Authors — Scott Macaulay

BACK IN THE DAYS

Kudos to Indiewire for nabbing the text of Dan Talbot’s engagingly long-winded speech at last week’s Gotham Awards. Personally, I found Talbot’s trip down memory lane kind of a blast, sitting as I was before the teleprompter which kept flashing “Please wrap it up!” Anyway, for notes on how it used to be in NYC art film exhibition, click on the above.
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2004
MANOHLA TALKS BACK

I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying tremendously Manohla Dargis’s film writing in the New York Times, particularly the more freewheeling attitude that runs through her pieces. Her Godard interview of a few weeks back was brilliantly edited. Leaving in his intellectual japes and her bemused ripostes — bits that might have been edited out in the hands of another Times critic — both made the piece entertaining and indicative of Godard’s entire enterprise. In today’s Times, Dargis steps in front of her byline to frankly answer questions from readers. (Registration required.) In response the various queries she raves […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2004
SUPER CRITICAL

I haven’t seen The Incredibles yet, but when I do I’ll be parsing its politics like some sort of Frankfurt School flunky because of a number of conversations I’ve been drawn into recently about the film. My brother calls it the best animated movie he’s seen, but at my Gotham Awards table the other night, a publicist and editor attacked it for what they read as its regressive politics. For a sort of Incredibles study guide, check out this piece in The Guardian’s newsblog that deftly summarizes the various critiques of Brad Bird’s Pixar creation. The piece begins by evoking […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2004
PAIN, SUFFERING AND THE AMERICAN WAY

Producer, screenwriter and co-president of Focus Features James Schamus penned this sharp essay in In These Times on one short-term goal progressive citizens can rally around during their post-election blues: oppose the nomination of White House Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General. Schamus explains: The mainstream media uses the word “torture” to describe those (hundreds of) documented cases of “isolated” incidents, performed by those “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. When it comes to the pervasive use of torture at Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray and scores of other secret military prisons around the globe, the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 7, 2004
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE WORK

I always admire those who are able to lay either their professional and personal lives out online for all to see. One person who does this when it comes to his independent film producing is Muse Production’s Chris Hanley, who has made an entertaining habit of posting on his website copies of business emails he’s received under the apt header of “Scathing Letters.” For a while the letters sections was filled with angry back-and-forths from folks like Vincent Gallo and Don Murphy over older Muse projects, but Hanley has updated the site recently with two choice bits of correspondence, both […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2004
LUCKY STARS

Producer Matthew Greenfield, whose credits include Miguel Arteta’s features Star Maps, Chuck and Buck, The Good Girl and this year’s Sundance-bound The Motel recently became the Associate Director of the Feature Film Program at Sundance Institute, but he emailed the other day to tell us about his new non-film venture. He and writer Laurence Dumortier have launched Cloverfield Press, “a boutique publishing house dedicated to bringing new literary and artistic voices to a discerning public.” Graphic design is an important component of the press’s mission statement: “We hope to create books as visually beautiful as they are intellectually and emotionally […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2004
THE THERAPY OF FILMMAKING

Essential NYC weblog The Gothamist has posted this interview with actor, former therapist and filmmaker Robert Margolis. It’s part of the site’s series of pieces on interesting New Yorkers who aren’t necessarily household names but whose life and work reflect deeply on the city we at Filmmaker live and work in. Margolis’s latest film is a “faux documentary following the trials and tribulations of the fictional Robert Margolis, an actor, a pretty bad one at that, living on the fringe, trying to balance the demands and practicalities of every day life with his dream of becoming a successful actor.” From […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2004
CITY SLICKER

Chicago-based critic Ray Pride has appeared many times in Filmmaker‘s pages, but now readers can catch a daily — or, if the first week’s posts are any indication, near-hourly — dose of Pride in his new Movie City Indie blog up at the ever-growing web empire that is Movie City News. Pride’s links-scouting is already impeccable. So far he’s posted links regarding the firing of Buenos Aires Film Festival head Edgardo (Quintin) Antin, Robert Altman directing an opera based on The Wedding, Isabelle Huppert on making a new Cimino film based on an Andre Malraux novel, and Alexander Payne on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2004
HIGH ON HI-DEF

David Poland’s Moviecity News links to this interesting interview with Mark Cuban in Business 2.0 in which the Broadcast.com, 2929, and HDNet founder (and Dallas Mavericks owner) concisely lays out his long-term vision as a digital distributor and content supplier. It’s a good read as it clearly lays out in one short article the thinking that informs Cuban’s business ventures, which include the producer of low-budget indie HD films, HDNet. Cuban disparages the DVD format (he believes they’ll be replaced by higher quality presentations delivered via satellite and broadband and stored on hard drives) and, in one great quote, dismisses […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2004
THIS DVD WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN…

In a blog entry below we reported on “window-busting” release of Chazz Palminteri’s film Noel, which will appear in theaters, on cable and on DVD all within the same month. It’s part of a marketing strategy designed to score Noel some ink in the press — perhaps to divert attention away from the reviews, which Rotten Tomatoes scores only 18% positive. In our entry we were intrigued by the release strategy, but the folks at The Movie Blog linked to this USA Today piece which describes it in more critical terms. Some of the comments in the piece, like the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 15, 2004

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