Filmmaking

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY EARNS RECORD NUMBERS OVER THE WEEKEND

Paramount‘s grass-roots Internet marketing of Oren Peli‘s low budget horror Paranormal Activity looks to be working. According to Variety, the film pulled in $7.1 million over the weekend at 160 screens, beating the 22-year-old record of the highest weekend grosser at 200 locations or less, held previously by Platoon ($3.7 million at 174 locations). The film also grossed the weekend frame’s highest per screen average of $44,163, edging out An Education ($40,595 per screen). Without question the film has turned into the hottest ticket for not only the horor fan but college kids who’ve been constantly clicking the DEMAND IT […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Oct 11, 2009 Filmmaking
HOW DRAMA DIED AT THE FILMMAKER FORUM

Film Independent‘s Filmmaker Forum is underway this weekend, and we asked writer/director Zak Forsman to attend and report back. Here’s the first of his posts. I’ve just locked picture on my first feature-length motion picture and it seems I couldn’t be entering the world of distribution at a worse time. I strolled into the DGA in Los Angeles for day one of the Film Independent Filmmaker Forum optimistic and eager. I left it determined to batten down the hatches in preparation for stormy seas ahead. Veteran producer Jeremy Thomas (Creation, The Last Emperor, Crash) keynote opened with the concession that […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 11, 2009 Filmmaking
PONDERING THE FUTURE OF THE LOW-BUDGET GAY FILM

I received the following note from a filmmaker who is witnessing the shrinking of what was once a reliable niche — the low-to-no budget gay film. Hey Scott– LOVE your editor’s note “from the future”. I follow your twitter already– just had to write you to react to this piece. Right now, I’m typing in an Atlanta hotel room and tonight my movie, PORNOGRAPHY, is closing the Atlanta LGBT film festival. I flew from the Portland LGBT a few days ago, and tomorrow I’m in Tampa at that fest. (I’m missing our closing night of Dallas OUTTAKES tonight.) I’ve been […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 9, 2009 Filmmaking
REDACTED: A LETTER FROM THE FUTURE

Through a bizarre anomaly in the space-time continuum, I received the following email in my in-box. It’s dated March 30, 2010, so it’s from the future. Since what’s being discussed hasn’t happened yet, I can’t, of course, vouch for its authenticity, but the internet routing and DNS server codes all seem accurate. I’m going ahead and posting it because this filmmaker’s thinking is interesting, but I’m redacting his name and the name of his film so as to protect his privacy. — S.M. Dear Friend, What a tumultuous but exciting two months since our film, REDACTED, premiered at Sundance! Thanks […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 8, 2009 Filmmaking
MARKETING INDEPENDENT MEDIA IN A DIGITAL WORLD

Here’s Mike Johnston’s second post from the Future of Music Conference. One of the most important considerations for most musicians or filmmakers is to have their work exposed to as wide an audience as possible. The existing model of taking a product to market is still alive but it is no longer the only way to do it. That model depended on the acquisition of funding from a major record label or film studio for production expenses, distribution and major commercial exposure (promotion). Trying to navigate this avenue is full of potholes for the indie artist due to the inherent […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 8, 2009 Filmmaking
Sets and the City: On the History of Smithereens

Susan Seidelman’s landmark 1982 debut feature, Smithereens, recently made its Cable VOD debut on Cinetic’s FilmBuff channel. It will soon be made available on iTunes, Amazon VOD, and more. Seidelman reflects on the origins of her Manhattan indie classic as it finds new audiences today. I moved to New York City in the mid 1970s, to go to NYU film school. At that time the grad school was housed in a funky building on East 7th street and Second Ave — a space it shared with a rock club called the Fillmore East. The mid-to-late ’70s was a transitional time […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Oct 8, 2009 Filmmaking
SEIDELMAN ON SMITHEREENS AND INDIE IN THE ’80S

“Thinking back on it,” director Susan Seidelman writes, “there was something wonderfully naive about the way the film came together. We never thought about how (or if) the film would get distributed, or how it would be marketed. This was just a film I wanted to make that attempted to capture the spirit of a certain time and place. Fortunately, it ended up getting accepted to the Cannes Film Festival and then got picked up for distribution by New Line Cinema. But that was never something we calculated or even thought about when we first set out to make Smithereens.” […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 7, 2009 Filmmaking
OF CRISES, FALL DAYS AND NEW POSSIBILITIES AT THE WOODSTOCK FILM FESTIVAL

Several familiar faces, including my own, spoke at the Woodstock Film Festival on a panel entitled “The Changing Face of Independent Film.” I moderated, and the panelists were directors Rick Linklater and Ira Sachs; Cinetic’s John Sloss; and Big Beach’s Peter Saraf. As four of the five of us attended the Indiewire/MoMA/Zipline summit on the crisis in independent film production and distribution, I began by asking what the term “crisis” meant for them. Sloss spoke about the vanishing studio specialty divisions and with them the erosion of the indie film business model that requires a marketplace with well-funded buyers. He […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 7, 2009 Filmmaking
RED BUCKET FILMS LAUNCHES NEW SITE

I’ve been posting links to stuff I’ve found around the web mostly on our Twitter feed these days, but this deserves its own blog post: Red Bucket Films, the home of filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie as well as Brett Jutkiewicz, Alex Kalman, Sam Lisenco and others, has launched a new version of their website. And it’s not just a design refresh — it’s got a bunch of new stuff on it, including “Talk Show,” four episodes of Red Bucket’s “TV Party”-like downtown interview show. The first guests are filmmaker Ronnie Bronstein, National Scrabble Association’s John D Williams, and musician […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 6, 2009 Filmmaking
5 MILLION BANDS ON MYSPACE: AT THE FUTURE OF MUSIC SUMMIT

Where went the music business may go the film business is a common refrain these days. The music business was slow to deal with the digital revolution and has seen its business models capsized. For this reason, Filmmaker has asked journalist Mike Johnston to attend the Future of Music Summit, just wrapping up in Washington, D.C., and report back on what went down. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” That quote from The Who seems to encapsulate the material presented during the first day of the Future of Music Conference. While the Internet has obviously eliminated many […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 6, 2009 Filmmaking

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