Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Binaural Recording, Room Tone, and Voices from the Past: Sam Green on His Documentary 32 Sounds
When it came time to title his 2018 documentary about The Kronos Quartet, director Sam Green chose A Thousand Thoughts. Referring to an older Kronos composition, the title also spoke to the film’s approach, which was to use the music and biography of the Bay Area classical group to summon up a range of allusive meditations on ephemerality, culture, legacy and death. For his latest documentary, ostensibly about the much larger and more amorphous topic of “sound,” Green has gone in the numerically opposite direction. 32 Sounds, which opens today at New York’s Film Forum, announces itself as a sort […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2023 -
Filmmaker Issue #122 Out Now (Along With a Flash Subscription Sale)
Filmmaker‘s issue #122 is arriving in mailboxes and at newsstands now, and in conjunction we’ve launched a Spring Subscription sale until Sunday. For the first time, we’re discounting our print and digital subscriptions by 50%. A one-year digital subscription — which includes our archives back to 2007 — is just $5. In the US, a print subscription is just $9. Both subscriptions include access to all paywalled content as well as Filmmaker on Exact Editions, which offers fantastic browser and tablet reading. (Check out a sample issue here.) Your subscriptions help underwrite all of our editorial content, including on the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 29, 2023 -
Filmmaker Seeks New Media and Audio Writers
At Filmmaker, we are seeking freelance writers to cover new media — AR, VR, XR, the metaverse, AI-generated work, etc. — as well as audio (podcasts, etc). Opportunities exist for regular print columns as well as web columns and one-off web pieces. Ideal writers will have published writing samples and deep knowledge of these topics and be able to cover them from a Filmmaker style, which is to mix critical appraisals with insights into the production, technical and financing issues that affect both individual works and the respective fields. If you feel you qualify and would like to pitch or […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2023 -
Case Study: Dramarama
At the end of the 2000s, Jonathan Wysocki went to both the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs, then spent years on projects that would assemble pieces of financing before falling apart. All the while, he watched colleagues from those labs launch Kickstarter campaigns and make ultra-low-budget debuts. Deciding to take a similar approach, at the start of 2019, he raised $62,000 on the crowdfunding platform and an additional $180,000 in private equity and was shooting his first feature, Dramarama, by summer. Of course, as the timeline above suggests, Wysocki’s picture will forever be asterisked in the independent film distribution history […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2023 -
Case Study: S&M Sally
S&M Sally, the third feature in writer-director Michelle Ehlen’s trilogy of character-based comedy dramas dealing with gender and sexuality, was financed largely via crowdfunding and premiered at the Frameline Film Festival in June 2015 before going on to play more than 70 other fests, generating about $15,000 in revenue. For Ehlen, who has a devoted fanbase, festivals provide a kind of audience research: “Even if my films might land on the LGBTQ circuit, I try to go to bigger festivals, too. The festivals guide me as to how big a movie this is, how big the audience is, then I […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2023 -
Editor’s Letter
“Go make movies.” That was my Editor’s Letter signoff here in the earliest days of this publication. And, over the ensuing 30 years, many of you did! I won’t give Filmmaker anything more than a small amount of credit for the independent production boom in the years following our 1992 launch, but we have certainly been out there issue by issue, web page by web page, encouraging new independent filmmakers. We’ve also tried in these pages to deliver doses of reality along with our encouragement. We’ve run articles on the vicissitudes of financing, the high cost of delivery, difficult sales […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2023 -
Case Study: Playing with Beethoven
“As a filmmaker, you’re just happy if your investors get paid back,” says director Jenn Page about her sixth feature, 2020’s Playing with Beethoven, produced for just $65,000. “Even if you’ve done the whole thing—produced it, packaged it and spent your life on it—you just go, ‘Let me just please make my investors’ money back,’ and even that is always obviously risky in this business. You literally put in the packet to your investors, ‘You’re probably not going to make your money back.’ What kind of business does this?” With the exception of her very first film, Page hasn’t had […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2023 -
Remembering Noah Cowan
Noah Cowan, who died in January at the age of 55 of glioblastoma multiforme (a form of brain cancer), was a passionate and erudite multihyphenate in the world of international cinema. A programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival who went on to become its co-director, as well as inaugural artistic director for the festival organization’s year-round theatre, the Bell Lightbox, he was also a distributor (Cowboy Pictures), nonprofit leader (the Global Film Initiative and SFFILM) and a business consultant and strategist. He was also a writer and critic. For much of this magazine’s first decade, Noah was a contributing […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2023 -
State Hopping: The U.S. Film Tax Credit Landscape
As the pandemic exited its first lockdowns and film production tentatively recommenced amid overall economic uncertainty, the fate of U.S. tax incentives for feature film and television appeared cloudy. Wrote James Cutchin in the Los Angeles Business Journal on August 20, 2020, “State coffers have been drained after months of lockdowns, starved of key tax revenues and exhausted by the costs of fighting the virus. With states facing such bleak financial outlooks, some wonder whether governments will continue to fund film tax credit programs.” Two and a half years later, those worries have been largely banished. Last fall in an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2023 -
Case Study: Desperate Acts of Magic
Joe Tyler Gold made his magic-themed comedy Desperate Acts of Magic, co-directed with Tammy Caplan, “a day or two a month, over 18 months, until the film was done,” he says. The protracted production worked in the film’s favor because, with new crews shuffling in and out, “people kept getting introduced to the movie, and we kept getting new supporters. So, we were able to get donations and funding through the whole process and, toward the end, when we released our trailer, a producer saw and was impressed by it. He saw that we were looking for money, and he […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2023
