Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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If Stanley Kubrick Was a Young Filmmaker Today…. A Hypothetical Festival Journey
In celebrating 25 years of Slamdance, I’m reflecting on the journey of first-time filmmakers. Many have passed through the hallways and screening rooms of Slamdance’s long-standing headquarters at Treasure Mountain Inn, through Sundance’s theaters, and many other new festivals over the past couple of decades. Yet from Stanley Kubrick’s coming of age as a filmmaker in the 1950s to the new digital technologies of today, it’s been an endeavor “against all odds,” through hurdles of financing, casting, scheduling, production and distribution. I have always been fascinated by Stanley Kubrick’s early career, specifically his first three feature films: Fear and Desire, […]
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RIP Jonas Mekas (1922-2019)
I only met Jonas Mekas once, briefly, in the most technical and unimpressive sense of “met”: I was coming out of Anthology Film Archives, emerging from a press screening and grimly proceeding to the nearest USPS branch. He asked why I wasn’t smiling, for which I didn’t have a good or succinct answer, and turned tail. I blew it! He didn’t identify himself and didn’t need to: Mekas’s status as an East Village institution and NYC film legend was imprinted on me long before I moved to the city. Artforum‘s obit puts it succinctly: “His output, which spans seven decades […]
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Grasshopper Film Acquires Robert Greene’s Bisbee ’17
Grasshopper Film announced today the acquisition of US distribution rights to Bisbee ‘17, the latest documentary from filmmaker Robert Greene. Following its theatrical release, Bisbee ‘17 will be released on Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming platforms this spring, as well as on the non-theatrical market. From the press release: Bisbee ‘17 follows several members of a close-knit community as they attempt to reckon with their town’s darkest hour. In 1917, nearly two-thousand immigrant miners, on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, were violently rounded up by their armed neighbors, herded onto cattle cars, shipped to the middle of the New Mexican desert, and […]
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Simulation Training: Action Director Lawrence Ribeiro on Exercises That Help Prepare for Stunts
The following is an excerpt from action director Lawrence Ribeiro’s new book Action Realism. Due to the speed and the nature of stunts and my overall point of view (shooting with the intent of making the images visceral or dynamic), I have come up with some exercises. Scenarios, locales, speeds and context of the story will dictate how I train. Sometimes you need a supply of guts, sometimes you need to overcome your fears, but the truth of the matter is that my feet rarely touch the ground when shooting. It’s more mental than physical, as a few close calls can […]
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Documentary Producers Alliance Fights “Credit Creep” with Proposed Industry Guidelines for Producer Credits
In the world of documentary film, where projects gestate and then are produced over the course of years, and with funding often raised in stages from a variety of different sources, the determination of producer credits can turn into something like the Wild West. There are usually one or more producers who are actually producing the film, and they are supported by a bevy of archival producers, field producers, etc. But what about all the executive producers, co-producers, presenters, etc. — how did they become involved in a film, and what do their credits mean? The question is more than […]
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Remembering Mark Urman, 1952 – 2019
Mark Urman, the film publicist, marketer, distributor, father and husband, was one of the significant figures of the indie film boom of the 1990s and 2000s, participating directly in its rise and adapting to its shifts over the decades. His death last weekend at the age of 66 came as a shock to his colleagues in the industry and a great loss to his friends and family. “We’ve all been shedding tears,” says Jamie Patricof, producer of Half Nelson, one of the breakthrough indies Urman shepherded. “He was such a unique voice in our business, and he was really able […]
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Can Critics’s Awards and Top Ten Mentions Boost Revenues for Independent Films?
Do critics matter? Maybe. But do critics’ top ten lists matter? There’s little doubt within the industry that an Academy Award nomination (or win) can provide an extraordinary boost to a film’s profile, especially smaller independent films who need the long tail of awards recognition more than most. Think of last year’s The Florida Project or Faces Places. But what about all those year-end numerical rankings and lists, proffered by that dwindling professional entity known as the film critic? He’s no Oscar, but when the New York Times’ A.O. Scott puts your little film at the top of his year-end […]
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Steve Bannon, Michael Jackson Docs Added to the 2019 Sundance Film Festival
Although there’s always a chance of an unannounced sneak screening, Sundance’s program is officially locked today with two last additions. The catalog blurbs are below, but suffice to say that both are high-profile docs that lean hard into topics of the day. Dan Reed’s Leaving Neverland deals with alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by Michael Jackson through the stories of survivors while Alison Klayman’s The Brink looks at Steve Bannon’s post-Trump career as an international anti-immigrant rabble rouser. (Klayman was a Filmmaker 25 New Face back in 2011 while in post-production on her debut doc, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.) From the […]
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The 50 Most Anticipated American Films of 2019
Hello! Happy New Year! The fine folks at Filmmaker have invited me back to put together my (now) annual list of the 50 most anticipated American films of the year. I thought about making the list shorter this time around (because 50 blurbs is really a lot), but believe it or not I had a tough time narrowing things down even to this number. Before we get started, I want to share some quick clarifications and warnings: First and foremost, this list represents my opinions alone, and in case you got here via Google you should know that my taste […]
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2018 As a Year in Double Features
Every year, when looked back upon in its final days, reveals patterns. For the past four years, I’ve capped the holiday season with a list of 10 double features from the year in film here at Filmmaker. Each capsule review is, in essence, a mini-thinkpiece on a cinematic trend from the year. This past year gave us many such boomlets: the year of the horse movie, the year of the “white voice” movie, the year of the movie set entirely on digital screens. A delightful interplay emerges when you watch, or think about, films in pairs. One movie brings out […]
