Authors — Scott Macaulay

SECURE POSITION

Women in Film and General Motors have launched Traction, a new website “for and ‘by’ women in the industry.” There’s already a ton of stuff on the site, including a great interview with Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce by filmmaker Kirby Dick, a blog by the “Two Kids in the Balcony” (Jessica Silver-Greenberg and AJ Strasser), and a column entitled “The Virtual Mentor” which offers industry advice. In its debut, Film Finances Senior V.P. Marion Spiegelman discusses the process of bonding a picture.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007
TAGGED

Over at his increasingly essential Workbook Project, Lance weiler posts an audio podcast with Bomb It director Jon Reiss. I liked Reiss’s film, which starts off as a straightforward doc on the origins of urban graffitti art and then, as it globetrots to five countries, subtly morphs into a compelling essay on the changing nature of public space. Hear what Reiss has to say at the link above.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007
THE NBC/iTUNES SKIRMISH

Louis Hau has a solid piece in Forbes on the current skirmish between GE/NBC/Universal and Apple’s iTunes. If you’re not up on it, NBC has notified Aplle that it will no longer sell its television shows over the iTunes store. (It has also announced its own streaming and download site, Hulu.) Hau notes that NBC’s notice of termination occurs while negotiations are continuing and that, in the end, a deal may be worked out even as the network’s long-term strategy may be away from the pay-to-download model: Apple wants as much video content as it can get to continue driving […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007
SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT

I want to thank David Lowery for contributing the great interview with Ronnie Bronstein that’s up on the main page right now. I love Bronstein’s film Frownland and am really happy to be hosting a special screening of it with director Lodge Kerrigan at the IFC Center next Wednesday at 7:30 pm. Lowery is right when he calls Frownland “one of the most confrontational and uncompromising visions to emerge from the American independent scene in recent memory,” and I hope that a lot of you come to this special edition of Filmmaker‘s series at the IFC. Here’s a taste of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 30, 2007
SOFT VOICES

For all the talk this past week about mumblecore — what it is and how these films are similar — it should also be noted how different the aesthetics of its various directors are. A case in point is this week’s opening at the IFC Center, Quiet City, directed by Aaron Katz, which boasts some of the trademarks of the genre — 20-something protagonists, a focus on transitory lifestates, relationship issues, an extreme naturalism — but which also has its own very distinct sensibility that’s quite different from some of the genre’s other filmmakers. As its title suggests, the film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 29, 2007
SHIT HAPPENS

Police Beat writer Charles Mudede pens a curious ode to Stanley Kubrick in Seattle’s The Stranger. After opening by saying that Kubrick’s contempt for mankind was “deep,” he moves on to a fuller explication of his worldview: “I’m in a world of shit,” says Private Joker at the end of Kubrick’s unremittingly dark Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket. That is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation. In Kubrick’s movies, progress, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 25, 2007
WHAT WOULD THE COMMUNITY THINK?

Over at his blog, filmmaker A. J. Schnack thinks about the whole mumblecore thing with tons of links to all of this week’s NYC press coverage and more (including the filmmaker’s own piece on Swanberg and DIY distribution in February, 2006). Schnack, a doc maker, considers the phenomenon and takes the right lessons away from it: And perhaps the biggest thing that we should learn from these filmmakers is that we can and should work together. And I mean that literally. Although the doc community is a pretty tight-knit bunch, we should continue to find ways of collaboration, on screen […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2007
WE ARE CURIOUS… AND YELLOW

Our friends at MySpace have just launched their new Film page. It’s wider, with more features and info, and Filmmaker has even more real estate on it. And over on the Filmmaker MySpace site, we’ve changed our color scheme, away from our undeniably impressive but eye-straining backdrop of past covers to a stylish yellow/orange. The MySpace site will have more on it in the days ahead, but, for now, here’s something I found: a clip from Lynch, the doc on David Lynch Nick Dawson wrote about in a posting below.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2007
WELCOME TO THE BLOGOSPHERE, MIKE!

Filmmaker‘s former Managing Editor, Mike Jones, who is also a working screenwriter and director, has been tapped by Variety to head their new film festival blog and online section. Welcome, Mike, to the blogosphere and look forward to seeing you on the fest circuit this fall!
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2007
I’M NOT THERE RELEASE DATE AND TRAILER

I’ll admit that it initially seemed a little weird when news broke that Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There would be opening on two screens at the Film Forum and also at Lincoln Plaza in late November. Decently budgeted (reportedly $13.5 million) and starring Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and others, it hardly, as this piece by John Anderson in The New York Times points out, seems a likely candidate for a small arthouse opening. But, it is a Todd Haynes film and the Film Forum is a great venue that carries cultural weight. I think, then, in the end […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 21, 2007

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