Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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With His “Disrespectful” Remix of Pynchon’s Vineland, PTA Mastered the Art of Adaptation
Adapted Screenplay. It’s often an afterthought: an extra category on the Oscar ballot, an edge in your betting pool. Unlike the rest of the Academy, screenwriters get two shots at an award: one for original screenplay, one for adaptation. If you haven’t sacrificed your career to the cruel gods of screenwriting, “adapting” may seem less … impressive. Isn’t it easier to have a well-paved Autobahn to guide you, rather than hacking your way through virgin story wilderness? Can’t you just “cut-and-paste?” Do we need a whole other category for that? I’ll stop there before the WGA revokes my card. Every […]
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Sundance 2026 Quick Takes
While the East digs out from under feet of snow and ice, Park City is dry as a bone. Desiccated slopes encircling Main Street are gray and bare, devoid of powder or skiers. Meanwhile, Main Street, a pedestrian mall during the festival’s first weekend, is buzzier than ever, packed with Sundancers under sunny skies reveling at the festival’s last rodeo in Utah. The only precipitation in the forecast is another blizzard of great indie films. Last night’s premiere of Once Upon a Time in Harlem was the film’s first public screening ever, and it was met with two standing ovations. […]
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A Tech Writer’s Appreciation of Scott Macaulay
Scott Macaulay’s remarkable three-decade-plus tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Filmmaker, a magazine by and for indie filmmakers, coincided with momentous changes brought on by tech: the almost total supplantation of a century’s worth of film technologies—production, post-production, distribution, exhibition—by digital systems conferring high-end capabilities upon low-cost cameras and PCs, along with the birth of internet websites and online streaming. Scott, with his roaming intellect, taste for experimental theater and film, and open spirit, was the right person at the right time to captain Filmmaker magazine through these epochal transitions. I know, because my association with Filmmaker, the print magazine, and Scott […]
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Why Hedda, Roofman, and F1 Could Still Crash the Oscar Party
Today is the last day of Oscar nominations voting, which brings an end to “phase one” of campaigning. With the noms being announced next Thursday, January 22—at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. PT—there will be barely enough time to relax before things kick into full gear once again. Now, I can’t imagine being an Academy member and waiting a whole week to fill out my ballot. But unlike us pundits, most voters haven’t spent the last few months obsessively tracking dozens of movies they did not work on. Academy members are hopefully busy making other movies! I can also […]
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Reflections on Independent Film and 33 Years of Filmmaker
In 2017, for the 25th anniversary of Filmmaker, we commissioned a radical redesign and also initiated a new upfront section: Reflections. For four issues we published pieces looking back at the history of the magazine as well as ones that meditated anew on its enduring concerns, such as struggles of early career filmmakers, the changing models of independent producing, the role of print magazines in a digital culture, and the shifting definitions of the word “independent.” When our anniversary year was over, I decided to keep the section, reasoning that “reflections” didn’t have to just refer to the past; these […]
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Everything is Fine (Maybe?)
As I devoted more time and energy to the Filmmaker newsletter throughout the last decade-plus, I’d often find myself in some form of dialogue with producer, strategist and consultant Brian Newman. His invaluable Sub-genre newsletter arrives on Thursdays (now, biweekly), mine on Fridays, and, like me, he’ll often comment on the production and distribution challenges facing independent filmmakers in an increasingly commercialized, politically cautious and algorithmically-driven media landscape. So, many Fridays, I have found myself trying to add something new to Brian’s erudite musings on the topic of the week, often defaulting to just throwing him a link. But our […]
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Big Art/Little Debt/Together
I first met producer, director and non-profit executive Esther Robinson in the early aughts, when she was Film/Video Program Director at Creative Capital, a still invaluable organization that not only funds bold work but helps artists in their paths towards overall sustainability. Later, in 2006, I selected her for our 25 New Faces while she was in production on her luminous documentary A Walk Into the Sea, about her uncle, Danny Lyons, a filmmaker at Warhol’s Factory. In the years since, Robinson has been a contributor here, conducting the occasional interview but most notably writing columns that spoke uncomfortable but […]
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My Best Work as (Mostly) an Editor
When I realized I’d be laid off (via: restructuring) from the publication I’ve worked at for 11+ years, I went back through the print archives to round up work I was proud of as an interviewer and commissioning editor. It holds up better than I hoped: I came out swinging in my second print issue with what I’m reasonably sure was the first non-video, written-out English-language interview with Roberto Minervini for Stop the Pounding Heart; his next film, The Other Side, is a defining work of the decade. There’s a solid mixture of European arthouse known quantities (Arnaud Desplechin, Mia […]
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The Best Films of 2025 As Chosen By Some of Its Key Directors
As 2025 unfolded, returning to the ritual of asking filmmakers about the films that moved them feels both fragile and necessary. This exercise appears days after yet another grotesque display of interventionism in Latin America, an event so swiftly normalized that its violence dissolves into the background noise of the present. In this context, cinema—even in its most superficial, market-driven or seemingly shallow dynamics—reasserts its essence: a place of resistance, a safer space, a memory capsule. Against a futile and often despicable world, the cinema persists not because it is pure, but because it is collective, embodied, and stubbornly alive. […]
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Notable Tech Trends in 2025
Telluride is not on my annual festival calendar—too distant, too costly—and rarely I’m at Toronto, only with a film. So as a New Yorker, my personal fall awards season kicks off with the New York Film Festival. Like Telluride, it’s a non-competitive festival that showcases and celebrates the best of each year’s new crop, and it has the advantage of relying less on premieres and more on outstanding films gleaned from earlier festivals like Berlin, Cannes, and Sundance. As such, it’s a pretty good sampler of the latest trends coursing through the art and practice of cinematic expression. This year […]
