Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Home Viewing Recommendations: The Day After and NCIS: New Orleans — The Fourth Season
One of the bleakest, most affecting and most expertly directed movies ever made for television arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Kino Lorber’s special edition of Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After. When it first aired on ABC on November 20, 1983, Meyer’s harrowing vision of the impact of a nuclear war on a Kansas town was a phenomenon — over a hundred million people tuned in, making The Day After the highest rated TV-movie in history. It also happened to be one of the most powerful and sophisticated thanks to Meyer’s uncompromising approach to his material (an […]
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How a Baby Bucket List Lead Us to Make Our First Feature Film
They say that making your first feature is a lot like having your first child. My wife, Allyssa, and I have not taken the plunge into childrearing yet but instead we created a “baby bucket list.” It included diving the Great Barrier Reef, petting a Koloa bear, seeing the Sagrada Familia in Spain, attending a rodeo in Hawaii, running a marathon and last but not least making a feature film. At the time I proposed this idea it didn’t seem far-fetched as we met in the film industry. I was working as an associate producer on Scott Pendergrast’s first feature, […]
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Classic 3D, the WW2 Doc Strange Victory and Billy Budd: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
If you’re in Los Angeles, this weekend offers a rare opportunity to see classic 3-D films projected in 35mm as the American Cinematheque and LACMA kick off their “Double Vision” series. Highlights include a screening of Friday the 13th Part III, which is perhaps the most shamelessly fun 3-D movie of all time as it exploits the technology to toss everything from yo-yos to eyeballs into the audience’s lap (it’s also the movie that introduced Jason’s iconic hockey mask); a double feature of the 1983 cult favorites Metalstorm and Rottweiler; and a presentation of Lamont Johnson’s criminally underrated Spacehunter: Adventures […]
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John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, and an Obscure Discovery for Die-Hard Horror Fans: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
After writing and directing the most savage, uncompromising film of his career with the independently financed They Live (1988), John Carpenter made one last stab at big-budget studio filmmaking with the 1992 Chevy Chase vehicle Memoirs of an Invisible Man to disappointing commercial and critical results. In spite of its reception at the time, however, Memoirs is a fascinating film on a number of levels – more fascinating, perhaps, than Carpenter realizes. It’s one of his few movies on which he declined to take a possessory credit, but Carpenter’s signature is all over Memoirs in its deft juggling of emotions […]
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“Our Culture is in Our Language”: Lisa Jackson on Her VR Film Biidaaban: First Light and Indigenous Futurism
Perhaps the most innovative virtual reality work I’ve seen this year has been Lisa Jackson’s Biidaaban: First Light, which premiered earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival. Jackson, an Anishinaabe artist working out of the National Film Board of Canada, has spent years exploring issues of First People identity and language in her work, which includes documentary and fiction film, animation, installations, and other media; in fact, Biidaaban: First Light was designed as a corollary to a multimedia installation. The film’s narrative is minimal. It could be described as a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the viewer witnesses how nature has reclaimed […]
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Don Hahn Talks Howard Ashman, Musical Animation, and his Documentary Howard
For a few brief shining years Howard Ashman was one of the most influential filmmakers in Hollywood. With the composer Alan Menken he had already created an Off-Broadway hit with Little Shop of Horrors, and, at Walt Disney Animation Studios in the late 1980s, he was a pivotal force in creating The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin—films that galvanized an industry-wide animation renaissance—as not just a lyricist but a producer, writer, and director. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, however, while the latter two of these films were still in production: Beauty and the Beast was dedicated “to our friend Howard, who […]
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Promise and The Pitch: A Bible-Themed Short Film Contest That Offers $40,000 in Production Financing
Director and film critic Neville Pierce, who we interviewed several months ago around the online premiere of his shorts, has a new film, Promise, up on the interwebs, and it’s tied to the announcement of an unusual short film contest that offers filmmakers $40,000 in production funds for their winning pitch. From the press release: The Pitch is an annual online pitching competition which invites filmmakers to submit a two-minute video pitching their idea for a short film inspired by The Bible. It can be in any genre, can emerge from any perspective, and can draw on any story, passage, […]
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Kickstarting a “Mezuzah Movie”: Gerald Peary on The Rabbi Goes West
What’s a non-religious, non-observant Jew doing making a movie called The Rabbi Goes West, in which the main character is a Torah-following Hasidic Orthodox rabbi? And who is now, between beloved corned beef sandwiches, in the middle of a $40,000 Kickstarter campaign through August 10 to finish it? Click here to go our Kickstarter page. Glad you asked. I’m a long-time film critic (The Boston Phoenix) and one-time actor (Computer Chess) who turned to filmmaking (For The Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism). My last documentary, Archie’s Betty, was appreciated by the thousand people who saw it, […]
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Towards Gender-Blind Casting: Conversion Therapist Writer/Director Bears Fonte on Trans Performers
On June 12th, 2016, I woke up to coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting and felt my heart being ripped out. Even worse, I was due to moderate a Q&A of the Sandy Hook shooting documentary Newtown that night. What world were we living in? In the aftermath of Pulse, I couldn’t believe the bigotry of certain “ministers” who did more than hint that they believed the terrorist had done the world a favor. Roger Jimenez, a Sacramento preacher, said in a sermon to his parishioners, “The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die… I’m kind of upset that he […]
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Be Everywhere All At Once: The Ultimate Guide to Festivals, Online, & Your Short Film Release
The following article is crossposted with, Short of the Week, a new kind of film festival aimed at discovering the next wave of emerging filmmakers crafting stories for online audiences. Visit them at shortoftheweek.com A few years ago we released our short film online and shared the tactics behind the strategy we used to get views and industry attention in one of our most popular articles titled How We Launched Our Film Online. In the years since, we’ve had the pleasure of working with thousands of filmmakers to release their short films to millions of people around the world and […]
