Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Are Virtual Theaters Here to Stay?
When Toby Leonard, programming director at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre, returned to the space for the first time since the COVID-19 shutdown began, a six-foot cardboard display for Never Rarely Sometimes Always struck his eye. Eliza Hittman’s film was four days into the first week of a planned platform release before it was pulled from theatrical exhibition and hadn’t yet made it to the Belcourt, but its physical teaser remained. “How many of these things were there and how many did they send around the country?,” Leonard wondered. Then he took it down. As exhibitors and distributors initially adjusted to no theatrical releases for […]
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Writer/Director Lynn Shelton, 1965 – 2020
Lynn Shelton, who wrote and directed features including Hump Day, Your Sister’s Sister and Laggies, and who directed numerous television episodes, died yesterday in Los Angeles of a previously undiagnosed blood disorder. She was 54. Long associated with the Seattle independent film scene, Shelton began feature filmmaking in her mid-30s, after working in a variety of other artistic mediums. She told Filmmaker in 2012, “As far back as I can remember I always knew I wanted to be an artist. Finding myself smitten with nearly every creative medium in existence probably made the fact that I ended up deeply exploring […]
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King Creole, To Catch a Thief and Gunsmoke: The Complete Series: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The conventional wisdom among cineastes is that Elvis Presley’s best movie was the Don Siegel Western Flaming Star (1960), mainly thanks to the fact that it was one of the few times the singer worked with an important auteur. While I bow to no one in my admiration of Siegel in general and Flaming Star in particular, it’s less a great Elvis movie than a great movie that has Elvis in it; for a terrific film by a terrific director that’s also a supercharged vehicle for what Presley did best, one need look no further than 1958’s King Creole, which […]
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A Virtual Promotional Tour: Setting Up a Home Zoom Studio for Spaceship Earth
I’m sitting in my living room doing press for the release of Spaceship Earth. Normally I’d be at a distributors’ office or running around to different studios, but this week I’m wearing a nice shirt with sweatpants and a cat on my lap. In the past two weeks in anticipation of being on Zoom a lot, I put together a modest Zoom studio. Besides doing press days, I’m pre-recording a lot of intros and Q&As for virtual cinema presenters. Neon has partnered with over 200 different venues and small businesses to present the film digitally. We pre-recorded an intro and […]
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Filmmaker‘s Quarantine Mix Tape, Volume 1
It’s 9:00 PM on a Friday night about two weeks back (could have been three, but who keeps time anymore?) when I found myself turning off the TV after two films and sitting at my desk. My brain couldn’t focus on another movie, and I felt inspired — wanting to get some writing done. Normally, I’d put on a coat and pop across the street to The Roost, my coffee/wine spot in New York’s East Village for late night writing. Alas… here we are. I realized how difficult it can be to “switch modes” when we can’t switch spaces. Whether […]
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Senator Adam Schiff Discusses Unemployment Provisions and Worker Protections for Entertainment Industry
In a virtual town hall today organized by IATSE and SAG-AFTRA, Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) addressed questions from union members regarding federal government support for entertainment industry workers during the novel coronavirus shutdowns. SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris and IATSE International President Matt Loeb led the hour-long conversation and touched on several topics of interest to Filmmaker readers. Unemployment benefits for gig workers. The first question asked came from a SAG member who complained that her state unemployment benefits were not calculated based on a combination of her previous year’s W2 salaried income and her 1099 independent contractor income. Schiff stated […]
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Should We Be Filming At All? Doc Society, Field of Vision and Sundance Institute Partner on Doc Filmmaking Risk-Assessment Guide
Doc Society, Field of Vision and Sundance Institute have collaborated on a risk-assessment guide for non-fiction filmmakers considering shooting during the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The document, “Independent Filmmaking in the Time of Coronavirus,” co-signed by a number of other leading documentary organizations, differs from other such industry guides being circulated at the moment by its three-part structure. Before even getting to the third part — “Corona protocols: what’s the safest way to organize the shoot?” — the guide walks filmmakers through two other checklists. The first, “The Big Question: Should I be filming at all?”, surveys the […]
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Clean and Sober, Sweet Bird of Youth, Reflections in a Golden Eye: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Michael Keaton was primarily known for comedies when he gave one of the riskiest dramatic performances of the 1980s as a fast-talking addict in Glenn Gordon Caron’s Clean and Sober (1988); over 30 years later it remains a high point in the actor’s distinguished career. Keaton plays Daryl Poynter, a coke-snorting real estate salesman who needs to lay low after he embezzles tens of thousands of dollars and wakes up next to a woman who has suffered a heart attack after doing drugs with him the night before. Not accepting that he’s an addict, Daryl decides to “pose” as an […]
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Canon Reformation (3): Adaptation.
So far in this column I’ve written about movies I’ve seen multiple times, but I hadn’t rewatched Adaptation. since December 2002. Regardless, for nearly two decades hence I’ve regularly heard Brian Cox-as-Robert-McKee bellowing “and god help you if you use voiceover!” I don’t think I was actively aware of McKee’s Story before seeing Adaptation. The spine, with its title in distinct marquee lettering, was familiar—I have vague memories of seeing it in the aisles of the film section of the Barnes & Noble I haunted way too much as a kid—but it would never have occurred to me to open it up, so my true […]
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“It Was Subversive, a Political Act, Giving Screen Time to a Scrappy Stray Dog”: Director Elizabeth Lo on Her Mesmerizing Tribeca Documentary, Stray
About the production philosophy behind Stray, her captivating and immersive documentary about stray dogs in Istanbul, director Elizabeth Lo says that her shooting decisions were “kind of left to the whims of a dog” (specifically, a mutt named Zeytin). Lo is perhaps being a bit modest here — there’s a tremendous amount of human skill, empathy, observational power and narrative shaping in her mesmerizing canine saga. But a giant strength of the film is its sense that it is indeed in sync with the rhythms of a dog, occupying an animal world while also being both smartly aware of and […]
