Authors — Scott Macaulay

47 SHORT FILMS ABOUT CANNES

You could read all the blogs, all the coverage… or you might just watch the 47 delightful micro-shorts that Red Bucket Films (Go Get Some Rosemary filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie and colleague Alex Kalman) made while attending the Cannes Film Festival this year. By way of introduction, they write, “With these small observations from a place and time where most of the humanity exists on a screen in a dark room, we (Alex, Benny and Josh) thought we’d find comfort in our pocket sized cameras. The little bits of people, moments, absurdity, glamor, humor and mistakes are for our […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 31, 2009
WRITE YOUR BUSINESS PLAN FOR THE FUTURE, NOT THE PAST

On his 401st Blow blog, Noah Harlan unfurls a lengthy and detailed (charts and all!) post entitled “This is the Right Time to Make Movies.”. He’s not referring to creative issues, like the wealth of things in the world that contemporary filmmakers can be reacting to or be inspired by, but rather the evolving media economy and how viewer trends, monetization potential, and distribution efficiencies may make this moment a good one for sharp-eyed movie investors. I particularly liked these two paragraphs: In a business plan for a traditional company you will have sections that deal with barriers to entry […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 31, 2009
WHAT IF EMAIL WERE INVENTED TODAY?

That’s the question two developers from Google, Lars and Jens Rasumussen (creators of Google Maps) asked themselves, and their answer is Google Wave, the one-hour, twenty-minute demo of which is generating talk all over the web. The first 38 minutes are the meat of the demo, and if you want to see the near-future of web communication, check it out. In brief, Wave is an open source protocol that rolls email, chat, blog publishing, forums, photo sharing, wiki contributing and document collaboration into a single “shared object” that is accessed through the browser. Blogger Andy Wibbels says “Google Wave completely […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 30, 2009
FILMMAKING AS LIFE MANAGEMENT

Ted Hope gave a talk at the New York Foundation for the Arts that ties together a lot of things he’s been talking about at his Truly Free Film blog. The section up front that pulls together some statistics about the state of our arthouse cinema is pretty sobering. I won’t summarize it here — just go to the link to read it — but I especially liked a paragraph near the end in which he urges people to get out of the single-picture mindset and to see their activites as a film artist as part of a continuum of […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 29, 2009
MAN OR EVERYMAN?

In Bookforum, novelist Richard Ford discusses his method for writing his acclaimed “Frank Bascombe” trilogy of novels, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. Along the way he references some useful theories about art, literature and character creation. An excerpt: To my mind, and faithful to Frost, these three Frank Bascombe novels, along with everything else I’ve ever written, have been largely born out of fortuity. First, I fortuitously decided I wanted to write a book. I then collected a lot of seemingly random and what seemed like significant things out of the world, things I wanted […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 29, 2009
SHOOT THE HARMONICA PLAYER

The music, the make-up… I dunno. Maybe it’s time for Abel Ferrara to retire his vendetta against producer Ed Pressman and director Werner Herzog for their remake/reboot/Southern-gumbo-laced reimagining of Bad Lieutenant. Or maybe it’s just a lousy showreel cut to make the film seem more generic to foreign buyers than it really is. You decide.
by Scott Macaulay on May 27, 2009
A TRIP TO THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL’S ATELIER

Producer Noah Harlan posted earlier on this blog about his first few days in Cannes attending the Atelier with Jake Mahaffy’s Free in Deed, and his report below, cross-posted at his own 401st Blow blog, is a great intro to the world of co-production finance for U.S. indie producers. Read it and take notes. I’ve been attending the Cannes Film Festival for nearly 10 years now (which, admittedly, makes me a Johnny-Come-Lately) and each experience of the week on the Croisette takes on it’s own qualities. Where you are staying, what you are trying to accomplish (premiering, selling, financing), the […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 26, 2009
TALKING GODARD AND HERZOG WITH SASHA GREY

The Girlfriend Experience star Sasha Grey continues her march through the jungles of mainstream media with this Current TV piece in which she lists her five favorite movies. Hey, given that she’s using her promo time to promote Werner Herzog and Catherine Breillat, it’s totally cool with us. Read my interview with Grey here.
by Scott Macaulay on May 26, 2009
THE 62 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL WINNERS

Having taken the train from Cannes early this morning to Paris, I’m now watching the closing night ceremony on television following a few stressful moments in which it appeared that our cable might be out. But, Canal + is on, the Steadicam follows Jan Kounen and his closing night film Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky star Anna Mouglalis into the Palais, and the awards begin…. Best Short goes to Joao Salaviza’s Arena. Isabelle Adjani presents the Camera d’Or, given to the Best First Feature, to Australian director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah. (A special mention was given to Ajami.) Andrea […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 24, 2009
CANNES SNAPSHOTS: TARANTINO, NOE, HANEKE

A lack of wireless, fatigue, and my dislike of netbooks (particularly the kind in the American Pavilion) have curtailed my Cannes posting. I have no idea how Eric Kohn, Matt Dentler, Allison Willmore and the trade reviewers get their well considered reviews up so quickly after their screenings. That said, I’ll try to have my thoughts on the handful of films I saw up when I get back to Paris tomorrow. Very quickly, though, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void is disquieting and dreamy, as much a psychologically charged immersive space as it is a conventional film narrative. Noe’s decadent Tokyo […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 23, 2009

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