Authors — Scott Macaulay

WHAT ARE THE INDIE NUMBERS?

“Everything is over 6” — meaning budgeted millions — “or under 1,” a producer friend says. “There are no 3s.” “Everything’s 3 now,” an agent counters in an unrelated conversation. “3 is the new ‘6 – 8.’” “1 – 3 is impossible — it’s the union/non-union no-man’s land,” I paraphrase another producing friend. Meanwhile, more than one financier says to me, “1.2 is the number.” How to keep it all straight?
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2009
MIRANDA JULY AT THE RUBIN (AND THE CHELSEA)

In addition to a spectacular weekend of New York City movie-viewing opportunities, which Michael Tully has thoughtfully laid out for you at Hammer to Nail, the writer/director/artist/performer Miranda July will be participating in the second annual Brainwave Festival at the Rubin Museum in Chelsea. July will be joining a line-up that includes Paul Simon, Lewis Black, Darren Aronofsky, Eric Fischl, Mario Battali, Tom Wolfe and Laurie Anderson. The various talks and presentations all, according to the website, deal with “intersection of mind and matter” and many pair artists with neuroscientists. July’s event, which takes place Saturday, March 7, at 6pm, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2009
DIGITAL CLOUDBUSTING

If you believe in the trend presaged by this week’s rumble between Facebook and Twitter (briefly, after failing to buy the microblogging service, Facebook is redesigning its home page to incorporate more of the immediate news and info-streaming features that Twitter has made popular), then we are moving towards an always-on, always-connected social reality. We will no longer “log on” or “check our email.” Bytes of data will be like air, a digital cloud the intake of which we won’t really think about. Of the Facebook change, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says, “As people share more, the timeline gets filled in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2009
MICHEL GONDRY ON THE INTERNET’S STRANGE CREVICES

There’s a superb interview with Michel Gondry by Nick Bradshaw up on The Guardian’s film page. It’s great because what starts off as a straightforward dialogue about Gondry’s judging of a short online film competition for Babelgum riffs off into a wide-ranging discourse on the problems with contests, censorship vs. self-censorship, the siren call of the web’s dark places, the challenges involved in music video creation, and why his short Rubik’s cube videos got him more props from Kevin Spacey than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. An excerpt: I think you should be able to censor yourself. If you […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 3, 2009
PANASONIC’S NEW 24P-HD STILL/VIDEO CAMERA

Via the PrepShootPost blog comes news of the Panasonic new Lumix DMC-GH1, which is the latest in the new still cameras that have great video recording capabilities. From the blog’s Eric Escobar: Pretty awesome next generation HDSLR hybrid still/ video camera from Panasonic (f’ yeah Panasonic!). Shoots 1080P/24 and 720P/60, if it’s priced like it’s predecessor expect it to be for around US$1200 with a standard zoom lens. And it’s got way more options for manual controls in video mode than the Canon or the Nikon. Click to his blog post for an update with a few relevant details (like […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 3, 2009
A PIRATE IN THE COURTROOM

Via Boing Boing comes this info-age definition of chutzpah: one of the owners of P2P site The Pirate Bay, currently on trial in Stockholm for “complicity to making copyrighted material accessible,” fixed a server problem on the site remotely from the courtroom by using his laptop while his lawyer was making arguments. From the post: Thepiratebay.org was down during the best part of Monday, which had a good deal of file-sharing folks worried that the website might be down for good this time. Thankfully for them, he had his trusty laptop at hand and could restart the server remotely, so […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 3, 2009
IGGY POP’S HOUELLEBECQIAN DOG LOVE

Via Pitchfork comes this unexpected but delightful news that Iggy Pop is making an album of New Orleans-styled jazz songs inspired by the French writer Michel Houellebecq’s quite excellent latest novel, The Possibility of an Island. Entitled Preliminaires, the album is an outgrowth of a songs Pop made for a documentary about the French author’s making of his novel into a film. Pop has made a wonderful video trailer for the album, which can be seen here. From Pitchfork: A bulletin sent out via the Stooges’ MySpace page says that Preliminaires is “NOT a rock album, more jazzy stuff.” In […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 2, 2009
PANOPTICON-LAND!!!

Greg Mottola’s forthcoming Adventureland is set in a slightly run-down 1980s Pennsylvania amusement park, and, as this link demonstrates, amusement parks have come a long way in 25 years. In a creepy application of the surveillance state, visitors of U.K.’s Alton Towers have the opportunity of paying extra to have themselves recorded during their day on the various rides by the park’s surveillance cameras. The park developed software capable of tracking each of its wristband-wearing visitors and then dumping footage of them onto a DVD that’s available when it’s time to go. From the amusement park’s site: What did we […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 1, 2009
WHICH PART OF THE MOVIE INDUSTRY ARE YOU IN? (WRITERS CLICK HERE)

Citing the uptick in theatrical box-office receipts led by hits like Gran Torino, Taken and Coraline, there have been a number of articles recently on the movies and the recession. Like this one in the New York Times. The upshot: in depressing times, people flock to escapist, cost-effective fun at their local cineplex. One can of course pick apart this thesis — in fact, David Poland just has — but most people in the movie biz prefer to cling to the reductive takeaway that our business is recession proof. However, as this post on screenwriter and director John August’s blog […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 1, 2009
TOMORROW’S AD MODELS TODAY AT CINEQUEST

Over in our Festival Ambassador section, Jason Guerrasio reports from Cinequest, where he sat in on an interesting panel discussion entitled “The Marriage of Television and the Internet.” In the piece Jason relays comments from reps of Intel and Move Networks from subjects like Hulu and emerging internet ad models, but he also reports on an independent filmmaker who is making real money online where others have failed. From the piece: One filmmaker during the Q&A pointed out his success on the Web. Christopher Cannucciari, who has is debut feature premiering at Cinequest, New Brooklyn, talked how his Web series, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 1, 2009

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