The Financial Times reports on a new anti-piracy and filesharing proposal being endorsed by President Nicholas Sarkozy. An excerpt from the piece by Ben Hall: Internet users in France who download music and films without paying for them could find their web access shut down by a government body, under a ground-breaking industry agreement backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy. The plan, which Mr Sarkozy is to endorse in a speech on Friday, will put France at the forefront of the battle against internet piracy with a three-strikes-and-you-are-out policy against repeat offenders. The proposed enforcement body would use information collected by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 23, 2007Everyone here at Filmmaker wishes our readers a happy and safe Thanksgiving. Thanks for reading us this past year and see you after the holiday.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 22, 2007According to Mike Jones at Variety‘s “The Circuit,”, it was animals engaging in inappropriate behavior. Click on the link to find Mike’s first videoblog, a report from the halls of the recent American Film Market in Santa Monica.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 18, 2007If you’ve been following the WGA strike, you’ve probably realized that a lot of people on the WGA side are blogging it. There is, of course, United Hollywood, a blog that reports from the WGA side. But there are also several blogs run by active screenwriters. One is John August’s blog where the veteran screenwriter (Go, Big Fish, Charlies Angels) is offering a very personal view of life on the picket line. His daily reports are full of humor, well-crafted observation, and even bits of industry news. Here’s an excerpt of his November 15 entry in which he describes meeting […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 16, 2007If you’ve attended a screening of Frownland (and a couple are coming up this week at MOMA), then you know that writer/director Ronnie Bronstein does a mean Q&A. Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg realized this too and cast Bronstein as the private investigator protagonist of his new web series, Butterknife. It’s being presented by Spout, and there’s a blog and trailer up now. (The series launches in January.) Here’s how Spout describes the project: Forced to deal with the ugly side of people and relationships all day, an unnamed private investigator can’t wait to get home and hang […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 15, 2007At her Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikke Finke says “everyone in Hollywood is talking about” this YouTube video put together by the folks at United Hollywood.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 13, 2007In a post entitled ‘Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s Image,” Netscape founder Marc Andreessen wonders whether the current WGA strike will alienate the current television viewing audience and hasten their flight towards new forms of mostly internet-distributed entertainment. (Thanks to Ted Hope for the link.) From the piece: I think the TV and movie industry is at a turning point where things could go either way — they could repeat the critical error of the music industry and permanently alienate their customer base; or they could get it together and create viable models for the future that make consumers happy […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 12, 2007The mumblecore-haters may be out in force these days but, hey, it’s not like they got a word into the New Oxford American Dictionary. As reported on the Oxford University Press blog, “mumblecore” is a runner-up 2007 “word of the year.” The OAD defines mumblecore as: “an independent film movement featuring low-budget production, non-professional actors, and largely improvised dialogue.” As a word, mumblecore faced stiffed competition. Some of its challengers included “upcycling” (“the transformation of waste materials into something more useful or valuable”); “previvor” (” a person who has not been diagnosed with a form of cancer but has survived […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 12, 2007Because it’s laid out at the bottom of the home page, you may have missed Rak Razam’s interview with French director Jan Kounen. Razam’s was a fascinating over-the-transom submission that explains what the talented Gallic director has been up to the last few years. I first came across Kounen’s filmmaking many years ago when I saw his short Vibraboy. A friend and aesthetic colleague of directors like Gaspar Noe and Marc Caro, Kounen attracted international buzz with the film and then went on to make a hyperviolent and stylish crime movie, Dobermann, that starred Vincent Cassell and Monica Bellucci. The […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 12, 2007Bruce McDonald’s new film The Tracey Fragments played at the AFI Fest this week, but if you missed it, don’t worry — you can make your own version of the film. The film stars Ellen Page and is described as “a 21st century Catcher in the Rye told in a dizzying pop-art fashion.” The film is also edited in a multi-frame format, and the filmmakers have employed this aesthetic concept coupled with open-source generosity to come up with a unique promotional tool. As one of the three editors of the film, Matt Hannam, wrote in an email, “As the movie […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 11, 2007