perhaps my most significant contribution was a series of annual digital cinema camera round-ups written from 2011-2018, with a follow-up in 2022. This was entirely Scott’s idea and he pressed me each year to do it. By 2010 I had already profiled the introduction of Alexa, ARRI’s answer to 2007’s RED One camera. Digital production cameras were evolving at a fast clip by then, and inasmuch as I considered Filmmaker to be indie filmmaking’s “paper of record,” I endeavored to write these round-ups with an eye towards both the practical informational needs of low-budget filmmakers and also the longer perspective of history. Footprints in the sand, if you will. String those articles together and you get a decade’s timeline depicting the evolution of digital cinema cameras, from knuckle dragging to posture parade. In later years I also wrote a series of tech year-in-review pieces.
I always tried to write clearly, to better communicate my understanding of the wild ride tech was taking us on. I tried to avoid jargon while never watering down complicated but essential topics. Scott welcomed all of it. It was Scott who set the magazine’s open tone with his own inquisitive yet critical curiosity, encouraging candor and acumen throughout Filmmaker’s pages, whether on paper or screen. I’ll miss his unique guiding spirit as Editor-in-Chief, and I’ll look forward with anticipation to the many provocative films he’ll bring us on the next leg of his career.
