Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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San Sebastian Critic’s Notebook #2
As the San Sebastian Film Festival drew to a close, there was — as there should be with festivals that want to thrive — a sense of honoring the past and looking to the future. The week had been studded with Hollywood star appearances, from Ewan McGregor becoming the youngest ever actor to win a Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award to 75-year-old Dustin Hoffman tearfully collecting his Donostia on Saturday. Thanking the festival for honoring the art form of cinema, he told the packed Kursaal auditorium: “The feeling that you gave me is as important as the award.” But there was […]
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Director Ted Kotcheff on Wake in Fright
Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, but as the film made its way across the Atlantic, its stateside distributor decided to do a bit of rebranding. Against Kotcheff’s will, his intense fish-out-of-water tale was released in New York the following winter as Outback, a perfectly bland title for a movie that’s anything but. If the new name threw some film-goers off the trail, United Artists’ failure, as Kotcheff recalls it, to “spend 25 cents on publicity” made certain that the rest of its potential audience never heard about it in the […]
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Another Web is Possible
Most mobile and wireline users rely on a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) to access the web. Such ISPs include big dogs like AT&T and Verizon, Time Warner and Comcast, as well as small fries like Earthlink and Juno. However, there is a second class of ISP that is little discussed: nonprofit ISP. Nonprofit ISPs involve two different types of providers – municipal or community networks and nonprofit corporations. In 2001, there were only 16 government-run networks in nine states. Today, there are an estimated 150 communities around the country with their own publicly-owned broadband networks. In the face of […]
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Film Tax Incentives
A recent panel on State Tax Incentives sponsored by Media Services and Film Incentives Group, LLC., was centered on tax credits for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but much of the advice is applicable to other state programs. It’s important to note that while many states offer some form of tax incentive for filmmakers, there are several important differences between the various programs: whether it’s a rebate or a credit, transferable, has a cap [the state has a total limit per years for all credits], the minimum production budget requirements, and several other details. Also covered was: different ways to use the […]
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Trailer Watch: Blood Brother
A month ago, director Steve Hoover wrote an excellent guest post for the Filmmaker site talking about the experience of making Blood Brother, the documentary about his childhood friend Rocky Braat, who moved to India to look after AIDS orphans. This week I got word from Hoover that a new trailer for the film has arrived, which you can watch below. Look out for Blood Brother early next year, when it should premiere at one of the winter festivals.
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Gordon Von Steiner and Steven Meisel Face the Future
I haven’t posted a great fashion film in a while because, well, I haven’t come across one. This, via Director’s Notes, is out-there enough to warrant placement here. It’s directed by Gordon von Steiner and was shot during Steven Meisel’s “Face the Future” photoshoot for Vogue.
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Lessons Gleaned at Independent Film Week
I learned a lot about myself during IFP’s Independent Film Week. I shared the experience with my brilliant/disgustingly attractive producer, Cecilia. Here is a photo of her to prove to you that I am not exaggerating. You can’t tell from the photo, but she has an Italian accent. This really enhances the allure. Also, I try to photobomb as many pics of her as possible. She’s one of my closest friends. We met all the way back in undergrad when she produced a really cheesy dating-comedy I was far too proud of having written. Last week, we spent every waking […]
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POV @ 25: Natalia Almada & Theo Rigby on Technology in Docs
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning documentarian Natalia Almada — whose new film, El Velador, airs tonight as part of the 2012 POV season — and Sin País director Theo Rigby, a photographer-turned-filmmaker, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Almada and Rigby share where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re heading while dissecting different viewpoints of their craft. In this final part, […]
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5 Things to Know Before Submitting to The Tribeca Film Festival
Here’s Tribeca Film Festival Director of Programming Genna Terranova on her way to work while imparting some useful info about submitting to the 2013 edition. Early deadline, believe it or not, is October 19.
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Trailer Watch: Park Chan-Wook’s Stoker
The early months of the year are typically something of a cinematic wasteland dominated by substandard horror movies and thrillers, films that act as a palate cleanser to rid us of the taste of all those worthy pictures that awards season has fed us. Park Chan-Wook’s first Hollywood film, Stoker, is set to drop on March 1 next year, just as the bad starts turning to better; it looks like both a gripping genre piece and visually stunning, and personally I can’t wait to see it. Interestingly, though this is an American film, only the screenwriter (former Prison Break star […]
