Authors — Scott Macaulay

FLAMING OUT

Last year director and d.p. Patryk Rebisz wrote in Filmmaker about making his short film Between You and Me entirely with a still camera in burst mode. He just emailed about his next project, a lovely music video for the band Plus/Minus in which he uses the same way of shooting and 170 burning Polaroids to capture the emotions of a crumbling relationship. Here’s the rough cut of “Let’s Build a Fire.”
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 12, 2006
GOING MOBILE

Click here for the press conference in with Robert Redford announced a new partnership between the Sundance Institute and the GSM Association to commission six filmmakers to create short films for the mobile platform. From a piece by James Allan Miller in Smart Phone Today: Six filmmakers have been commissioned by the GSM Association and the Sundance Institute to create five short short films just for mobile handsets. The purpose of what’s called the Sundance Film Festival: Global Short Film Project is to extend independent filmmaking to what the institute’s president and founder Robert Redford refers to as “the ‘fourth […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 11, 2006
GOT MILK?

Via Defamer, the following report sent it by one of its readers: “David Lynch RIGHT NOW is sitting on the corner of Hollywood and La Brea with a cow on a leash and a picture of Laura Dern that says For Your Consideration. He also has a sign that says “without cows there would be no cheese in the Inland Empire”. This is one of those things that a person needs to see. I wish I wasn’t chained to a desk.” And here, via YouTube, is a live view from video bloggers. Nate and Matt:
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 10, 2006
FUR FLIES

If you link to this blog and bypass the main page, I just want to point you to Peter Bowen’s excellent interview with director Steve Shainberg, whose Fur opens today. An excerpt: Filmmaker: You didn’t want to make the film look like Arbus’s work, but you also cast Nicole Kidman, who doesn’t look like Arbus. Why Kidman? Shainberg: Whenever I see a biopic, no matter how much the person looks like the person they are playing, it just looks like a bad high school play to me. There is no way that Will Smith is going to look like Muhammad […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 10, 2006
CLIPS 4 SALE

If your browser is working correctly, you’ve got Travis Bickle reciting his famous “Are you talking to me” speech from Taxi Driver on the screen below. And have I lifted his copywritten content off of YouTube to add some zest to the blog? No, using the Screenbites Channel of the Grouper website I’ve legally placed this clip — and an ad for the film’s DVD — on the blog along with a feature that allows you to upload your own rendition of the DeNiro monologue. Scott Kirsner (who picked the far friendlier Groundhogs Day for his own demo) explains over […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2006
Taxi Driver: Are You Talking To Me?

Taxi Driver: Are You Talking To Me? View on Grouper.com Add to Blogger Blog Add a video comment to this video
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2006
THE WAY WE WERE

In a post entitled “It Was All So Simple Then,” Mark K-Punk explores “the reality of nostaliga” in a typically wide-ranging essay that skips from Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Freud, Thomas Hardy, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Way We Were, Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, Roxy Music, Marvin Hamlisch, Blade Runner, Samuel Beckett, the Wu Tang Clan and Charlie Kaufman. From the opening: The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2006
HOLLYWOOD 2.0

Like we do with our 25 New Faces feature, which spotlights very emerging writing, directing, acting and below-the-line talent, the Hollywood Reporter has just come out with its own list, a survey of industry execs moving up the Hollywood ladder. (These round-ups are always fun pieces that people actually take very, very seriously. I once met a Hollywood exec who half-boasted, half-apologized that he was one of only two people in some magazine’s years ago profile of up-and-coming folks who didn’t go on to run a studio or agency.) Anyway, the editors at THR have picked 35 people for their […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 8, 2006
YOUTUBE, VIRAL VIDEO, AND THE ELECTIONS

Over at The Daily Reel, which has become a go-to site for the latest in viral video as well as occasional media-related political commentary (disclosure: I’m a writer for the site), there are a couple of postings up about yesterday’s election. Anthony Kaufman looks at election day improprieties, centering on YouTube clips highlighting the inadequacies of the Diebold voting machines. And Alexandra DeLyle looks at the effect of YouTube on the elections, highlighting the George Allen/”Macaca” clip and the Claire McCaskill/Michael J. Fox ad.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 8, 2006
COME AS YOU ARE

Over at Nerve, Daniel Nemet-Nejat interviews A.J. Schnack,, whose Kurt Cobain Without a Son recently played at the AFI Festival. Constructed around a series of audio recordings of Cobain conducted by journalist Michael Azerrad, the doc is a surprisingly poetic and non-didactic portrait of a reluctant rock star’s interior life. Here’s Schnack on his approach towards constructing the film: I tried to pay attention to Michael’s desires that it be unusual, not the typical cut-and-paste piece about a band. Immediately I thought what would be interesting to me is if the tapes would be the single source for the narrative, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 8, 2006

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