Head over to our page dedicated to all things Park City. For the next week and a half there you’ll find features on films screening at the fest, on-site coverage of the news and trends this year, answers from filmmakers attending this year to our question: “What was the hardest decision you had to make to complete your film.” And much more.
From the online store of Mike Mohan’s One Too Many Mornings, playing in the Next section of Sundance. Are you an acquisitions executive at Focus, Miramax, Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC, or Magnolia? Or are you just an independently wealthy entrepreneur that wants to get into theatrical distribution? The first person to click this button will get the rights to theatrically distribute our film across the USA. **Purchaser also agrees to pay for all legal fees and deliverables that the filmmakers may incur. You need an Amex, Visa, Master card, Discover, or a PayPal account that can handle the […]
While going back through old emails I came across one from filmmaker Jim Helton, who made this cool video detailing artist Chris Rubio’s process making four paintings for New York’s Ace hotel. As Helton edited Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, one of Sundance’s most hotly anticipated films, it seems like a good idea to post this for all of you to check out. Ace Hotel x Chris Rubino from Jim Helton on Vimeo.
Before we all head off to the Sundance Film Festival, I think it’s useful to remember that there can be a dark and lonely undercurrent to the Park City experience, one perfectly captured by Jamie Stuart in the video he made for us at the 2007 festival. Here, with a guest appearance by Sienna Miller, is “White Plastic Flower.”
Here’s the great director of photography Ed Lachman on the roots of his career and the making of Sundance’s Opening Night film, Howl.
One independent film I’m especially looking forward to in 2010 is Braden King’s Here, shot in Armenia by Ballast‘s Lol Crawley and starring Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal. Braden’s film is ambitiously conceived, a story of a romance between a cartographer sent to map the Eastern European country and a local art photographer that will blend King’s striking images and moody drama with interstitial material by a number of great experimental filmmakers. Braden has launched a blog about the making of his film. Here’s an excerpt: It was an adventure. It was magnificent. It was terrible. It was hard. We […]
One of the most creative and fascinating young filmmakers working today is Brent Green, the Pennsylvania-based animator whose work we first brought to our readers’ attention in 2005 when we selected him as one of our “25 New Faces.” His new film, Gravity, a feature, is his most ambitious film yet, and at the Andrew Edlin Gallery site he has posted a preview that makes me psyched to see the whole film. You can check it out here. Gravity promises to be an amazing blend of live action, narrative, and puppet stop-motion animation in a fantastically constructed set built on […]
I’ll post a bit later about all the stuff in the new Filmmaker magazine that’s not online. It’s a particularly good issue, I think, and one of the things which is print-only is Alicia Van Couvering’s look at five films that found their money and went into production in 2010. We decided to do a financing-oriented corrective to all the doom-and-gloom stories out there, and this one is full of practical tips for filmmakers looking to crowdsource and raise money through other unconventional means. One of the films she writes about is Kentucker Audley’s Open Five, which is our 25 […]
Ted Hope has an excellent blog post today, one of those print-this-out-and-post-it-above-your-computer lists to guide you through your work as a screenwriter. It’s entitled “Ten Things to Do Before You Submit a Script,” and it’s not about getting an agent or using two brads, not three. It’s about the final stage of a writer’s own in-house (i.e., in brain) development. There are a few that really resonated with me. One is: “Know what the historical precedents are for your story and how you differ from them in how you have chosen to tell it.” This is crucial. If a producer […]
Well, not really but sort of… While researching an article I’m writing, I came across this trenchant passage by critical theorist Frederic Jameson in the foreword to the U.S. edition of Jacques Attali’s 1977 music manifesto Noise: The Political Economy of Music: “Not the least challenging challenging of Attali’s thought lies in his tough-minded insistence on the ambiguity, or better still, the profound ambivalence, of the new social, economic and organizational possibilities, which he often describes in terms of autosurveillance. From one perspective, autosurveillance marks the penetration of information technology within the body and the psyche of the individual subject: […]