As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we’ve reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. Today: Brendan Byrne on David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. The […]

“We have a solution to Hollywood’s ‘development hell’ which I am pleased to share with everyone.” This was how Dallas Sonnier, or at least his marketing department, announced the introduction of “the original audiostate,” the neologism Cinestate (Sonnier’s Dallas-based indie production company) coined to avoid the dread word “podcast.” Through marrying the “grandiosity of Hollywood films with the intimacy of audio,” the audiostate is meant transform that most beloved of objects, the unproduced screenplay, into multi-platform pitchable content. Since Sonnier’s 2017 statement, only one audiostate has been produced: the same year’s The Narrow Caves, a story of eldritch horror, eugenics […]