Authors — Scott Macaulay

VARIETY REPORTS ON AXIUM BANKRUPTCY

Variety has posted its story on the Axium bankruptcy, which we wrote about in the blog post below. Their story has a couple of quotes from affected parties — a director, Charles Matthau, who says he is owed $75,000 of his director’s fee on an indie film, and a production executive who comments on the loss of the long-term accounting and record-keeping functions of Axium’s software. Earlier in the day I talked with an indie distributor who used Axium to pay SAG and DGA residuals on the company’s DVD releases. The DGA had called him and told him to cancel […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 8, 2008
BREAKING NEWS: AXIUM PAYROLL SHUTS DOWN

In a sudden and stunning piece of news that’s just breaking within the film production comunity, Axium, one of the industry’s largest payroll services and a leader in the administration of state tax incentives for independent producers, is closing and will be filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In a Chapter 7 corporate bankruptcy, a company ceases its operations and its assets are liquidated to its creditors and investors by a court-appointed trustee. We will try to have more details, including news of what will happen to current productions that have their payroll with Axium, soon. UPDATE, 7:00PM: News on Axium’s closing […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 8, 2008
DAVID LYNCH ON THE iPHONE
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2008
A WHOLE LOT OF GREEN

Filmmaker, performer and musician Brent Green, one of Filmmaker‘s 2005 25 New Faces of Independent Film, sent an email with all of the exhibitions and performances he’s planned for the next couple of months. If you haven’t seen his intense and theatrical live performances, in which he collaborates with musicians for a live score and, in the process, comes up with a different model of independent film exhibition, I highly recommend you check one of them out. A recent performance clip is embedded below, and here’s the email: On Jan. 11th I’ll be screening all of my films with live […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2008
STRIKE SEQUEL-ITIS

Thom Taylor’s opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times about the possible lasting effects of the WGA strike is worth a read, even if he’s perhaps a bit more optimistic than I’d be about the ease by which striking writers are going to slot into new entreprenenial positions as web content creators. But his historical recap of the previous strike and his foreshadowing of media marketplace churn feels right. From the piece: The transition to making money from the new paradigm will naturally take time. Right now, anybody with a computer connection can create an overnight sensation on YouTube — […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2008
L.A. DEPARTED

The tour de force blog posting of the day is playwright and television creator Jon Robin Baitz’s second half of his “Leaving Los Angeles” essay on the Huffington Post. This part two deals with Baitz’s final feelings about the city he’s worked in the past few years (he compares L.A. to Johannesburg in the ’70s), his romantic life, youth culture, the WGA strike, identifying oneself as an artist while working in TV, and the struggle to create a show that reflects and not obfuscates the realities of life in America right now. (Part one, which details some of the details […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 6, 2008
POULTRY POWER

The below was posted on Filmmaker‘s Facebook page by John Fiege, director of the documentary Mississippi Chicken, which was one of our five “Best Film Not Playing Near You” Gotham Award nominees this year. As it’s a general call for support, I’m taking the liberty of posting it here. It’s the holiday season, and in the spirit of Christmas a major poultry company fired one of MPOWER’s board members in what appears to be a retaliatory action for his active involvement in fighting several cases of race discrimination at the plant. MPOWER is the workers’ center that was in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 5, 2008
BINARY CODE

Over at the Invisible Cinema blog, Jennifer MacMillan starts the new year with a list challenging the binary oppositions that too often inappropriately frame the relationship between narrative film and experimental film. And, um, I guess with that last sentence I fell into the sloppy thinking she critiques. Witness point number four: “To say that an experimental video is ‘non-narrative’ is like saying that Henry Ford’s invention of the T-model automobile was a non-horse & carriage buggy! Or it’s like saying that Rimbaud wrote non-novels. Grouping all short films together is misunderstanding cinema.” And here’s #2, on the year-phenomenon of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 5, 2008
MICHAEL MOORE COMMENTS ON IOWA

If you’re a Democrat in Iowa — or if you’re just a Democrat who, like many, are still trying to make a decision about who to support in ’08 — Michael Moore has collected his thoughts in a letter posted on his blog. He’s not endorsing anyone yet, but he does offer some cogent commentary on current candidates.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 2, 2008
CONNECTION TO HER FANS

The new issue of Filmmaker, which we just sent to the printer, has author Jonathan Safran Foer interviewing Michel Gondry about his new feature, Be Kind Rewind. They talk a lot about invention, DIY artmaking, and artists who gaze horizontally at their audiences… all of which are echoed in Gondry’s new Bjork video, just released today, for her single “Declare Independence.” Check it out below.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 2, 2008

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