Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Controversial Film Financier Steven Mnuchin Joins Trump Campaign as National Finance Chairman
Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs veteran and hedge fund manager who has executive produced a number of studio films, has joined the presidential campaign of Donald Trump as its National Finance Chairman. Through his Dune Capital, and later through a partnership between Dune and Ryan Kavanaugh’s now bankrupt Relativity Media, Mnuchin was involved with the financing of such films as Mad Max: Fury Road, Black Mass, Our Brand is Crisis and American Sniper. A partner in RatPac Dune Entertainment along with Brett Ratner and James Packer, Mnuchin has also been involved with the financing of many Fox and Warner films […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2016 -
Sundance Announces Eight First-Time Directors for its June Directors Lab
The Sundance Institute announced today the eight first-time feature directors selected to participate in its June Directors Lab. Over nearly a month at the Lab — a program that has mentored directors including Cary Fukunaga, Quentin Tarantino, Dee Rees and Marielle Heller — the directors will receive guidance and mentorship from an impressive list of advisors (director David Gordon Green, DP Bradford Young and editor Dylan Tichenor, to name a few), and will workshop scenes with actors and crew. This year’s filmmakers arrive in Utah with a diverse group of projects spanning topics from the Zambian space program, a mysterious […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Zachary Treitz and Kate Lyn Sheil’s Independent Civil War Drama, Men Go to Battle
Written by Zachary Treitz and Kate Lyn Sheil, and directed by Treitz, Men Go to Battle is an ambitious independent historical drama that tells the story of two quarreling brothers whose back-and-forth are interrupted by the Civil War. Here’s how the filmmakers synopsize the film, which stars Tim Morton, David Maloney and, from Spring Breakers, Rachel Korine: While most Americans predict that the Civil War will end by Christmas, Henry (Tim Morton) and Francis Mellon (David Maloney) are more concerned about braving another winter on their struggling rural Kentucky farm. The brothers have become suffocatingly close. Francis’ practical jokes become […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 3, 2016 -
Watch: Giacomo Cimini’s Science Fiction Short, The Nostalgist
Author Daniel H. Wilson, whose Roboapocalypse has been in the works for some time from Steven Spielberg, has the first adaptation of one his stories receive its online premiere today over at Wired. Embedded here, The Nostalgist is the adaptation of Wilson’s first published work of fiction, and it’s described thusly: In the futuristic city of Vanille, with properly tuned ImmerSyst Eyes & Ears the world can look and sound like a paradise. But the life of a father and his young son threatens to disintegrate when the father’s device begins to fail. Desperate to avoid facing his traumatic reality, […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 3, 2016 -
Nine Years in Nine Minutes: The Guardian’s 6×9 VR Look at Solitary Confinement
One of the most powerful pieces at Tribeca’s Storyscapes program this year was a nine-minute evocation of the experience of solitary confinement produced by The Guardian. Now available for Google Cardboard or simply viewed as a web video on The Guardian‘s site, 6×9, directed by Lindsay Poulton and Francesca Panetta, is both a masterful exploration of VR’s promise as well as a penetrating look at the corrosive psychological effects of solitary confinement. Overused in the American prison system — to say nothing of being simply inhumane — solitary confinement becomes, as 6×9 succinctly demonstrates, a form of torture. On an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 29, 2016 -
Watch: Cannes Mounts Terrorism Training on the Palais’s Red Carpet
Adding an anxious frisson to the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter reports on the city of Cannes’ terror training exercises in advance of this year’s event. From the Hollywood Reporter: With the world’s biggest film festival only a few weeks away, Cannes made a very public show of force. Last Thursday, the city on the Cote d’Azur staged a dramatic, some would say chilling, test run of what might happen if terrorists target the stars, film industry execs and thousands of fans that descend on the Croisette every year. A video of the exercise, which featured masked gunmen […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2016 -
Five Questions for 195 Lewis Director Chanelle Aponte Pearson
Winner of the euphoria Calvin Klein-sponsored “Live the Dream” grant at the 2015 IFP Gotham Awards, filmmaker Chanelle Aponte Pearson is the director of the upcoming web series, 195 Lewis, as well as the head of operations at the Brooklyn-based production company MVMT. In other words, she’s a consummate juggler, working on the business side of film while evolving her own film and web practice. With an excerpt of 195 Lewis, Pearson’s Brooklyn-set, queer polyamorous love story, having screened at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, we decided to check in with Pearson for a status update on the larger […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2016 -
Dean, Junction and Do Not Resist Top 15th Annual Tribeca Film Festival Awards
Dean, Demetri Martin’s gently comic picture about a Brooklyn illustrator unable to move on with his life following the death of his mother, won the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature today at the 15th Annual Tribeca Film Festival. Udi Aloni’s Junction 48 — a drama about a Palestinian rapper in the mixed-city of Lyd that won the Audience Prize at this year’s Berlin Festival — took home the Best International Narrative Feature Award, while Craig Atkinson’s Do Not Resist, about the increasing militarization of United States’ police forces, won the Best Feature in the World Documentary Competition. About Martin’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2016 -
Editor’s Letter
Many years ago I was invited to be the co-editor of The Off-Hollywood Report, the precursor magazine to Filmmaker, by its new editor, James Schamus. To start me off, James handed me a long-form assignment. He told me about several UCLA film school students who were skipping their thesis shorts and going straight ahead to making no-budget features while in school. I talked to a number of them, including Caveh Zahedi, whose first feature (directed with Greg Watkins), was just one of these films — A Little Stiff — and that feature appeared in our first issue. So, I’m finding […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2016 -
Parting Shot: Thomas Bidegain
In the ’90s, French screenwriter and now director Thomas Bidegain was a familiar face in the L.A. and New York film communities. He worked in distribution in L.A. for Connoisseur Films, produced independent films out of New York, and worked in Paris for distributor MK2 and production company Why Not during the years when both were eagerly scouting the latest American independent auteurs. But after writing a series of short films, Bidegain made his biggest career shift yet, moving into screenwriting as he wrote, with Jacques Audiard, the tough prison drama A Prophet. Since then he’s co-written all of Audiard’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2016
