Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Should Filmmakers Be Financially Accountable to their Kickstarter Supporters?
A recent NPR story, “When a Kickstarter Campaign Fails, Does Anyone Get Their Money Back?”, raised the issue of failed crowdfunding campaigns and financial restitution to supporters. It’s a relevant topic as Kickstarter is increasingly acting as a pre-sale, customer-financing platform for sundry consumer, tech, and design goods. iPod wristwatches, RAW-shooting cameras, tripods and remotes, aquariums — many projects, some from creators with manufacturing backgrounds and some without, are bypassing the angel investor round and raising start-up capital directly from their customers. And while these are creative projects, they’re different from the short films and features we highlight on our […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2012 -
JORGE HINOJOSA ON “ICEBERG SLIM: PORTRAIT OF A PIMP”
Premiering in Toronto this year is Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp, director Jorge Hinojosa’s portrait of the legendary black author and pimp, whose work influenced generations of rap artists as well as urban fiction — or Street Lit — writers. Making his directorial debut, Hinojosa has been Ice-T’s manager for the past 28 years and previously executive produced the features Urban Menace, The Wrecking Crew and Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap. In the below video, offered by Hinojosa to Filmmaker, he discusses the origins of the film, his interest in Slim and how he and his collaborators […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 7, 2012 -
SYRIAN FILMMAKER ORWA NYRABIA ARRESTED AND MISSING
Last Thursday, August 23, Syrian filmmaker Orwa Nyrabia was arrested by Syrian security forces at the Damascus airport while on his way to Cairo. Since then, he has not been heard from. Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker wrote about Nyrabia and his disappearance in a blog post last week. I had the good fortune at the time to meet Orwa Nyrabia (also transcribed Nairabiya). He is a big, ironic, bold spirit, whose jolly nature seemed perversely at odds with the grimly repressive atmosphere inside that country. With another producer, Diana el-Jeiroudi, Orwa started Proaction Film, the only independent documentary-film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 2, 2012 -
CHAIR FIGHTING TIPS FOR CLINT EASTWOOD
Clint, here, via Harmony Korine and Mark Gonzalez, is how you fight a chair. (The clip, of course, is from Gummo, which I co-produced.)
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 31, 2012 -
“BIG RIVER MAN” BENEFIT SCREENING SEPT. 4 AT IFC CENTER
Along with Jonathan Caouette, Ingrid Kopp, Thom Powers, Esther Robinson, Morgan Spurlock, and John Vanco I’ll be co-hosting a benefit screening of John Maringouin’s Big River Man on Tuesday, September 4, at the IFC Center at 7:30PM. All proceeds will go towards the filmmaker’s surgery fund and an urgently needed lung operation. Additionally, IFC will be donating an additional 50% of the box towards the fund as well as 100% of all income from membership sales and renewals purchased that evening. I’ve posted about Maringouin’s situation previously, and, with days left, the fund still needs monies to reach its $60,000 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 30, 2012 -
Kubrick’s One-Point Perspective
From Kogonada is this supercut of scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s films showing his fondness for symmetrically composed wide shots. Check it out, and follow the comments thread at the Vimeo link, where the conversation continues. (Hat tip: Text of Light.) Kubrick // One-Point Perspective from kogonada on Vimeo.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 30, 2012 -
OTHER PEOPLE TURNS 100
Congratulations to Brad Listi’s Other People podcast, which reached a centenary today with a big get: author George Saunders. If you read the print edition of Filmmaker, you will have heard about the podcast as I featured it in our Super 8 a while back. (My blurb is embedded here — Brad, thanks for the scan!) Other People is a twice-a-week podcast in which Listi interviews authors about… well, just about anything. Their books are discussed, of course, but also their biographies, their writing processes, their child-raising habits, their obsessions, their quirks… It’s always a deeply human conversation, and the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 29, 2012 -
Laura Poitras’s Spy Theater
There was a spooky feeling at the Whitney Biennial one Friday night this past April. Visitors to Laura Poitras’s “Surveillance Teach-In” were forcibly detained as they tried to enter the museum, while downstairs a masked man handed out leaflets with lists of addresses (NSA listening posts?), sinister in their nondescription. Slides flashed, of the anonymous desert buildings that house the servers that index our every email, phone call, transaction. And on the dais, an odd couple riffing one acronym after another: “NSA, NARIS, AES….” Hacker Jacob Appelbaum, black clad, with earrings, played something of a straight man, even as the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2012 -
MUSIC VIDEO: “A FAKE HELLO”
Factory 25 maestro Matt Grady appears here in his other guise as music video director with this witty clip for the band Young Fresh Fellows. The video features director Onur Tukel and actress Jennifer Prediger and shows you how much mileage you can get from a simple prop — in this case, a smiley-face flat-screen TV.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 21, 2012 -
Independent Film Success: Luck or Merit?
Two of my favorite economics bloggers — Felix Salmon at Reuters and Joshua Brown at The Reformed Broker — are debating a new work by a third writer, Black Swan‘s Nassim Taleb, that has something to say to independent filmmakers. To bring their dialogue into our world: has the DIY revolution led to a system in which luck is the primary determinant of independent film success? Let’s start at the beginning. The work referenced — “Why It is No Longer a Good Idea to Be in The Investment Industry” — opens with a new term, “the spurious tail,” that refers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2012
