Authors — Scott Macaulay
-
“We Just Love This Beautiful Outsider Art Form”: Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley on Home Haunts and “Room Temperature”
Making an appearance on DC’s, the blog of author Dennis Cooper, each October are haunted houses and their amateur offspring, “home haunts,” the Halloween home makeovers that with varying degrees of imagination turn suburban dwellings into highly personal expressions of horror . For Cooper, the acclaimed author of works such as Closer, Frisk, God, Jr., The Marble Swarm and The Sluts, these necessarily ephemeral stagings are a particular kind of outsider art, which makes their cataloguing each year on Cooper’s website a work of invaluable archiving; they are installations in dialogue with American horror movie iconography in which such figures […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2026 -
Reflections on Independent Film and 33 Years of Filmmaker
In 2017, for the 25th anniversary of Filmmaker, we commissioned a radical redesign and also initiated a new upfront section: Reflections. For four issues we published pieces looking back at the history of the magazine as well as ones that meditated anew on its enduring concerns, such as struggles of early career filmmakers, the changing models of independent producing, the role of print magazines in a digital culture, and the shifting definitions of the word “independent.” When our anniversary year was over, I decided to keep the section, reasoning that “reflections” didn’t have to just refer to the past; these […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 9, 2026 -
Source File: Mark Obenhaus on “Cover-Up”
Mark Obenhaus has had an extensive career in television documentary, having worked with ABC News as well as on the PBS series Frontline, Great Performances and The American Experience. His subjects have ranged from the Kennedy assassination to UFOs to Robert Wilson’s groundbreaking opera, Einstein on the Beach, and he has won five national Emmy awards, two for the Frontline series “Abortion Clinic” and “Living Below the Line.” He worked with Seymour Hersh on projects including the Frontline documentary Buying the Bomb and brought his long relationship with Sy and understanding of the reporter’s working methods and very understandable sensitivities […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2025 -
Subterranean Histories: Laura Poitras on “Cover-Up”
When we meet Seymour Hersh at his Washington office in Laura Poitras’s and Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up, the veteran journalist is framed by papers—documents piled on his desk, notebooks stacked against the wall, binders stuffed into bookcases. The man who began his career in 1959, broke stories about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and prison torture in Abu Ghraib and penned provocative counter-histories about the killing of Bin Laden and the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline is very much still at work. (Now on Substack, he’s recently been writing about the genocide in Gaza, Trump administration plans to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2025 -
Historicizing the Independent Awards Race: Manohla Dargis Speaks with Scott Macaulay
A garish panel from an R. Crumb cartoon was the cover of Filmmaker’s spring 1995 edition. Inside were interviews with Hal Hartley, David Salle, Lourdes Portillo and Gregory Nava; a David Leitner article on new trends in film lighting; a survey of new independent distributors; and Mikki Halpin on how the internet could help independent filmmakers. Finally, there was “The Vision Thing,” Manohla Dargis’s take on the Spirit Awards, the fundraiser of our co-publisher at the time, the IFP/West (now Film Independent). It was a pivotal year for the Spirits: they had previously announced that for the first time films […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2025 -
Reflecting on 33 Years of “Filmmaker” and Independent Film
In 2017, for the 25th anniversary of Filmmaker, we commissioned a radical redesign and also initiated a new upfront section: Reflections. For four issues, we published pieces looking back at the history of the magazine as well as ones that meditated anew on its enduring concerns: the struggles of early career filmmakers, changing models of independent producing, the role of print magazines in a digital culture, shifting definitions of the word “independent.” When our anniversary year was over, I decided to keep the section, reasoning that “reflections” didn’t have to refer just to the past; reflections can radiate towards the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2025 -
Anthony Dod Mantle on Cinematographer Origins
The Copenhagen-based British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle is known for his innovation around diverse shooting formats, from the MiniDV of The Celebration to the SI-2K digital camera of Slumdog Millionaire and iPhone of his most recent, 28 Years Later. But as a producer who has worked with Anthony—on Harmony Korine’s MiniDV-shot julien donkey-boy and Gus Van Sant’s Easter—what I most associate with him is his ability to locate a script’s latent, least articulable meanings and then, using a combination of instinct, storytelling insight and technical prowess, bring those images to the screen. Recently, I shared a script with Anthony, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2025 -
Going Again: Laura Klein Interviewed by Scott Macaulay
Filmmaker’s goal has always been to include articles written by film workers as often as possible. We’ve had many directors write pieces or conduct interviews, and we’ve had articles written by below-the-line crew, too—DPs, production designers, editors, script supervisors, even dolly grips. The only reason that there aren’t more of these pieces in every issue is that the best technicians who have the most to impart are usually busy. They work all the time. Laura Klein is one of New York’s top independent film first assistant directors. Among her recent credits are Lucky Lu, Rebuilding, Friendship, Between the Temples and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2025 -
Scott Macaulay’s Final Editor’s Letter as Filmmaker Editor-in-Chief
The following is Filmmaker co-founder and editor-in-chief Scott Macaulay’s final Editor’s Letter, from the Winter 2026 print issue. Edit a magazine for 33 years and by the time you must write a final editor’s letter, you have plenty of examples to draw from. Knowing that some day I’d be writing this send-off, I’ve found myself taking note of all the departing missives that have come across my coffee table and screens—quite a few, given the tumult across the film, non-profit and journalism worlds these past decades. There’s the most common type of farewell: plucky, somewhat anodyne, with the promise not […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2025 -
Sundance Film Festival Announces 2026 Feature Slate, Including Competition Titles
The Sundance Institute announced today 90 feature films, including the competition titles, and seven episodic projects that will screen at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, the final edition to be held in Park City, UT. (Eight other projects were previously announced as part of the Park City Legacy program.) Among them are new films from John Wilson, Josephine Decker, Kogonada, Gregg Araki, Alex Gibney and Antoine Fuqua; three films featuring Charli xcx (Araki’s I Want Your Sex, Aidan Zamiri’s A24 release, The Moment, and Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist), and, as always, a number of first-time features, including films from Ramzi […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2025
