Filmmaking

BOXING HANNAH, PART TWO

Aided by a greater competence when it comes to grabbing and resizing web images (a competence I’ve appropriated here), Peter Martin at Cinematical links to my piece on the DVD box art of Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs and asks: I agree that Hannah Takes the Stairs deserves a wider audience, but I’m not sure the DVD cover will make people want to pick it up and take a chance on renting or buying it. What do you think? To be honest, I don’t know. As a producer, I’ve long been inured to the design indignity that occurs when […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2008 Filmmaking
TWILIGHT OF THE STARS

Jamie Stuart forwarded the screen cap pictured here from IMDb. It’s a grab from the “pro” version of the site’s Starmeter which, you’d think, would provide some sort of ranking of top movie stars. But no, the Starmeter is more a measure of transitory popularity. As the site notes about the rankings: Plain and simple, they represent what people are interested in, based not on small statistical samplings, but on the actual behavior of millions of IMDb users. Unlike the AFI 100TM or Academy AwardsTM, high rankings on STARmeterTM and MOVIEmeterTM do not necessarily mean that something is “good.” They […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2008 Filmmaking
SPRING ISSUE ONLINE

Over on the main page check select stories from the Spring issue. Peter Bowen chats with Errol Morris about Standard Operating Procedure, I have an in-depth discussion with Sangre de Mi Sangre (aka Padre Nuestro) writer-director Christopher Zalla, Lisa Y. Garibay interviews Tom Kalin about Savage Grace, Howard Feinstein explores the making of Tom McCarthy‘s The Visitor and Travis Crawford talks to Dario Argento about his final chapter in the “Three Mothers” trilogy, Mother of Tears. Plus, we take a look at the Red One camera, Anthony Kaufman reports on the struggle American filmmakers are having in the international marketplace […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Apr 21, 2008 Filmmaking
IRAQ AT 24 FRAMES A SECOND

Over at FilmInFocus, Anthony Kaufman takes a look at filmmaking in Iraq by talking to the leaders of the Baghdad Independent Film and Television College. Here’s the opening: Filmmaking requires perseverance, zeal, sometimes even a pathological commitment to see a project through. Now imagine making movies in Baghdad. Kidnappings, killings, suicide bombings and blackouts haven’t deterred a number of intrepid aspiring directors from pursuing their passion, whether Oday Rasheed and Mohamed Al-Daradji, the first two people to make feature films in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2003 (respectively, Over Exposure and Ahlaam) or the roughly 80 young Iraqis […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 18, 2008 Filmmaking
EQAL-ITY

Over at his Cinematech, Scott Kirsner rounds up the news that EQAL, a “microstudio formed by the guys behind the lonelygirl15 series and KateModern” has raised $5 million in venture capital from Sparks Capital in Boston along with Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Here’s Rebecca Buckman from the Wall Street Journal: Producers of the Internet-video serial “lonelygirl15” — once thought to be an amateur project but later revealed to be the product of professionals — have raised $5 million from prominent technology investors to expand and introduce new online shows. The new funding for EQAL, the Los Angeles company behind […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 18, 2008 Filmmaking
SYNDROMES CENSORSHIP, PART TWO

A couple of weeks back, we posted an email from U.K. producer Keith Griffiths about the Thai censorship of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century. Now, over at FilmInFocus, where Griffiths is maintaining a regular and quite erudite blog, he updates us with stories of the butchered film’s screenings in Thailand (audiences must sit through several-minute-long sequences of black leader) in a long post that winds its way through a discussion of Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project, the Degenerate Art Show and Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride. An excerpt: Unlike the Degenerate Art show in Munich of 1937, thousands […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 18, 2008 Filmmaking
HANNAH GOES TO THE VIDEO STORE

What is the difference in the conventional wisdom between selling a film to an indie arthouse audience and selling it to the video chains? A quick tutorial: Exhibit A, theatrical release poster. Exhibit B, home video box cover.

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 18, 2008 Filmmaking
TIME LAPSED

I was on two short film juries in the last two weeks. If this web video from The New Yorker had been entered in either of them, it would have been a finalist. Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: “Up and Then Down,” Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker feature on elevators, is centered around Nicholas White’s ordeal of being trapped in an elevator for 41 hours after he left his office at Business Week to go downstairs for a cigarette. The article is accompanied by an extraordinary time-lapse video of White in his cage, rattling back and forth like a trapped […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 15, 2008 Filmmaking
Five Questions with Carny Director Alison Murray

Throughout her career, Alison Murray has excelled in the filmic exploration of subculture. Her films, both docs and a narrative feature, burrow deep inside groups situated outside of mainstream culture and capture not only their social dynamics but also the very human stories contained within them. Her first doc, Train on the Brain, looked at the teenage culture of “train jumpers.” Her feature Mouth to Mouth starred Ellen Page in a story of a teenager who runs away and joins a European youth cult. And now her latest, Carny, which premieres this week at Hot Docs, finds Murray on the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 15, 2008 Directors
DENTLER, PIERSON ON THE MOVE

In Variety, Mike Jones has the very big news that SXSW festival director Matt Dentler will be leaving the fest to join John Sloss’s Cinetic Media, where he will run the marketing and program operations of Cinetic Digital Rights Management. And in an equally notable development, Janet Pierson, who has worked as a producer’s rep with her husband John, has been named as the new producer of the annual Austin-based film festival. From Variety: SXSW Film co-founder Louis Black said: “Saying that Janet will hit the ground running as head of SXSW Film is truly an understatement considering her knowledge […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2008 Filmmaking

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