Bernie Tiede was the popular person in Carthage. We know this because the small East Texas town residents tell us themselves. They sit on lawns and in office chairs and talk to the camera in Richard Linklater’s new film Bernie, nominated for Gotham Awards for Best Feature and Best Ensemble Performance. This ensemble collectively tells of how Bernie (played in flashback by Jack Black) first came to town in 1985 as an assistant funeral director. Soon, they say, he led Carthaginians through the local church choir, town theater productions, and Little League, even helping people with their tax returns. He […]
Some of the best writing we’ve ever published has been Nicholas Rombes’ Blue Velvet Project, a year-long survey of David Lynch’s classic, done solely through the examination of single frames spaced at 47 second intervals. The series wrapped up a couple of months ago, and I’ve been missing it. The Project carries on, however, landing this week at the 27th Mar Del Plata Festival in Argentina. Each year, the festival publishes one book about cinema, and this year’s is, you guessed it, El Proyecto Terciopelo Azul. In the photo above, Rombes signs copies for festival attendees. I’m excited for him […]
“This is the future and the future is now,” declares director Larry Clark on the website for his new film, the Rome Grand Prize-winning Marfa Girl. And when Clark says “now,” he means now — the film will stream today, at 6:00 PM Eastern time, for 24 hours, and that may be the only time you’ll ever get a chance to see it. From the site: I will put the film on my first and only website, larryclark.com, which is the only place one will ever be able to see the film…. It will stream for $5.99 for access to […]
The central metaphor of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, as I remember it, is the university; she talks about the vast number of people who participate in its creation – from those who fund & design it to those who actually build it – the result of which is a single (male) student being able to sit and write. Woolf’s point is to illuminate the gendered nature of the systems and structures on which scholarship is built, but the scale of resources that go into the screening of any one film – especially one overseas, in the context […]
A couple of weeks ago we selected Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby for our curated Kickstarter page, and since then he’s been adding a number of provocative awards to the campaign. The most interesting was added today: for $6,000, Elliott will transfer to you his relationship with the actor and director James Franco, who starred in his feature About Cherry and owns the rights to his novel The Adderall Diaries. Muses Elliott, “What does that mean?” “I’m not really sure,” he continues. “I can’t promise anything from James, but I’ll send you a notarized document transferring full ownership.” Memorializing and transferring […]
Editing is older than motion pictures. The ordering and pacing of dialogues, scenes, entrances and exits to build conflict and resolution have long defined Western theater, from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung [Der Ring Des Nibelungen]. It was the insertion of first-person thoughts into dialogue and plot that modernized 18th- and 19th-century novels and clever sequencing of mechanically animated magic lantern glass slides that thrilled Victorian audiences to popular epics like Ben-Hur.
Nine years ago, I walked into Sound One on my first run at my first internship. This summer, I walked out of Sound One having completed post-production on my first feature, B-Side, less than six months after we began pre-production. It wasn’t just a feature debut for me as a director, but also for our producer, DP, editor, 1st AD, and leading lady. Now rest assured, I could tell you dozens of things we would do differently. Free sample: Don’t shoot anything that will go in a movie’s first five minutes on the first day of shooting. And we have […]
Every movie deserves a great poster. It’s the visual signature that establishes the world, the stakes and tone of the movie, but is also the familiar and identifiable touchstone that (potential) fans will see as it pops up online, at festivals and while browsing their VOD menu. I want to start by noting that for better or for worse, I kinda get off on “leaping without looking”. Maybe that’s a flaw but I don’t have much patience for formal training. So take this breakdown with the knowledge that there may be better ways to do things, or techniques I’m flat-out […]
I’ll make this brief. Attention spans are not what they used to be. Everything I learned in film school failed to include tips on the pitfalls of the digital age of storytelling — because there wasn’t much of one back in 2000. I currently write a lot for youth audiences, and also web series. With web series, it’s basically trying to sum up an entire scene in one page. Or the entire episode in five pages. Trying to bend a whole story arc, pieces of the series arc, plus character motivations, subplots and gods forbid a beat or two — […]
“In Production” is a regular column which focuses on notable independent films that are currently shooting. If you would like your film to be included in this space, please send an email to nick@filmmakermagazine.com Coming off the production of the long-awaited new season of Arrested Development (premiering Spring 2013 on Netflix), Jason Bateman has begun shooting his directorial debut, Bad Words, in Los Angeles. From Andrew Dodge’s blacklisted screenplay, Bad Words stars Bateman as a middle-aged cynic who hustles his way into the children’s National Spelling Bee, much to the dismay of one of its directors (Allison Janney). Rounding out […]