Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: David Lynch and Mark Frost’s On the Air
Following the warm reception of Twin Peaks (1990-1991), ABC commissioned a little seen follow-up from Lynch/Frost Productions in 1992 called On the Air. The series was a characteristically off-kilter sitcom about a ’50s television network struggling to rejuvenate their variety spot, The Lester Guy Show. What sounds like a quixotic collision of Network and 30 Rock instead turned out to be an unmitigated disaster: ABC put the ax on On the Air after only three episodes. Still, as cult followings are want to do, the series attracted a cluster of devotees when it screened in its entirety in the UK and Australia. The first (and only) season is now available on YouTube, […]
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Watch: How to Pull Off a Dolly Zoom Timelapse
Here’s a compact instructional video from Eric Stemen, who demonstrates how to pull off a dolly zoom timelapse using some basic gear and software. A dolly zoom timelapse allows for both accelerated views of changing light and some impressive distortions of space; it’s an effect that’s very showy and always gets attention. Stemen’s short video walks you through the surprisingly relatively process of pulling off this expensive-looking trick. Hat tip to our friends at No Film School for spotlighting this video.
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Watch: Lauren Bacall Remembers John Huston on Johnny Carson, 1987
In 1987, the late Lauren Bacall paid her last of five visits to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She had two recently completed movies to talk up, but in the first interview segment above, the actress and host don’t get around to lesser-remembered titles Appointment with Death and Mr. North. Instead, they focused on Katharine Hepburn’s recently published memoir The Making of The African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, with Bacall telling stories about her time on the set. The clip’s given new resonance today by an […]
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Watch: The First Footage Shot with the Blackmagic URSA
In his dispatches from NAB this year, Joey Daoud noted the 4K Blackmagic URSA as one of the conference’s big announcements: URSA’s ergonomics definitely look more like a traditional ENG camera than Blackmagic’s Production cameras, but it’s got some interesting twists. First off the flip out monitor is huge – about the size of an iPad. It’s also got two touchscreens on both sides of the camera to change settings, check image, pull up scopes and monitor levels. Today our friends at No Film School drew our attention to the first publicly shared footage shot with the URSA, though note […]
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Trailer Watch: See You Next Tuesday
“A real treat, a genuine discovery, a whirling dervish of a movie, some kind of roiling central-Brooklyn freak show, a film so searing with rip-your-throat-out and spit-on-your-grave anger, the indignity of mental illness, the messiness of race in this fast-gentrifying strip of American near-coastal land that it seems to have a pulse all its own; it feels alive in the ways only superior works of art can.” That’s Filmmaker‘s Brandon Harris on Drew Tobia’s See You Next Tuesday, a film that has multiple fans here at the magazine. There’s me, for one — I was on the jury at Indie […]
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Short Film Teaser: Peacock Killer, Directed by Boyd Holbrook
Actor and director Boyd Holbrook has been raising funds on Indiegogo to complete his short film Peacock Killer, which is based on a short story by Sam Shepard. He’s just released a new teaser trailer, which suggests an epic sweep. Check it out and, if it intrigues you, consider donating to Holbrook’s campaign. (Oh, and read our profile of Holbrook when we selected him for last year’s 25 New Faces list.)
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Watch: A 33-Minute Dustin Hoffman Interview from 1975
Today is Dustin Hoffman’s 77th birthday, as good an opportunity as any to post this 33-minute interview from 1975. Conducted with patient professionalism and minimal intrusiveness by veteran interviewer Michael Parkinson, the conversation starts with lots of long pauses and deadpan stares from Hoffman, who claims his real name is Clare Boothe Luce. Loosening up, he deadpans that his “first fantasy was to be a sex symbol film star,” discusses how he drew upon his high school fear of buying “male prophylactics” for the scene in The Graduate when Benjamin Braddock nervously checks into a hotel, recounts his first sexual […]
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Trailer Watch: Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery
Wiseman’s At Berkeley was a favorite of mine last year, and I’m just as eager for his follow-up, a three hour rumination on London’s National Gallery. Here’s our first look at the documentary, en route to TIFF and likely NYFF after its Cannes premiere, which covers the visiting public, the curators, the staff and, of course, the art, with Wiseman’s characteristic brand of watchful analysis. It’s all faintly reminiscent of the Bruegel room conversation in Museum Hours, in the best possible way. Watch above.
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Trailer Watch: The Fix
Fresh out of AFI Docs is Laura Naylor’s The Fix, a character-based documentary about Bronx-based IV drug users with Hepatitis C who organize to fight this epidemic. The film screens in New York September 5 at 6:00 PM at Lehman College’s Lovinger Theater in a screening organized by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and the Public Health Program at Lehman College. It is free and open to the public.
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Trailer Watch: The Theory of Everything
The life of Steven Hawking is given what looks like a gauzy, romantic approach in this trailer for The Theory of Everything, directed by Man on Wire‘s James Marsh. Eddie Redmayne stars as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his love, Jane Wilde. The film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival and is in theaters November 7 from Focus Features.
