Filmmaking

DOC FILMMAKER WINS FIRST AMENDMENT SUIT

From the law firm Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein and Selz comes a press release announcing the New York State Court dismissal of case brought against doc filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love. It’s great to see a filmmaker challenging such a seemingly frivolous lawsuit and winning. Excerpted from the press release: The film centers on the controversy surrounding Grammy-award winning musician Youssou Ndour’s release of his acclaimed album “Egypt.” Plaintiff, a former attorney for Mr. Ndour, appears briefly in archival footage taken at a press conference. “Vexatious right of publicity claims often hamstring documentary filmmakers,” said […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2009 Filmmaking
HAND-HELD COPPOLA

Check out Francis Ford Coppola’s new site for his forthcoming movie Tetro, starring Vincent Gallo. He’s got a video blog going with an accompanying flash gallery of images. The first vlog, just posted today (and shot by the director with the camera in his outstretched hand), is a brief intro to the film (and his Napa Valley workspace), and Coppola discusses why it’s his first original screenplay since The Conversation. From the site: It is his most personal film yet, arising from memories and emotions from his early life, though totally fictional. It is the bittersweet story of two brothers, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2009 Filmmaking
UNDER WRAPS

Director Maria Beatty last appeared in Filmmaker in 2002 when she interviewed Erin Cressida Wilson about her screenplay for Steve Shainberg’s Secretary, and since then we’ve been hearing about her plans for a mainstream narrative feature. Now, reports Lauren Wissot in a “sneak peek” at The House Next Door, Beatty has finished Bandaged, which is executive produced by Abel Ferrara. From Wissot, an excerpt: Bandaged is S&M filmmaker Maria Beatty’s foray into the indie mainstream – if one could call a flick best described as Mädchen in Uniform meets The English Patient meets Eyes Without A Face “mainstream.” Fittingly, none […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2009 Filmmaking
BETWEEN THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION

Okay, here’s a pull quote you won’t often get from me: this film is good for your soul. I’m referring to Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center in New York and which is so engaging, hopeful and against-the-grain that it becomes a must-see cinematic tonic for these confusing times. Examined Life is Taylor’s documentary about the related acts of thinking and walking. Using the history of mobile thought as her springboard (for more on this, read Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust), Taylor (pictured) follows eight philosophers as they stroll through their hometown environments engaging in a series […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2009 Filmmaking
SAM FULLER CREATES THE PERFECT WEB VIDEO

Well not, apparently, that Sam Fuller, although there’s something about this aerial view of New York City that seems timeless. Check out the director’s lovely “New York Paper Airplane Flight,” which is aided immensely by the Alexandre Desplat score (from Birth) that is yoked to it. Flying from Sam Fuller on Vimeo. Perhaps paper airplane flights are a new web sub-genre, like pet tricks and microwaved explosions? Here’s another take on the same idea, shot in 2000. Hat tip: Very Short List.

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2009 Filmmaking
CINEKINK RETURNS TO NYC

Cinekink, the festival that can lay claim to being truly alternative kicks, off tonight with an 8pm gala and fundraiser at the Kush Lounge, 191 Chrystie Street. Screening will be three shorts — Petra Joy’s Artcore, Chuck Renslow’s The Blue Rose, and Eva Midgley’s Erotic Moments. Tomorrow the fest moves over to the Anthology Film Archives with screenings of Daryl Wein’s doc Sex Positive and Robert Pratten’s erotic horror film MindFLESH. Other highlights include Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon’s Slamdance-premiering doc Graphic Sexual Horror, which looks at how the U.S. Patriot Act was used to shutter the extreme bondage website […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2009 Filmmaking
ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR

New York filmmaker Patrick Daughters is one of my favorite music video directors, and his new clip for Depeche Mode’s “Wrong” has the queasy logic and panick-y vibe of a waking dream. See it below.

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2009 Filmmaking
AMERICAN EXPRESS WANTS TO HELP YOU MAKE YOUR MOVIE…

… that is, if your movie can cost $300. As reported by the Credit Matters Blog, the credit card company is offering select customers three c-notes if they’ll pay their cards off and close their accounts. For AmEx, the incentive serves to raise some cash and, undoubtedly, reduce on the books the amount of credit it needs to keep on reserve for each customer. With the company trying to shrink its rolls with such an undignified come-on, the AmEx of old, that tony symbol of having made it, may be gone. So, let’s revisit (in a remastered version) Jamie Stuart’s […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2009 Filmmaking
WHY DIDN’T WE SEE IT COMING?

Ted Hope has an impassioned editorial on the Tribeca Film site about the calamity that is the stalling out of the New York State Film and Television Tax Credit program. In the piece, which carefully details not only the economic but also creative disaster that will be caused by a cessation of the program, Hope raises a great question: All New York filmmakers—and those dependent on them—got a quick lesson two weeks ago, when we learned that the New York tax credits had run out of money. It hit everyone as a shock, but did it really need to? It […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 23, 2009 Filmmaking
TRAILERING YOU WON’T MISS ME

One of my favorite films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Ry Russo-Young’s New Frontiers selection You Won’t Miss Me, co-written by and starring Stella Schnabel. I’ve got a short conversation between Russo-Young and Lance Edmands, who cut the trailer with her, to run in our upcoming SXSW online coverage, but there’s one thing the director says in the interview that I want to quote here. As she discusses the intimacy she tries to create on-set with her actors, she says, “Well, I try to create an environment on set where people aren’t thinking about the film as a […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 23, 2009 Filmmaking

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