Filmmaking

HOOK THEM IN THE FIRST TEN PAGES

The Raw Word is a monthly New York screenplay reading series in which up-and-coming actors perform 10 pages of scripts by up-and-coming screenwriters. Sponsored by the IFP, the series features an industry host and is a networking opportunity for writers, actors and development folk. The December event just passed, but you can submit “your most dynamic 10 pages in Microsoft Word or PDF format” for future readings by emailing them to: rawwordreadings@yahoo.com.

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2006 Filmmaking
COMPLETING THE PICTURE

Over at her journal, author Susie Bright eulogizes Gary Graver, the d.p., director, and colleague of Orson Welles in his later years, by noting the breadth of his overlooked biography. In addition to crewing films like A Woman Under the Influence, working extensively with Roger Corman, directing many low-budget horror films, and even shooting Ron Howard’s first feature, Grand Theft Auto, Graver, pictured here with Welles, directed many adult movies which, while included on iMDB, have been omitted from his various industry obits. Here’s Bright: Graver was memorialized everywhere, acclaimed in every paper from New York to L.A. But nowhere […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2006 Filmmaking
GIBSON’S FUTURE OF FILM

From The Guardian, a piece on Mel Gibson in which he places his new Apocalypto within a line of bigger-budget movies that are forming a new breed of independent films: Gibson has evidently chosen to turn his back on mainstream American cinema and take risks. “I’m getting to a place where I look at the future of cinema as independent film, through which there’s a hunger for a different kind of fare that simply isn’t being catered to by anyone, other than independent film-makers.” Not, he says, that he is deliberately shunning the mainstream studio system: “I really don’t think […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2006 Filmmaking
OVERWORK, DEPRESSION, RADIATION

The last time I linked to Tim Lucas and his excellent Video WatchBlog Lucas was dissecting the psychological motives and emotional pitfalls of DVD collecting. Now, in a post entitled “The Trouble with Blogging,” he is similarly ruminative about the film blogging rat race, realizing that his blogging compulsion has not left him enough time to dig into the new Thomas Pynchon novel. At the very least, Lucas’s post makes me feel better about my semi-frequent blogging breaks and sometimes sloppy proofreading. From the piece: “The trouble with blogging is that, at some point, you discover that you have become […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2006 Filmmaking
ROCKY TAKES ON JULIEN

Ain’t It Cool News is running for several days an online feature in which Sylvester Stallone, who is promoting his new Rocky Balboa, answers 200 questions from AICN readers. I was very, very surprised to read Day Five’s post in which Stallone answers a question about his favorite films by listing two: The Godfather and then a film I produced that I wouldn’t have guessed would be a pick of Rocky’s. Here’s Stallone: I like a lot of films from the 70s. I don’t like to speak specifically because sometimes people get offended. But, my taste runs from THE GODFATHER […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2006 Filmmaking
IWO JIMA TOPS NBR

With the Gothams passed out last week and the National Board of Review giving their top nods last night, the award season is beginning to blossom. The NBR named Clint Eastwood‘s second film on World War II this year, Letters From Iwo Jima, its Best Film (scroll down for full list). Shot around Southern California in 33 days on a substantially lower budget than Flags of our Fathers, most believed Iwo Jima – which is in Japanese and its only actor familiar to American audiences is Ken Watanabe – was to play second fiddle to its star-studded predecessor. But when […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Dec 7, 2006 Filmmaking
4 MILLION AND COUNTING

Over at Wild Diner Films, Sujewa Ekanayake has a long interview up with Lance Weiler in which the filmmaker and frighteningly efficient self-distributor talks about his new movie, Head Trauma and the pleasures of releasing a film on one’s own. (Re the title of this post, apparently Head Trauma has grossed $4 million in distribution income.) An excerpt: Reality is setting in as more and more films are being made every year. The tools are accessible, which allows for a diversity of voices but the flood of work is putting a strangle hold on an already strained system. Self-distribution is […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2006 Filmmaking
THE "A"-WORD

While reading the New York Times this morning, I was struck by Manohla Dargis’s evocation of the “a”-word when reviewing David Lynch’s new Inland Empire: “…the extraordinary, savagely uncompromised Inland Empire, his first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse.” Yep, she called it Art. On the front-page of the Weekend section […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2006 Filmmaking
PENNILESS

Larry Fine has a piece up at Reuters noting the dissolution of InDigEnt, the innovative low-budget film company created by Gary Winick and John Sloss that was behind pictures like Tadpole, Personal Velocity and Pieces of April (pictured). From the piece: “I kind of think we had our moment in time. Unfortunately there is no million-dollar film any more that actually gets in the market place and makes some money because the studios want the Capotes’ and the ‘Sideways‘ … they want the $8-million film to make a $100 million instead of the $1-million to make $10 (million). That’s the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2006 Filmmaking
PARTY OF ONE

If you bookmark this blog and don’t regularly check out the main page, click over there for the first Filmmaker-sponsored podcast short, Jamie Stuart’s Corner Dweller, in which Stuart brings his now-patented hard-boiled persona to the pre-Gotham Awards nominees party. Here’s what David Hudson at GreenCine had to say about it: … in his latest, for Filmmaker, Corner-Dweller, set against the backdrop of the IFP Gotham Awards Nominee Reception, he’s gouged out his own niche and, even assuming Kaufmanesque self-referentiality as a given, staked out his own as-yet-uncharted ground.

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2006 Filmmaking

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