Authors — Scott Macaulay

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
THE BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL, PART ONE

A few years after its move to Potsdamer Platz, the old dead zone between East and West Berlin that’s now a somber (at least in rainy February) pedestrian mall lit by the logos of its surrounding corporate spires, the Berlin Film Festival represents a shrewdly intelligent answer to the questions surrounding film production, exhibition and distribution today. Whereas the success of most festivals boils down to the cruel calculus of distribution deals and premiering masterpieces, the Berlin Film Festival, through its accompanying Talent Campus and its various retrospective programs, embraces a kind of “film festival as film school” model. By […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2005
RETURN TO SENDER

Making its way through the blogosphere (through sites like Moviecity News) is this link to a website run by an anonymous “Manager Guy” who posts the strangest, wackiest or lamest query letters he receives online for everyone to laugh at or, hopefully, learn from. As a producer myself, I could forward Manager Guy a bunch of doozies I’ve received, but it’s not like he’s short of content. Check out his site to read pitches like this one: “‘Marriage is a great cover. Emmanuelle can’t hold a job. She is chosen to become a mail order bride to infiltrate a spy […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2005
GET OUT OF THE VECTOR!

From an email from filmmaker Garrett Scott, who premiered his smart, sometimes surreal but always penetrating doc on a U.S. Army unit deployed in Fallujah, Occupation: Dreamland (pictured) in Rotterdam, where I got snagged in my hotel room with the Sundance flu for a couple of days: “It is widely believed that the deadly global Influenza epidemic of 1918 spread across the U.S. so rapidly because of mass troop mobilization for the First World War. No one realized what sort of by product would arise from moving all those bodies into closely compressed camps. Then, move them by train to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2005
EMERGING PARTICIPATES WITH PARTICIPANT

From a press release we received today: “Emerging Pictures announced today that it will launch its Digital Cinema Network with an investment by Los Angeles-based Participant Productions. This digital cinema initiative will establish a nationwide network for the distribution and exhibition of specialty films in such venues as prestigious museums, performing arts centers, science & technology institutions, and restored movie palaces. These venues will screen independent and international films, both dramatic and nonfiction, as well as alternate content such as film festivals, dramatic performances, concerts, and other mission-appropriate programming. “Participant Productions, founded in 2004 by eBay pioneer and philanthropist, Jeff […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 7, 2005
THE LONG ARM OF LONG TAIL

Checked out the Cyan Pictures site and discovered several new postings, the most interesting of which is the announcement of Long Tail Releasing, the Manhattan-based production company’s new distribution arm. Long Tail plans to release from 15 to 25 films in its first year and gear up to the release of an astounding 250 films annually, all by economizing and compacting the costs of distribution. Writes Cyan’s Josh Newman: “Long Tail started from a simple question: what costs make up that $250,000 [the initial releasing costs of a low-budget arthouse film], and how can we drastically reduce, share or eliminate […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 7, 2005

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Cookie	Duration	Description
cfmrk_cic		Used by Cloudflare to route user traffic for this Site.
sparrow_id		Installed by Cloudflare. Used to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It does not store any personal identifiable information.

Cookie	Duration	Description
OAGEO		Installed by the Revive Ad Server. Used to cache geolocation (session, deleted when closing the browser)
OAID		Installed by the Revive Ad Server to distinguish users.