Over at The Hot Button,, David Poland, while discussing Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, throws out some industry analysis that feels pretty dead on and which is the kind of thinking that a lot of first-time filmmakers I encounter don’t really understand when they talk about the value of their film: The new small distributors are trying a new model. 12-16 movies a year. Nothing too big. $15 million is the top. Nothing too small. A $1 million or $2 million pick-up is possible… but only if the film looks like $8 million or more. Cover most of the money […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2006Neil Young’s new album.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2006The Tribeca Film Festival is throwing NYC’s normally dense exhibition signal-to-noise ratio way out of whack this week, but one film you should definitely not miss that’s opening today is Robinson Devor’s Police Beat. It was one of our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award nominees last year, and it was also a critical highlight of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Distilling influences ranging from Alain Resnais to Rick Linklater to Jim Jarmusch, Police Beat is an utterly gorgeous portrait of lovesickness set against the psychic turmoil that is post 9/11 American life. A Muslim-American […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2006For those of you who are members of Filmmaker‘s MySpace page, click over to your in-boxes. I’ve just posted a bulletin with invites to a free MySpace Tribeca secret screening of two films. One I’ve seen and it’s really great, and the other is a doc on a subject that can’t go wrong.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2006Mary Jordan’s Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, which premiered Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a real triumph — a great doc on an artist that manages to encapsulate the spirit and values of its subject while situating his work historically and testifying to his influence on the generations that followed him. Jack Smith was an artist, photographer, filmmaker and performance artist who achieved a blast of notoriety in the early ’60s when his experimental film Flaming Creatures was dubbed obscene and banned in various states and countries. But as Jordan details in her film, Smith […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2006Over at his blog, Anthony Kaufman is blogging about developments in Net Neutrality:: Yesterday, a Republican-dominated House committee shot down an amendment put forth by a Massachusetts Democrat that would have prohibited broadband providers (such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) from blocking or degrading Internet connections to websites that they may deem as competitors. “Net Neutrality” has suffered a major setback… If you don’t think this affects your livelihood and freedom as artists, consider this similar to the Showtime/Smithsonian deal: It’s all about privatizing and monetizing institutions and archives (be they physical or digital) that should be free and equal […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2006For those worried about the announcement a few weeks back that New York ran out of money for its successful film tax rebate program, here’s an email from Pat Kaufman that arrived in my inbox this morning: The legislature has approved the Governor’s recommended expansion of the film credit!! We are pleased to confirm that funding for the NY State’s Production tax credit has been expanded and extended through 2011. New York State will continue to offer a fully refundable tax credit of 10% of the below the line budget of qualified feature films, episodic television and pilots. The city […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2006Warner Independent has just launched a very cool website for A Scanner Darkly, in which you the viewer are placed within the surveillance culture Linklater’s film dissects.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2006Indiewire has posted the writers and directors participating in the Sundance June Labs. Here’s the list and the descriptions of the projects: “A Breath Away”/Kit Hui (writer/director), U.S.A./ChinaAs a typhoon approaches Hong Kong, the residents of a high-rise apartment explore their need for human connection, family, and cultural identity in their increasingly isolated worlds.Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kit Hui immigrated to the United States at age 16. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program. Her short film “Missing” screened at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and she was recently […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2006A few posts below I linked to a short video clip that is something of a primer on Net Neutrality. Here, via Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly begins what in this post is the grad school version — read up ’cause you’ll be tested on this tomorrow. First off , Drum offers a long discussion of the problems inherent in the Barton-Rush bill currently working its way through Congress. Drum starts off a little bit dubious that the issue is as big as some are saying, but he works his way through the pros and cons. He starts by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 25, 2006