Toronto International Film Festival and Stranger than Fiction programmer Thom Powers is well known for his curation of documentary film, but with the New Year he’s offering something more: documentary film distribution guidance. For filmmakers entering the festival circuit, his “Distribution Advice for 2014” is a must read. In a detailed intro, Powers discusses various distribution options, ranging from traditional to hybrid to DIY strategies. Then, he gathers specific advice from filmmakers, journalists, producers, publicists and sales agent. Below are three of those recommendations, and check out the entire post at the link to read many more. DAN COGAN (CO-FOUNDER, […]
Fandor, the online streaming service, announced today that indie stalwart Ted Hope would make the transition from board advisor to CEO come January 30th. The appointment follows Hope’s resignation from his role as Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society last October. In December, Hope penned a highly trafficked post on his blog about how he could no longer produce films for a living. The financial imperatives driving the current film production business, he said, would force him to choose quantity over quality. Those who were left wondering what his new day job would be now have their answer. […]
I’ve been to many documentary screenings, and even to some attended by the films’ subjects. But seeing The Crash Reel with its subject, Kevin Pearce, present was one of the most riveting movie screening experiences I’ve ever had. If you haven’t read about or seen the movie, The Crash Reel follows champion snowboarder Kevin Pearce through a debilitating accident, his recovery and then his slow coming to grips with the fact that he can’t go back to competitive snowboarding. On the face of it, this may sound unappealing, but The Crash Reel is no 60 Minutes bedside weepy. Instead, it […]
While pitching Like Me at the Dogfish Accelerator Demo Day last month, Go Infect Films’ Jessalyn Abbott remarked that a complimentary clothing line would compound its release. I was — immediately and regrettably — skeptical. Of the substantial batch of independent films I seek out each year, not one in recent memory has touted more than a poster and the occasional t-shirt. I filed Go Infect’s marketing strategy away as “unusual” and “ambitious.” A couple days later, when the internet was astir with slack-jawed admiration for Her, I read that Spike Jonze’s longtime “collaborator,” Humberto Leon of Opening Ceremony, had created his […]
The simpler the better, or so says Gordon Willis, celebrated cinematographer of The Godfather, Manhattan and Annie Hall. Willis echoes Steve Jobs in his belief that simple outshines complex and stresses sticking only with the necessary in making choices. As he sees it, one natural window light can do much more than six artificial ones, and the bare bones of an idea often do the heavy lifting in communicating the story to an audience. The full Craft Truck interview with Willis can be viewed here.
As a tactile person with a Gen Y attention span, my preferred way of ingesting long form news is with a paper in hand. Make no mistake, I am prone to half-hearted cheating attempts: packed in a subway car, I’ll scroll through The New York Times app with one eye trained on the passing station, comprehending every other topic sentence. With the 24-hour news cycle and a tech-friendly public that is increasingly immune to putting up its feet and paging through a periodical front to back, The Times has found a way to fully utilize the electronic format, giving it […]
Along with Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, a book — an essay comprised of diary excerpts, actually — I recommend to all aspiring directors is Richard Stanley’s “I Wake Up Screaming.” It originally appeared in the 1994 third edition of the film anthology Projections, and it’s now published (with permission, the site claims) at the director’s unofficial website, Between Death and the Devil. “I Wake Up Screaming” documents Stanley’s attempt to make an ambitious Namibia-shot art horror-thriller called Dust Devil years after an earlier production fell apart. The movie Stanley went on to make instead, […]
It is perhaps indicative of how low-key this year was that when I first scribbled out a list of things that were “big” in 2013 I discovered that half of them were on last year’s list! In many respects 2013 proved to be a year of tentative advances and waiting, rather than one of incredible new tools to play with. Which is not to say that some interesting products weren’t announced and delivered. Sony shipped the F5 & F55, as well as the 4K upgrade for the NEX-FS700, and at the other end of the spectrum Blackmagic shipped its $1,000 […]
Tonight at midnight film investors and producers will be faced with a familiar uncertainty. Section 181, the portion of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 incentivizing U.S.-based film production, is set to expire, and independent filmmakers will lose a powerful tool in their fundraising arsenal. Section 181 encourages film investment by allowing investors to write off the complete cost of a qualified film in the first year. (Normally, this write-off is amortized, occurring in future years as a film demonstrates that it is money-losing. If and when profits then occur, they are treated as ordinary income by investors.) Scheduled […]
Instant remembrances flower online when strangers die. Twitter turns into an instantaneous altar, as if the site where a hero fell. And some writers are very good at devising a rapid remembrance of a long friendship or acquaintance into a succinct, maybe even final summation. After years of aggregating news headlines at Movie City News, linking to keenly observed obituaries daily, my impulse runs the other direction when I knew the deceased. I’m not ready that soon to thread the nuance of all that time into a tidy dispatch; I want to grip the fragments of soon-fading memory. I didn’t […]