Filmmaking

MARY BRONSTEIN ON THE RENART PODCAST

Okay, I’ve posted, MySpace’d and Facebooked you all to death about Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland, which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center. You know you have to see it, right? You will be graded on it on the upcoming final. And if you’re in Austin for SXSW, as I’ll be, you can score some extra credit by seeing Mary Bronstein’s debut feature Yeast, which premieres there. Mary is Ron’s wife, she co-starred in Frownland, and he was one the cinematographers of her movie. Greta Gerwig also stars. If you want to learn more about it, listen to Mary on the Renart […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 6, 2008 Filmmaking
SAG ALEVES INDIE STRIKE ANXIETY

The Screen Actor’s Guild has confirmed on its website news that has been floating around the indie world for a few weeks: that SAG will offer “guaranteed completion contracts” to indie productions so that they will be unaffected by a possible strike. What’s great about the SAG news, aside from quite valuably allowing indies to make a living during a labor stoppage, is that it implicitly acknowledges that all producers are not represented by the AMPTP and should not be affected by issues that primarily affect studio moviemaking. From the website: Guaranteed Completion Contracts are only available to independent productions […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 6, 2008 Filmmaking
DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS’ GARY GYGAX, R.I.P.

Gary Gygax, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (with Dave Arneson), died on March 4th. He had been in poor health for some time, and apparently died of heart problems. I saw notice of his death on Boing Boing earlier in the week, took a second to recognize Gygax’s name, and then kept on surfing through the site. Later, though, I thought a bit more about Gygax and his cultural contribution and decided to write something here for a couple of reasons. First, I’ll cop to having been a bit of a D&D geek for a couple […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 6, 2008 Filmmaking
UP STREAM

Eric Kohn emailed to tell me about a new online magazine he’s involved with called Stream. From the introductory notice posted on the site: Stream is a new magazine devoted to filmmakers who want to exploit new technologies in producing, promoting and distributing their work. It’s not as complicated as it sounds: We wish simply to be enablers. Filmmaking is the cultural phenomenon of our times, in the way that rock n roll was a generation or two (or three) ago. Once upon a time, any kid could pick up a cheap guitar and make their own noise. Now that […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 4, 2008 Filmmaking
KARINA LONGWORTH GOES BEHIND THE BLOG

Over at Film in Focus, Karina Longworth is the latest profile in the “Behind the Blog” series. Currently the editor of Spoutblog, Longworth talks about her favorite posts, her work day, and her history as a blogger, excerpted below: I’m a rare specimen, in that I’ve been a “professional” movie blogger from the jump–meaning, from the very early days of Cinematical through the present, I’ve always been paid to do it, and I’ve more or less treated it like a career. I have great admiration for those who self publish out of a labor of love, but I wouldn’t know […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 4, 2008 Filmmaking
PLEASE GO SEE FROWNLAND AT THE IFC CENTER!

I’m posting this short review by Richard Brody that appeared in the New Yorker this week as the first of a trickle of postings, message board missives, MySpace bulletins, and FaceBook alerts that will soon develop into a deafening roar of digital noise converging towards one important goal: to get you to see Frownland this weekend in New York at its world theatrical premiere at the IFC Center! If you’ve been following this blog over the last year, you know of our huge love for this film. I first saw it a year ago at SXSW and was on the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 4, 2008 Filmmaking
THIS ELECTION IS GETTING TOO BIZARRE…

According to The Huffington Post, the Hillary Clinton campaign released this video demonstrating the support of Jack Nicholson: UPDATE: Over at his The Chutry Experiment, Chuck Tryon explores the semiotics of this advertisement, noting that many of Nicholson’s characters are rebellious anti-establishment types, and muses on the collision between these associations and the Clinton campaign. Meanwhile, The Caucus blog at the New York Times discusses this video as well and, as a poster in the comments thread below concludes, doubts that it came from the campaign itself.

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 1, 2008 Filmmaking
DISCUSSING STORY AT THE TED CONFERENCE

When Filmmaker starts pulling in the big bucks, I’m going to demand that the magazine send me to the TED conference each year. The high-level conference acts as a platform and networking group for transformative ideas about technology, politics, social change, and the arts. The 2008 edition is in progress right now in Monterey, California, and news of the event can be found across the web. Steven Levy at Newsweek has this intro in which he talks about how the conference has changed over the years. Another distinguishing characteristic of TED is its tilt away from a classical tech conference […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 1, 2008 Filmmaking
EDISON CHEN SCANDAL PART 2

After I posted links to various summaries of the Edison Chen nude picture scandal, a flurry of new news appeared online. Last week the actor held a press conference in Hong Kong where he stated that “society as a whole has been affected” by the scandal, apologized to “all the ladies and all their families,” and announced his indefinite hiatus from the film business: It seems that Chen has now left Hong Kong for the States where he will lay low… at NYU Film School? Meanwhile, Radar Online aggregates some of the latest developments, including the theory that Chen leaked […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 29, 2008 Filmmaking
GREAT BUT PROBABLY QUITE IMPRACTICAL HORROR FILM LOCATION #1

From Fogonazos: Kolmanskop is a ghost town in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from the port of Lüderitz. In 1908, Luederitz was plunged into diamond fever and people rushed into the Namib desert hoping to make an easy fortune. Within two years, a town, complete with a casino, school, hospital and exclusive residential buildings, was established in the barren sandy desert. But shortly after the drop in diamond sales after the First World War, the beginning of the end started. During the 1950’s the town was deserted and the dunes began to reclaim what was always theirs. Soon the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2008 Filmmaking

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