Just below I linked to The Hollywood Reporter about the movie industry’s slow awakening to the impact on the Justice Department’s 2257 regulations on both studio and independent production. There’s a bunch of articles on the web this morning about H.R. 3132, the Children’s Safety Act, which passed the House and, if it gets through the Judiciary Committee and passes the Senate, will expand the onerous recordkeeping requirements of the 2257 in alarming ways. A number of the articles are on legal and cyber blogs. Here’s a piece on BoingBoing that details the consequences, and it includes PDF links to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 13, 2005When designer Tom Ford left Gucci a while back, he seemed to sink into a mid-life crisis with a series or morosely reflective interviews and then talked about going into the film business, becoming a director. It’s been a couple of years and no film is on the horizon, but Ford has just teamed with photographer Steven Klein, whose recent photos consciously draw upon the visual tropes of film narrative, to take off his clothes and do a W portfolio timed around the release of a makeup line for Estee Lauder. Style.com has a preview in which Ford, who, from […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 13, 2005Ray Pride posted this link to the new videoblog by the makers of the indie film Four-Eyed Monsters (which, given how hard I’ve been trying to get a screener DVD from the filmmakers, must be the hardest-to-see film of all this year’s hard-to-see pics without distribution). While I wait… and wait for a screener, I’ll content myself with the videoblog, the first clip of which is a totally charming ode to being a broke filmmaker without a deal.
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 12, 2005… about the article by Stephen Beachy in this week’s New York which argues that author and sometime Filmmaker contributor J.T. Leroy is actually not a young former teen hustler turned novelist but rather a 39-year-old mother from Brooklyn. To see what Leroy himself might have to say about the piece, I clicked over to his site and found the photograph, at right, on his homepage with the caption “The J.T. Leroy’s hard at work on the next novel.” An admission of truth or an ironic riposte? You decide…
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 12, 2005Back in July I posted this blog about the Federal Government’s new “2257” regulations and wondered why the independent film community, which can mobilize armies at the withdrawal of promotional screeners, has had so little to say about this bill which, while targeting the adult entertainment industry, looks to spread quite a bit of collateral damage. A week later I posted again after some readers added their own comments to the end of my original article. Now, today, finally, I read in The Hollywood Reporter a piece by Brooks Bollek which describes a ‘buried clause” in the regulation that could […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 12, 2005I haven’t been posting much recently due to an overall work crunch — the putting to bed of the new Fall issue of Filmmaker, and two new films my company is producing both going into production. Hopefully I’ll get back into the blogging swing of things in the next few days, but I couldn’t help posting this piece in Variety about Paul Dinello’s film Strangers with Candy. According to the trade, Warner Independent is not releasing the film, which was slated to open October 21, “out of concern that the producers didn’t secure all the needed rights, including for such […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 11, 2005Seattle filmmaker David Russo, one of Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” has begun work on his debut feature, #2, with the support of the Northwest Film Forum and it’s “Start to Finish” grant. The grant was previously awarded to Robinson Devore’s Police Beat, which was one of the best features to premiere at Sundance this past year. Russo’s award-winning shorts include “Populi” and “Pan with Us.” Russo calls the movie “a janitor movie par excellance, designed to be wildly entertaining as it is meaningful. It’s about some hardworking, invisible misfits at the waste end of our wasteful society […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 27, 2005One of my favorite artist/photographer/music video directors, Floria Sigismondi, has massively updated her website with news of her forthcoming photography book, Immune (click through the opening image to get to photos from the book), as well as streamed versions of many of her videos, including her recent clip for The White Stripe’s “Blue Orchid.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2005The Boston Globe ran today this obituary for experimental filmmaker, documentarian, and teacher Mark LaPore, who died September 11 in Boston. LaPore’s newest film (pictured at right), Kolkata, will premiere next week at the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant Garde.” From the piece: “Mark McElhatten, cocurator of the Views from the Avant-Garde program of the New York Film Festival, described Mr. LaPore’s films as ”unique, a form of visual anthropology but equally about the mystery of being and film as consciousness. These uncompromising films have enormous integrity and deserve a very important place within the entire history […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2005Filmmaker Cruz Angeles emailed about the website of Planet Ibsen, a film by his NYU-colleague Jonathan Wyche. And with so many American indies rehashing the same old family dramas or quirky tales of teen angst, I had to take special note of this film, which is a historical fantasia about the rivalry between August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen. From the website: “Planet Ibsen is an extreme adaptation of A Doll’s House play, written in 1879 by Henrik Ibsen. The story is told from the perspective of Ibsen’s real-life antagonist, August Strindberg, who never met Ibsen, but yet he publicly blamed […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2005