The first rule of Film Week is that if you have time to blog during Film Week, you’re probably not doing it right. The second rule of Film Week is that if you attend, the best part is that you will meet all kinds of awesome people making awesome films. This may intimidate you. It’s okay. Be cool. I guess that’s the third rule of Film Week, bro: just be cool. When the good folks at Filmmaker Magazine asked me to blog about Film Week again this year, I knew I wanted to write about some of the awesome people […]
by Penny Lane on Sep 24, 2012I am writing this from the crowded “lobby” area at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, where the Spotlight on Documentaries forum is going hot and heavy. The noise in this room is beyond description. It is such an overwhelming cacophony that try as I might, I can’t eavesdrop at all. This is disappointing, because eavesdropping is one of my most favorite pursuits and would surely have given me great material for you, dear readers. Alas. As promised, now I will share some key lessons from the original self help masterpiece, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence […]
by Penny Lane on Sep 26, 2011Day One of Film Week is complete! Wow, did we ever get better at talking about Our Nixon today. Ten back-to-back 30-minute meetings with brilliant people who are really interested in your film will do have that effect. Did Our Nixon make a true love connection? Who knows, but sparks were definitely flying. And it’s all about getting to the second date. We came into this week with a lot of meeting requests, and although I was fairly flabbergasted by the interest we elicited, I really shouldn’t have been. Because Our Nixon has a really fantastic premise: it’s a feature […]
by Penny Lane on Sep 22, 2011Next week, my husband Brian and I will take our first documentary feature (Our Nixon) to Independent Film Week. I’ve never been to this event before, or to anything remotely like it, so I would describe my state of mind as Excited Anticipation, tinged with a slightly lesser amount of Bemused Bafflement. For the uninitiated, here is the little that I know about Independent Film Week (I should say more specifically the Project Forum): if you are selected by IFP to participate, you upload information about your film to a top secret server run by elves, and then various species […]
by Penny Lane on Sep 19, 2011