Now that the drama is over about whether the Academy would disqualify Andrea Riseborough for her rules-skirting DIY Oscar campaign for To Leslie, we can now return to the question every indie filmmaker wants to know. Just how do you run a DIY Oscar campaign on an indie film that grossed less than $30,000? I don’t know exactly how she did it, but I can tell you how I did it with my recent Watergate thriller/comedy 18½ that grossed about the same (though with slightly different results). In short, the road to getting an Oscar nomination (much less an award) […]

Some set their calendars by January’s Sundance, which like clockwork kicks off each new year of indie releases. For me, these 11 intense days of nonstop screenings are a rich bounty that takes time to digest. Ergo my slow coverage, below. Usually I manage to see about 30 of the 120 features Sundance typically selects. This has always worked out to a quarter of the program. What are the odds someone else saw the exact same combination? My dictum for years now has been that no two people see the same Sundance. Even the most diligent reviewers and audience members […]

Delaware County, New York. Never heard of it? Makes sense. It’s a large county in the Catskills region of New York with a rich agricultural history of farming—there are more cows than people. There are also the most idyllic rolling hills, beautiful, lush green valleys, adorable Main Streets and a wealth of true architectural gems. With a low cost of living compared to other areas in the region and state and production friendly municipalities, this a county that has enjoyed a recent explosion in production and the county is eager to bring in more. Excited by the economic impact of […]

Over the past eight years, Jon Bois has become a key pioneer of documentaries made for the internet. As the creative director of Secret Base, the YouTube channel of sports blog network SB Nation, his work across three series—Pretty Good, Chart Party and now Dorktown, co-written by Alex Rubenstein—takes often unconventional and lesser-known sports stories as a jumping-off point for increasingly ambitious, deftly handled portraits of some of Americana’s most crucial mainstays. By focusing equally on the minutiae of statistics, the highs and lows of a game and the many human dramas within sports teams and the cities surrounding them, Bois and Rubenstein establish […]

Is Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, in fact, a mystery? It certainly presents as one at its beginning, when a group of unlikely friends, whom we will come to know as “the shitheads,” are whisked away to the private island of billionaire-bro Miles Bron (Edward Norton). As Daniel Craig’s returning sleuth Benoit Blanc points out, “You’ve taken seven people, each of whom has a real-life reason to wish you harm, gathered them together on a remote island and placed the idea of your murder in their heads.” So far, so trad. The film’s setting isn’t as familiar […]

A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to secure funding for writer-director Cambria Matlow’s narrative short Why Dig When You Can Pluck, starring Sol Marina Crespo as a mother and filmmaker who does some soul searching on a family vacation. The Kickstarter will run from February 28 through March 23 as part of the platform’s month-long specialty program Long Story Short. Matlow’s goal is to raise $22,000 for production and distribution costs.  “Why Dig When You Can Pluck is my first narrative film after years spent making documentaries and I couldn’t be more excited to share this with the filmmaking community,” […]