Authors — Scott Macaulay

INTRUSIVE ELEGANCE

At Filmmakermagazine.com, we just put up our first skyscraper ad, so we are inching out of the Dark Ages when it comes to internet advertising. Intrusive advertising is the rage now, but not the intrusive advertising of old in which window after window would take over your screen. Today’s advertisers are savvier and more creative. Take this Honda ad for its new hybrid vehicle which morphs its Vimeo page into a beautiful light show in the desert. I’m embedding the making of here, but to get the full effect go to the link above. Honda Insight – The Making of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 25, 2009
BRONSTEIN AND SAFDIE, STATESIDE AND ABROAD

Earlier I posted about the screenings of Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland and Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed this weekend in Los Angeles. As Brandon Harris noted in a blog post below, Josh Safdie and his brother Benny are premiering their new title, Go Get Some Rosemary, at Director’s Fortnight in Cannes this year. That film stars Frownland‘s director, Bronstein. So, seeing their two films back to back this weekend is something of a stateside prep for their appearance along the Croissette. Filmmaker contributor Mike Plante has just interviewed Bronstein over at his CineMad blog. Below, he talks about working […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 24, 2009
TRIBECA QUICK TAKE: GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH

Walk in a few minutes late and you’ll miss the set-up and most of the actual plot of Damien Chazelle’s lovely debut feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. Guy’s a young, handsome, somewhat taciturn jazz musician who seems to move from one short-lived romantic encounter to another while saving his real passion for his trumpet. Madeline is a pretty, shy, somewhat directionless young woman who meets Guy, is affected by him and his music, and then is abruptly cut loose as Guy’s eye wanders. And yes, that’s all in the first few minutes and told mostly without dialogue. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2009
DO FILM FESTIVALS MAKE YOU HAPPY?

Over at The New Breed, which is a section of the Workbook Project, a number of filmmakers are engaging in an interesting virtual video panel that discusses the issue of managing expections while traversing the festival circuit. There’s been a lot of talk recently about how film festivals are the new theatrical for many filmmakers whose work will not otherwise see the darkened inside of a movie theater. But is just showing your film at a festival enough? What about a deal? Or about networking? And should one worry about all of these things or simply visit festivals with an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2009
JAMES FRANCO, CLEAN UP YOUR ROOM!!!

FilmInFocus has nabbed an exclusive excerpt of The Room Before and After, a Wholphin Original Short that appears in its entirety on the new Wholphin #8, which has just been released. The concept: the same room is trashed three times by three different actors, each of whom bring their own destructive style and inner backstory to the process. Part One, excerpted here, stars James Franco, recently seen in Milk and Pineapple Express. There’s also an interview between Dave Eggers and Franco, in which Franco discusses some of his performance’s art-world inspirations. An excerpt: Wholphin: No, that was great, that was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2009
WHAT ARE THE TRENDS OF 2009?

In the current issue of Filmmaker we feature an excerpt for Scott Kirsner’s new book, Fans, Friends and Followers. Now, HDFilmTools.com has produced a conversation with Scott in which he discusses some of the macro trends affecting production, distribution and audience consumption in our business right now. Part One is here, and you can follow the links for Part Two and Part Three.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2009
CATALOGUING THE WOES OF INDIES ABROAD

In addition to all of challenging economic factors, one adversary indie film has had in the last year is the press. Gone are the puff pieces about filmmakers “making it” by gambling their mortgage on their indie film and then scoring big. Those human interest-type stories have faded away in the last year as the financing of the indie sector itself became the story. There’s not a lot new in Lauren A.E. Schuker’s Wall Street Journal piece, “Indie Films Suffer Dropoff in Rights Sales,” but when it comes to independent film foreign sales, the piece impressively catalogues all the bad […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2009
J.G. BALLARD’S WAY OF LIFE

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present. That’s J.G. Ballard from his prose poem, “What I Believe” (1984), as quoted in Mark Dery’s February essay in the L.A. Weekly on Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, the author’s memoir, currently out in the U.K. For […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2009
MICHAEL JACKSON GOES BACK IN TIME

This strange blog post is part Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, part MAD magazine, but really, it’s just an excuse for me to learn a new word: “pareidolia.” According to Wikipedia, the term “describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.” “Hoax or pareidolia?” is what Derren Brown asks about the kookily enjoyable internet meme that proposes that Michael Jackson somehow moonwalked in time back to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2009
J.G. BALLARD, 1930 – 2009

J.G. Ballard, the British writer whose long career aimed to, in his own words, graph “the psychology of the future,” died this weekend in England after a long illness. Throughout his many published works Ballard, in dispassionate, sometimes clinical prose, philosophized about the changes that technology, social changes or the decaying environment are having on our desires as well as our own conceptions of what it means to be human. His characters are typically scientists of their own disorder, cooly observing the ways in which their psychologies are being redrawn by forces they are only beginning to understand. In Ballard’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2009

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