Authors — Scott Macaulay
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"25 NEW FACES" PICKS THE NEISTAT BROTHERS SELL SERIES TO HBO
Casey and Van Neistat, who Filmmaker picked as part of our 2006 “25 New Faces” selections of up-and-coming talent, have had their independently produced autobiographical series bought by HBO. According to Variety, which reported the story, the series is exec produced by Tom Scott, founder of the Nantucket Nectars juice company as well as the Plum TV network. In the Filmmaker piece, Matt Ross detailed the brothers’ early career, the full text of which can be found at the link: The Neistats began making films in 2000 with the purchase of two iMac DVs, and their early projects involved reworking […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2009 -
SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT
Arms locked together, smiles frozen in place awaiting the digital flash — we all have these photos on our cameras and phones when we return from a film festival. These moments sure look like happy ones now that a festival premiere has spackled over all the fractures that production wrought. At SXSW this year, however, one group tried to summon up smiles that were a bit more sincere in intent. Operation Smile is a non-profit organization that provides cleft-lip and palate repair to children and young adults around the world, many in developing countries. Reps from the organization manned a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2009 -
SXSW FIRST PERSON: THE EYES OF ME DIRECTOR KEITH MAITLAND
A couple of weeks before the festival, Filmmaker reached out to directors with films in the festival to offer them space to recount the making and mission of their movies. Below is a response we received from Keith Maitland, whose documentary, The Eyes of Me, premieres at the festival today. How do they see the movie, if they can’t see at all? The Eyes of Me follows four blind teens over the course of one dynamic year at the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, TX. I didn’t know much about blind people before I decided to dive into […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2009 -
Creative Nonfiction’s Lena Dunham By Alicia Van Couvering
There is an actual college Creative Nonfiction class in Lena Dunham’s Creative Nonfiction, which premieres in the Emerging Visions section at SXSW this week. There is also the actual Dunham, who plays both Ella, a college student trying to get a grip on an ambiguous non-starter romance, as well as the heroine in the 16mm-filmed representation of the John Waters/fairy-tale screenplay Ella is writing. Dunham wrote the script, about her own real-life ill fated dorm-room non-romance when she couldn’t concentrate on her own fairy tale/John Waters script, which she was completing for writing class. In Creative Nonfiction we meet this […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2009 -
@SXSW: FREE IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR…
Long Tail author and Wired editor Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, isn’t out until June, but SXSW attendees got a taste at Anderson’s closing keynote at this year’s interactive conference. By now, many are familiar with the gist of Anderson’s argument, which is that the internet drives the marginal cost of digital goods to zero, which means that the price of these goods also is driven down to zero. “Free is the animal force of digital economics,” Anderson said. Furthermore, he said, “If you have not made your product free, piracy will do it for you.” However, that doesn’t mean […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2009 -
@SXSW: RICK LINKLATER AND TODD HAYNES IN CONVERSATION
Two filmmakers born out of the early ‘80s independent film movement, Todd Haynes and Rick Linklater, shared a casual, free-flowing conversation that ranged from New Queer Cinema to Tarkovsky to strategies for staying creatively alive at SXSW on Tuesday. There was no stated theme, so Linklater briefly discussed the genesis of his Me and Orson Welles, Haynes talked a bit about I’m Not There, but mostly they just shared common experiences of being directors having had early success in what now seems like the boom era of independent moviemaking. Of the New Queer Cinema, Haynes said, “Because I lived in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2009 -
SWANBERG… KRIS SWANBERG
Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last is not the only Swanberg film here at SXSW. His wife Kris’s movie, It Was Great, But I Was Ready To Come Home, premieres at the festival too. Pictured above at last night’s Florida Fish Fry, from left to right, are Alexander the Last star Amy Seimetz, Swanberg, and Three Blind Mice director Matthew Newton.
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2009 -
@SXSW: I PROMISE WE WON’T TELL…
At Scott Kirsner’s SXSW panel on digital downloads and vanishing physical media, he urged his panel members, who included Matt Dentler of Cinetic, Steve Savage of New Video, Rick Allen of Snag Films, and directors Gary Hustwit and Morgan Spurlock to spill the deep dish about digital downloads. Just what are the deal terms at the various outlets and what are the size of the checks filmmakers are receiving? “C’mon,” he said, “there are no journalists here. Nobody’s going to tell.” Not everybody took the bait, but Hustwit and Spurlock were both quite candid. Hustwit said that the digital sales, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2009 -
@SXSW: BEST WORST MOVIE
The most unlikely act of cultural excavation and redemption, Michael Paul Stephenson’s Best Worst Movie is a hilarious and poignant celebration of not only the communal experience of making and watching movies but the sheer randomness of life itself. The doc is Stephenson’s attempt to find out why a seemingly execrable B-movie he made as a child actor, Troll 2, has garnered a cult following of viewers who not only get off on its badness but also find an odd kind of joy in its screwy storytelling. While Stephenson is present in the film, he smartly chooses as the doc’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2009 -
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The goal in any festival director transition: to maintain the quality of a festival and begin to put one’s personal stamp on it while not slowing its momentum or dampening its good will. Mid-way through SXSW, I’d say that for new director Janet Pierson, pictured here at the BMI dinner, that mission has been handily accomplished. Attendance is up; audience reaction to a good number of films is positive; the panels are informational and packed; there’s the requisite fanboy buzz from the opening night I Love You, Man plus today’s sneak of some of the Bruno footage; and there are […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2009
