Authors — Scott Macaulay
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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 -
Indie Film is Alive
“It’s going be called ‘Indie Film is Dead,’” I remember Ted Hope saying to me back in 1995. He was referring to an article he was submitting for that fall’s magazine, a many-thousand-word takedown of the business practices and internalized logic of the specialty film business. Hope, a prolific producer who had worked with Ang Lee and Hal Hartley, was a frequent contributor to Filmmaker in our early days, writing pieces like one on how to interview a production designer or another on the job of the production manager. But this piece would be different. Here’s the lede: “The marketplace […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
In the Realm of the Possible: Hal Hartley on Restoring His Early Films and Working in Television
I interviewed Hal Hartley for Filmmaker‘s 25th anniversary issue this past Fall and am posting this piece online today as Hartley is in the final days of a Kickstarter to fund the release of the very films discussed here. If you’re a fan of this paradigmatic indie director please consider supporting! — SM I catch Hal Hartley — whose third feature, Simple Men, was Filmmaker’s very first cover back in 1992 — as he’s spending the day creating bonus features for new DVD and Blu-ray box sets of the three films in his “Henry Fool Trilogy.” As international distribution licenses […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
The Art of It All
Art and film share an essential trait: They are both about what the artist, or filmmaker, chooses to put in the frame. There are multiple frames — literal but also metaphoric ones — in the latest feature from Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund, his deviously sardonic The Square. The literal one is a 4-by-4 meter white-chalked box drawn on the grounds of the public space outside the film’s barely fictional X-Royal Museum. Within the frame of the film, the general public is invited to enter this work of conceptual art whenever they are in need of help — aid that passersby […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017
