Filmmaking

CREATIVE CAPITAL AND WARHOL FOUNDATION ANNOUNCE GRANTS FOR ARTS WRITERS

Since stories about declining staff opportunities for professional film critics seem to appearing all over, I thought I’d post this notice from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation announcing grants ranging up to $50,000 to arts writers. Although the focus is on the visual arts, the site says, “By ‘contemporary visual art,’ we mean visual art made since World War II. We will also consider projects on post-War work in adjacent fields – architecture, design, film, theater/performance, sound, etc.- if they significantly engage the discourses and concerns of contemporary visual art.” Take special note: this round of proposals specifically excludes […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 4, 2008 Filmmaking
AVOID THAT DOG ON THE SKATEBOARD

The analysts over at Tech Ticker have posted a short video conversation about the current state and future direction of internet video and the ad market. The discussion is kicked off by a mention of Disney’s recent earnings statement and the profitability of its fairly conservative and unsexy online video division. The Tech Ticker guys go on to talking about Hulu and YouTube, particularly how the latter is struggling for the moment to sell advertising against user-generated video. The analysts say that, with the exception of entertainment companies, which will advertise on user-generated spots, most mainstream advertisers don’t want to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 4, 2008 Filmmaking
TALKING TO THE ZELLNERS, JENKINS AND ROBIN

Short End Magazine uses the occasion of our “25 New Faces” list to recap three conversations between Noralil Ryan Fores and filmmakers from this year’s edition. You can read an interview with the Zellner Brothers and also this interview with My Olympic Summer‘s Daniel Robin, an excerpt of which is below. SM: Given four words to describe your style and four words to describe the purpose of your work, which eight words total do you chose? DR: You’re killing me. Style: personal, atmospheric, rhythm, process. Purpose: cathartic, engage, communicate, new cinema. SM: Why? DR: Well, I think for a film […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 3, 2008 Filmmaking
FINDING THE NEW AUDIENCE

Over at The Workbook Project Lisa Salem has launched a new section of the site entitled “How to Build and Audience and Keep it.” It’s a multi-faceted section, containing both a blog as well as more organized content areas covering different aspects of audience-building and retention. Here, in a Preamble, she explains what led her to this area of specialization: I speak from a particular form of experience. In 2005 I set out to walk the whole of Los Angeles – I’d lived there for most of ten years. I pushed a baby-stroller with a video camera attached to the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 3, 2008 Filmmaking
25 NEW FACES UPDATE #3

Here’s the third of our catch-ups with previous “25 New Faces” filmmakers. If you’ve been on the list and haven’t sent us an update, you can still email one to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com. Marshall Curry, director, 2005: Since releasing Street Fight, I have been working on two docs– one about the radical environmental group, the Earth Liberation Front, and the other about three 12-year old kids who aspire to be NASCAR drivers (they race gokarts that go 60 mph in a nationally competitive circuit that’s sort of the little leagues for NASCAR.) Both films are in post now, and the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 2, 2008 Filmmaking
CAN ANYONE SPARE A BUSINESS MODEL?

I just finished writing the letter for this week’s Filmmaker newsletter and discussed a few thoughts prompted by my trip this past weekend to the Creative Capital retreat at Williams College. I used some discussions I had with both artists and filmmakers to think further about our need to come up with new economic (and patronage) models that can support media work in that hybrid space between the art world and conventional theatrical distribution. (By the way, if you don’t subscribe to our newsletter, you can do so here on the main page. Each week I’ve been using the space […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jul 31, 2008 Filmmaking
SELF DISTRIBUTING INDIE FILM

I’m late to the linkfest on this one, but I just caught up with John Anderson’s piece in The New York Times on self-distributing indie films. It’s positioned as a trend piece, and the hook is this week’s release of Randall Miller’s Bottle Shock, which the filmmaker is getting in theaters himself with the help of Freestyle Releasing and former Picturehouse exec Dennis O’Conner. Filmmakers, of course, have been self-distributing for years — the difference now is that the specialty distribution circuit seems like such a bleak place that fewer are questioning the decision to do so. What I found […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jul 31, 2008 Filmmaking
PUNISHING POLITICS

A new “Five in Focus” series launches today at FilmInFocus: five political writers or commentators discuss their five favorite films about political campaigns. Up today is a sophisticated and suprising list from Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Along with Max Ophuls’ The Earrings of Madame De is Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park. From Perlstein’s piece: I’ve never seen a film that more convincingly projects the sheer rage Americans felt toward one another in 1970 than Peter Watkin’s astonishing mockumentary Punishment Park. In it, a group of radicals are basically tortured to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2008 Filmmaking
25 NEW FACES UPDATE #2

Here’s the second of our catch-ups with previous “25 New Faces” filmmakers. If you’ve been on the list and haven’t sent us an update, you can still email one to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, directors, 2005: Since we were included in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” we co-directed a film called Jesus Camp that was nominated for an Oscar, and have completed television projects for CBS and VH1. We are currently making a documentary in Saudi Arabia, and producing a segment of the Freakonomics movie. In addition, we just signed on to make […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2008 Filmmaking
THE ART OF THE INCOMPLETE

Ted Hope forwarded this link to a fantastic list of “Top 10 Great Movies That Were Never Finished” over at List Universe. Of course, the term “great” is one of almost philosophical speculation as opposed to qualitative judgement. How can a film be great if it was never completed and viewed by an audience? Looking at it from another way, though, films create memories and desires in us long after we view them, and sometimes a film that is wished for yet remains an impossible object exerts a stronger pull on us than one that is released and quickly disappears […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2008 Filmmaking

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