Authors — Scott Macaulay

CRITICAL BLIND SPOT

It’s a cliche to say that independent films are “critic-driven,” that they rely on good reviews to combat Hollywood-size P&A budgets and succeed in the marketplace. And while Filmmaker doesn’t run reviews per se, it’s true that a kind of “critical sensibility” informs our editorial decisions. At the same time, we do try to cover what’s going on in the independent scene, so that sometimes means that a film we’re not crazy about shows up in our pages. But I, Filmmaker, and most every other member of the so-called critical establishment have missed the boat entirely on a trio of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2005
YOU ASHCROFT!

If the Argentinian newspaper The Post can be believed, creators of “airline versions” of R and PG-rated movies have a new word replacement for a common epithet. In what is, if true, an oddly hilarious example of subversive political commentary, the word “asshole” as uttered in Alexander Payne’s Sideways was replaced in actor Thomas Haden Church’s airline dubbing with “Ashcroft.” The paper’s Montel Reel says he heard the word twice in Church’s dialogue while on an Aerolineas Argentinas flight to Lima, Peru. The Arizona Central, which picked up the story, says calls to Fox Searchlight, which distributed the picture, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2005
ARGENTO, GLOVER AND MORE…

The New York Underground Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 2005 edition that runs from March 9 – 15 at the Anthology Film Archives. The festival is bookended by films you’ve read about in the magazine or on this blog by filmmakers we are big fans of. Asia Argento opens the festival with her J.T. Leroy adaptation, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and the festival is closed with Crispin Hellion Glover’s What Is It?, which premiered at midnight at Sundance this year. Check out these movies and all the interesting stuff in between! .
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 3, 2005
IN SEARCH OF SEKA

The smart and charmingly edited Fleshbot — part of the Gawker empire, a reliable source for Paris Hilton T-mobile hack links, and truly the only “adult” Web site you need to bookmark — notes today the “porn star documentary craze” and links to a doc produced by the Swedish Grindhouse pictures that tracks down the legendary ’70s pornstar Seka. Titled Desperately Seeking Seka, the pic details a trio of Swedish filmmakers trying to locate and interview perhaps the biggest female porn star of the 1970s. While I wasn’t aware that Seka had pulled a Betty Page-like disappearing act, the filmmakers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 2, 2005
OSCAR WINNERS LIVE LONGER… WITH ONE EXCEPTION

From an interesting article in Forbes.com: “Later [today], when Clint Eastwood faces off against Martin Scorsese in the battle for the Academy Award for best director, they could be fighting over much more than a gold statue. Life itself could be at stake. A study by a University of Toronto physician suggests that winning an Oscar can extend a director’s life-span dramatically. In fact, Oscar-winning directors live about two years longer than those who were just nominated, the result of a 24% decrease in the risk of death over their lifetimes. Those with multiple wins saw their average risk of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2005
SPIRITS GO SIDEWAYS

The 2005 Independent Spirit Awards were announced this afternoon at the IFP Los Angeles’s annual ceremony on the beach in Santa Monica. For the major awards, it was a virtual sweep by Sideways — Alexander Payne’s smart comedy won six prizes. Other winners, listed below, include Garden State, The Motorcycle Diaries, Mean Creek, the filmmaker Jem Cohen, the producer Gina Kwon, and doc filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman. Here are the winners: Best PictureSideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures) Producer: Michael London Best Director Alexander Payne Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures) Best Screenplay Alexander Payne & Jim TaylorSideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures) Best […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 26, 2005
ONE SMALL STEP…

I attend the Rotterdam Film Festival every year, and I’ve taken that step many times… up a few inches from the street to the plaza that the Pathe theater complex is on. And now this architectural fillip is celebrated at MOMA and reviewed in the New York Times. From the review by Nicolai Ouroussoff of the exhibition “Groundswell,” an architectural survey of “two decades of landscape design”: “…the most innovative may be the Schouwburgplein (1996) in Rotterdam, a plaza by West 8 Urban Design and Landscape that draws inspiration from the eeriness of the city’s industrial waterfront. The plaza’s surface, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2005
“ROSEBUD WORKS!”

The folks at Cinemaminima pointed to this fascinating clip on Errol Morris’s website. It’s from one of Morris’s “aborted projects,” series or films that for whatever reason didn’t make it off the ground. In the Quicktime stream, Donald Trump discusses Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, riffing on the lessons the film has to impart on wealth, accumulation and happiness. As Morris does, Trump becomes a poignant, contradictory and very human ambassador from the director’s now readily identifiable universe of oddball dreamers and schemers. Check out the clip for some fascinating viewing, and click back to the page in the future. Morris […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2005
A SCANNER DARKLY IMAGES AND NEWS…

If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning, you’ll know that I’m really looking forward to Rick Linklater’s adaptation of one of Philip K. Dick’s best books, A Scanner Darkly. The folks at Ain’t It Cool News (which, frankly, kicked all of our asses when it comes to online coverage of Sundance) have some exclusive pics from the movie up, and now ifilm has posted a seriously cool trailer as well. To top it off, a simple Google search revealed this interesting “making of” A Scanner Darkly blog which seems to contain posts from various people involved in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 22, 2005
MONDAY MORNING WITH KENT JONES

It’s Monday morning and I’ll allow myself one posting based on the a.m.’s quick scan of what’s out there on the web. The choices? Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile pager records and phone book… or perhaps, this engaging interview with our friend, the author, critic and programmer Kent Jones. appearing in Gothamist. From the piece: “I mean, I really, really hate TV — the commercials, the ‘hand-held’ camera, the music, the personalities of the newscasters. I’ve given things like Six Feet Under and The Sopranos a try, and I see their merits but they seem like canned art to me — stuff […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 21, 2005

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