Authors — Scott Macaulay

VERHOEVEN FROM ACROSS THE COUCH

Hot off the servers, here’s Jamie Stuart’s not-to-be-missed newest creation which again blurs genres (here between the short film, the TV entertainment magazine show and the celebrity interview) to, this time, particularly mind-warping effect. Director Paul Verhoeven has fried a lot of brains in his cinematic lifetime, and his new film, Black Book, is being considered as one of his best. To interview him, Stuart put away his knit cap and one-ups the master of free-floating perversity by handing the reigns to a chirpy and obscenely animated E!-style news chick. Check it out by clicking here.
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007
BROWN BAGGING IT

The Times of London runs a sobering story from a Hollywood producer who can’t get a film made. In “Will I Ever Eat Lunch in This Town Again?” “Mr. X” discusses the travails of producing movies within the system. Here’s how he begins: Ostensibly, I produce movies for a living. The most recent movie I had a hand in producing won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. The reality, though, is slightly less fulfilling. We shot that film two years ago and, since then, I’ve produced nothing. Zilch. Not a frame of film, a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007
DON’T JUDGE THE MOVIE BY ITS POSTER

After earning the ire of both the MPAA and alarmed motorists with its unapproved billboard campaign for the upcoming Elisha Cuthbert torture pic Captivity, After Dark Releasing is preparing to court further controversy with its campaign for Wristcutters, a very good film that deals, in part, with suicide. Here’s Gregg Goldstein in The Hollywood Reporter: Fifteen suicide prevention groups are dead set against After Dark Films’ proposed campaign for the comedy Wristcutters: A Love Story, which is set to bill itself with signs showing people killing themselves. After Dark Films co-owner Courtney Solomon said late Friday that while the film’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007
MORE GRINDHOUSE

Below, Nick Dawson tells us about 11 new Grindhouse clips online. While he was posting that, I was reading some of the early word on the film. Jeffrey Wells is mixed on the Rodriguez, but he really digs the Tarantino: Take away the car-chase finale and the Tarantino flick is almost all sublime, groovy-chick dialogue. This is Tarantino amblin’ country, all right — a place where very cool people (i.e., ’70s “street” archetypes) talk and talk and say it just right while sipping a Corona or smoking a Red Apple cigarette or eating a Big Kahuna burger. And yet Death […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007
SUNSHINE IN THE FALL

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, a sci-fi epic starring Cillian Murphy and scripted by novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach) doesn’t open here until the fall, but it premieres in the U.K. on April 7 and the early press has me really excited. Here’s Mark Kermode in The Guardian: Shot not in Hollywood but in the 3 Mills studios in London’s East End, Sunshine boasts extraordinary computer graphic imagery so luminescent you feel you could get sunburn just watching the film. As a sensory experience, it’s overwhelming. But perhaps more importantly, Sunshine also harks back to a time when sci-fi turned […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007
WE’RE NOT DRUG DEALERS

At his CinemaTech blog, Scott Kirsner reports on the speakers at yesterday’s Future of Film Conference in L.A. Along with various business types discussing new media platforms like Joost, the speakers included a director, Jason Kohn, who discussed his Sundance hit, Manda Bala: He wants to shoot movies on film, and have them seen in theaters. With his documentary, which focuses on corruption and kidnapping in Brazil, “I was reacting against the future of film. The future of film at the time was video, and I thought the future sucked. So I decided to change the future.” He said he […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2007
THE SILVERBERG SHELVES

Hey, check out this article in Bookforum I just came across profiling an old friend, Ira Silverberg. I first met Ira years ago when I was the Programming Director of The Kitchen. At various times a literary publicist, head of Grove Press and agent (now at Donadio and Olson), Ira would pitch — and I would program — readings by people like Mary Gaitskill, Kathy Acker and Joel Rose. After a few of these I suggested he cut out the middleman (me) and become the curator of a new Kitchen literary series, a program he directed for several years. Elizabeth […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2007
KEEPING IT SIMPLE

Finally… this blog has an RSS feed. That little symbol next to our logo above… use it to click through to an RSS page. Or search for Filmmaker magazine on your RSS reader. Or simply cut and paste this code — https://filmmakermagazine.com/blog/sitefeed/atom.xml — and receive this blog on your RSS delivery system of choice.
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2007
WHAT’S IN A SCREEN NAME?

There’s an interesting thread going on over at Jeffrey Welles’s Hollywood Elsewhere. Welles has been talking up Mike Binder’s upcoming Adam Sandler-9/11 pic Reign on Me, and a recent posting linking to Anthony Lane’s positive review has turned into a war between the talkbackers (one, Scooterzzz, in particular), and director Binder, who is replying on the site. Binder has challenged Scooterzzz to post his real name and to email Binder his address so Binder can refund him his admission; Scooterzzz says it was a press screening and that it’s impossible to compensate him for the lost two hours of his […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2007
A POWER MAC USER

Since I posted about the political ad mash-up that composites Hilary Clinton into Ridley Scott’s celebrated “1984” Apple Macintosh ad on March 5, the YouTube clip has gone from hundreds of views to hundreds of thousands of views, becoming a media sensation in the process. Keith Olberman has devoted a couple of spots to it, and various pundits have attempted to figure out the identity of the creator. Today, on the Huffington Post, the author of the work reveals himself. Here’s Arianna on the whole affair,”, and here’s Phil de Vellis, aka ParkRidge47, the originator of the spot. An excerpt […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2007

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