Authors — Scott Macaulay
-
Win Tickets to Hear Steven Soderbergh and Sam Esmail at this Weekend’s Future of Storytelling Festival
A conversation with Steven Soderbergh and a screening of the season three premiere of Mr. Robot followed by a talk with creator Sam Esmail are just two highlights of the Future of Storytelling Festival, to be held this weekend, October 6 – 8, at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, New York. In a discussion moderated by Elvis Mitchell, Soderbergh will talk about his overall career as well as Mosaic, the new interactive project he’s making with HBO. In addition to Esmail, there are comedy performances, music events, and panels on truth in the age of digital journalism […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 2, 2017 -
Interactive Storytelling in Eko Studio’s The Garage Sale
From the folks at Eko Studio, director J.M. Logan (The Disunited States of America) and writer Molly Hagan comes a new interactive film for the web, The Garage Sale. It’s about three couples who descend on a suburban garage sale with different aspirations and behaviorsl the film, viewable through a web browser, allows viewers to live-switch through their different stories. “The viewer is able to navigate between stories to get a different perspective, learn new information, and follow which of the couples they are most curious about,” says the press release. “While their choices will not impact the final outcome […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 30, 2017 -
Ten Films and a Retrospective to Catch at the 55th New York Film Festival
Filmmaker‘s usual “films we’re anticipating” preview — opinions gleaned from early buzz or just pure enthusiasm — doesn’t work for the New York Film Festival. Always a collection of the best films from the prior months’ festival circuit, with a few world premieres thrown in, this year finds the latter — outside of the opening (Rick Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, reviewed here) and closing nights — in shorter supply. (The pluses and minuses of the festival’s curatorial approach receive a solid debate over at Indiewire morning.) That means we’ve seen a large swatch of this year’s selection, and the below […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 28, 2017 -
Butler/Eno’s Thom Pain, Lynn Sachs’s Tip of My Tongue, Abel Ferrara Tribute and More: Indie Memphis Announces its 2017 Festival
On the eve of its 20th anniversary, the Indie Memphis Film Festival, presented by Duncan-Williams, has announced its 2017 selection, which spans world premieres, a recut indie gem and a special salute to Abel Ferrara. Oliver Butler and Will Eno’s adaptation of Eno’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, Thom Pain, kicks off Opening Night. Starring Rainn Wilson, it’s a film version of Eno’s monologue filmed at the Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse. Lynne Sachs’s Tip of My Tongue, which collects the reflections of a group of the filmmaker’s contemporaries on the occasion of her 50th birthday, is the closing night film. As for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 27, 2017 -
Kimberly Peirce, Natasha Lyonne, Lena Dunham and More Talk Therapy with Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks
Disclosure: I’ve never done therapy, although it has certainly been suggested over the years. Any recent therapy-curiosity was tempered by watching a couple of episodes of the Naomi Watts/Netflix series Gypsy, which made seeing a therapist seem like being the unwitting subject of a Sophie Calle art piece. Offering a point-of-view both more optimistic and realistic is, timed to National Therapy Day, a set of six new shorts from directors Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks in which five women and one man discuss their various experiences in therapy. Director Kimberly Peirce talks about an experience in couples therapy, author Susan […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2017 -
A DIY Feature with a Crew of One: Jamie Stuart Trailers A Motion Selfie
Filmmaker readers have long known the work of Jamie Stuart, whose inventive, deadpan dissections of film festival customs and rituals as well as elegantly lensed interviews graced our (web) pages for years. If you haven’t seen his byline around here much recently, there’s a good reason for that: he’s been making a feature. And now you can see some of it. A Motion Selfie is Stuart’s long-form debut, and he wrote, directed, starred, shot, scored, edited, color corrected…. well, you get the idea. Yes, A Motion Selfie is as DIY as you can get, with Stuart literally being his own […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2017 -
Enabling What is to Come: IFP Previews its 2017 IFP Week
“Film” — what’s in a word? It’s still the first half of Filmmaker, even as our new logo design nods to the ways in which this term’s meaning is continually mutating and no longer fixed in celluloid. But, as Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP (Filmmaker’s publisher) and the Made in NY Media Center notes, it’s been dropped this year from the name of IFP’s signature event, which begins today through September 21 in Brooklyn. Over the last several years “Independent Film Week” has shortened to “IFP Film Week” to, now, simply, “IFP Week.” That’s because, as Vicente says, “the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 16, 2017 -
End Note
It was more than 25 years ago when James Schamus called and asked me to be the coeditor of The Off-Hollywood Report, IFP’s magazine, which he’d just been hired to edit. The pay was $600 an issue, and I moonlighted from my full-time job curating performance art at New York’s The Kitchen, while James also produced movies. After a few issues, Good Machine, James’s company with Ted Hope, took off, and I became the editor. A couple of issues after that, the IFP and IFP West — now Film Independent, our former copublisher — met up at Sundance and decided […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
It’s a Small World: Sean Baker on The Florida Project, Shooting 35mm and Going Union
I experience a bit of a disconnect when setting up my interview with Sean Baker about his indelible new feature about childhood, The Florida Project. The publicist tells me to meet Baker at the storied Stonewall Inn, where, before me, Baker will be doing an interview about the iPhone. It takes me a second to piece that together, but then I get it — Baker’s last film, Tangerine, starred trans actors and was shot on the iPhone, which marks its 10th anniversary this September. Baker, I guess correctly, is being interviewed for some tech website’s history of the transformative tech […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
Editor’s Letter
Welcome to this, the 100th issue and 25th anniversary of Filmmaker. As you can tell, we used the birthday celebration to make a few changes around here, starting with our logo and design. We also threw out several of our usual columns and features to make way for content from some of our most valued friends and contributors, who were asked to ruminate on the present moment by considering their journey through the past. More on all of that in a second, but, first, allow me to just take a moment to marvel at the fact that, a quarter century […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017
