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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

When martial arts legend Bruce Lee died in 1973 just weeks before the release of Enter the Dragon, a bizarre subgenre of action cinema was born: “Bruceploitation.” The international success of Enter the Dragon created an appetite for new Bruce Lee movies, which intrepid producers tried to satisfy by scraping together whatever meager Lee footage they could find and building new films around it; when they couldn’t get their hands on discarded scenes from Lee’s work they tried to fool audiences with movies starring Lee imitators like “Bruce Li” and “Bruce Le.” One of the strangest Bruceploitation movies – which […]