Authors — Scott Macaulay
-
Trailer Watch: Ms. 45
Hobo With A Shotgun director Jason Eisener cut this fantastic trailer for Abel Ferrara’s 1981 revenge thriller, Ms. 45, which is being re-released December 13 with VOD following March 25. Check out Drafthouse Films’ fantastic remastering job as evidenced by the clips here. Ms. 45 stars the late great Zoë Lund as a shy seamstress who, after multiple assaults in one 24-hour period, goes on a killing rampage against all the men in New York. For more details on the release, with nationwide theatrical dates, visit the film’s page at Drafthouse Films.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 21, 2013 -
Independent Film and the Reshoot
If you ask me what’s the biggest difference between studio and independent productions, I wouldn’t answer the length of the shooting schedule or luxuriousness of the craft service. No, I’d say it’s the ability to do reshoots. While studio films can hone their stories through test screenings and additional photography, changing endings (Fatal Attraction) and even entire third acts (World War Z), too many independents wind up with depleted contingencies and unwilling investors when additional photography needs arise in post. Producer Rob Cowan wrote about reshoots today at Hollywood Journal, correctly regarding them not as signs of weakness but as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2013 -
Must-Watch Music Video: Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”
Credit Bob Dylan and a 48-year-old song for the best music video of the moment. In “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan and co. create a channel-hopping interactive experience in which no two viewings are the same. Click through 16 different channels to watch various TV presenters, reality-show folk, celebrities and, oh yeah, Dylan himself, lip-sync to the song. From the press release: Nearly a half-century later, a groundbreaking interactive project has been created for the song, allowing fans to experience the classic recording in unprecedented ways. Celebrities and reality stars are featured throughout the various channels including cameos by Drew […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2013 -
Code: Laura Hanna and Matana Roberts on NYC Stop and Frisk
Filmmaker and media activist Laura Hanna — a co-founder of the production company HiddenDriver and director of docs Gattis, James and Hammer — has directed this short documentary about composer and sound artist Matana Roberts’ recent “stop and frisk” encounter on the Williamsburg bridge. Produced by Creative Time Reports and found on their site, it is introduced thusly: As the composer, saxophone player and sound artist Matana Roberts walked across the Williamsburg Bridge one night in May, she asked herself a familiar question: “How am I going to survive as an artist in this town?” It was too enchanting an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2013 -
Remembering Syd Field, 1935 – 2013
“I don’t even really understand the second act,” a filmmaker said to me just last week. He obviously hadn’t read Syd Field’s Screenplay, which is nothing if not about act structure: the first, second and third acts, but also the inciting incident, pinch one, plot point one, midpoint, pinch two, plot point two and resolution. When I started reading scripts — both as a professional gig and as a producer — Field’s was the book to have on your shelf, and, setting aside Aristotle, was the one that ratified a storytelling paradigm that exists to this day. As a script […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 18, 2013 -
10 Picks for the DOC NYC Film Festival
In only its fourth year, DOC NYC feels like an institution. Nestled in the calendar alongside the concluding CPH:DOX (where I’m writing this from Copenhagen) and Amsterdam’s mammoth IDFA, this edition of DOC NYC, under the usual steady hand of artistic director Thom Powers, boasts an even more impressive blend of world and New York-premieres, Gotham-centric special events and panels for both audience and industry. Here are 10 picks, some films I’m excited about seeing along with one I have seen and can highly recommend. Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? In the former category is the world-premiering collaboration […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 14, 2013 -
Five Questions for I Learn America‘s Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng
The coming-of-age tale is a durable independent film genre, but it takes on added political and personal dimensions in I Learn America, Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng’s documentary about five new teenage immigrants within New York’s public school system. Dissard, a dual citizen who immigrated himself from France when he was a teenager (and with whom I worked with on Raising Victor Vargas), and Peng, an education reform expert who worked in the Bloomberg administration, embrace within the film the emotional complexity of their subjects’ lives while an exhaustive outreach campaign amplifies its various messages and policy implications. I Learn […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 13, 2013 -
Prefundia Promotes Crowdfunding Preawareness
Pre-awareness — in studio parlance, it usually refers to viewers' recognition of a film property before its release. In today's crowded landscape, it's considered an important factor when greenlighting Hollywood tentpoles, and it's why you see so many remakes, reboots and franchise films. In the indie world, there's pre-awareness too. It can be created by everything from grassroots publicity before a film's release to the ability of successful crowdfunding campaigns to stoke interest in a project. And, if the folks at Prefundia are right, there's crowdfunding pre-awareness — buzz preceding a project's launch on Kickstarter or Indiegogo that can help […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 13, 2013 -
Five Films Announced for 8th Annual Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You Series at MoMA
Filmmaker, Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), and The Museum of Modern Art announce today the five films chosen for the organization’s annual Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You series, running November 15 – 18 in MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2. They are: Eddie Mullins’ Doomsdays; Kevin Jerome Everson’s The Island of St. Matthews; Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love; Aaron Douglas Johnston’s My Sister’s Quinceanera and Benjamin Greené’s Survival Prayer. As always, Filmmaker editors (myself, Nick Dawson, Brandon Harris, Alicia Van Couvering and Ray Pride), the IFP’s Milton Tabbot and, new this year, MoMA’s Sophie Cavoulacos have […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 7, 2013 -
Recommended Short: Brandon LaGanke’s Playhouse
I’m a fan of Brandon LaGanke’s short film Play House, writing in my print magazine SXSW report, “Play House is an elegantly disturbing suburban horror short in which the defeated apathy of a wife, daughter and son is revealed to be sickeningly explicable.” The short has just gone up on Vimeo where it is a Staff Pick. Check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 6, 2013
