Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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WEINSTEINS START VOD LABEL
A few weeks ago we learned about Focus Features’ new VOD arm, Focus World, well today Deadline broke the story that at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (which begins Thursday) The Weinstein Company will go full steam ahead on their own VOD label. The Weinstein Company has also confirmed that Magnolia Pictures’ SVP and Head of Acquisitions, Tom Quinn, will come over to head the label along with Magnolia’s head of legal and business affairs, Jason Janego. The two had been instrumental in Magnolia’s day-and-date platform. Quinn and Janego will be at TIFF scouting titles for the Weinsteins’ as […]
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LAURA POITRAS ON THE 9/11 DECADE
The New York Times is doing a series of videos on artists responding to the decade since 9/11. Here’s filmmaker Laura Poitras, whose documentaries My Country, My Country and The Oath are essential documents of this era.
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DAVID BYRNE LOOKS FORWARD TO THE MOVIES
I was describing this performance art piece by David Byrne to a friend the other day, but, of course and like everything, it’s on YouTube. It’s from The Kitchen Presents: Two Moon July, a television special produced by the New York performing arts and video center that was my first place of employment. Here, Byrne returns from Los Angeles with a copy of Variety and looks forward to all the upcomings. With Toronto starting this week and the fall festival season in gear, it felt like the right time to post this.
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When Should You Call Bulls@#t ?
I’ve been pondering Scott Macaulay‘s post WHEN SHOULD YOU GIVE UP? as it’s a question I’ve asked of myself on several occasions, quite recently even. It’s a question that hangs heavy on the psyche of anyone with a will to create and grow beyond the confines of their own feeble inheritance. I know this because I know that anyone who has ever made any attempt to do, or create, or make, anything, ever, has failed. Many times miserably and likely to the point where it feels as if hope has not just vanished from the horizon, but has finally revealed itself to […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #13
Second # 611, 10:11 This gliding shot, showing the underside of trees as Jeffrey walks the nighttime streets of his neighborhood, loomed large in my imagination after seeing the film for the first time in 1987. I wouldn’t see Blue Velvet again for many years, and in that time these few seconds of footage assumed meaning and feeling wildly disproportionate to their importance in the film. I can’t really account for this and, to be honest, when I set out to do this project I did it with the intention of not writing very much about my own personal stake […]
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“WE WERE HERE” DIRECTOR DAVID WEISSMAN
David Weissman moved to San Francisco in 1976 and has been a fixture of the filmmaking community there, working on films like Crumb and In the Shadow of the Stars before directing his own movie (with Bill Weber), The Cockettes, a documentary chronicle of the legendary Bay Area performance group. With his latest, We Were Here, Weissman again digs into the history of the city, this time capturing the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The following short conversation was conducted at Sundance before the first screening of his film. We Were Here opens in New York at […]
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DIGITAL RESUME WRITING AND THE PMD
I remember when I was a teenager sitting down with my dad and doing my resume. My father had left a 30-year government job to move into consulting and the corporate sector, and he was sending out a lot of them. I modeled mine after his. There were headings down the left side — a short-term “Goal,” experience, education, and my interests — and all the info was succinct, tabbed, bullet-pointed. It fit on one page. I haven’t done a resume in years. In film, the narrative bio is used more often. Or, an iMDb page suffices. But, after reading […]
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KEVIN SMITH TO SCREEN “RED STATE” IN NATIONWIDE SIMULCAST
Kevin Smith continues his maverick release strategy of his latest film Red State by announcing today that he’ll be screening a one-night only nationwide simulcast of the film on Sept. 25. at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema in L.A. The film will screen at select theaters nationwide through a unique partnership with Ira Deutchman‘s Emerging Pictures theater network, including the post screening Q&A with Smith which will be digitally streamed live from the New Beverly into all of the participating theaters, allowing audience members to interact directly with Smith utilizing Twitter. Red State had its VOD premiere yesterday after grossing […]
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“RESURRECT DEAD” DIRECTOR JON FOY
This interview with Jon Foy, director of Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, was originally published during the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, where the film won the Documentary Directors Award. The film opens today at the IFC Center in New York, with Foy and his collaborators doing Q & A’s at the evening shows. There are few professions in the world that demand more from their practitioners than documentary filmmaking — most filmmakers spend years (if not lives) toiling away in obscurity, with little keeping them going beside the faith that theirs is a story worth sacrificing everything […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #12
Second #564, 9:24 Jeffrey comes down the stairs of his home. It’s night, and his mother (played by Priscilla Pointer, the real-life mother of Amy Irving) and Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay) sit on the sofa watching a black-and-white crime drama on the television. Positioned on opposite ends, the space between them opens up like some sort of haunted void where someone (or something) else should be. In Lynch’s films, sofas—which seem like the most harmless piece of furniture possible—become uncanny objects, spooky places that are so familiar that they become unfamiliar. There is one more point of general application which […]
