Filmmaking

WAR SONGS

Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake links to one of the oddest anti-war songs going at the moment: a remix by Lou Reed of his “Walk on the Wild Side” that adds a verse about a soldier headed to Iraq in order to feed his family to the song’s litany of Warhol scenesters hustling their way through the streets of New York in the ’70s. The song is in support of Blue America PAC. Strangely, it’s not the first NYC rock revival Gulf War 2 statement I’ve heard this week. I caught Suicide’s Alan Vega out at P.S. 1 this Sunday as he […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 2, 2006 Filmmaking
ADRIENNE SHELLY, R.I.P.

A friend emailed me this afternoon about the sudden passing of actress and director Adrienne Shelly, who was found dead in her office yesterday. This Newsday article has a few more details, but the cause of death is unknown. As an actress Shelly is best known for her work in Hal Hartley’s first two features, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust. A true original in the world of American independent film, she projected a fascinating, low-key charisma on screen and, in Hartley’s work in particular, captured the essence of a brainy and slightly lost young generation trying its hardest to figure […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 2, 2006 Filmmaking
‘EVERY BANANA PEEL AND DYNAMITE STICK…"

Publishers Weekly has what seems to be the first review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day. From the conclusion: Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book’s jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 30, 2006 Filmmaking
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE

Indie films aren’t often noted for their ancillary rights potential, but over ten years after it first premiered at Sundance, there’s a video game based on Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Here’s Game Trailers: Reservoir Dogs is a bit of a chicken and egg debacle. Fans of the movie are going to be put off by an extended story and characters that don’t live up to the original. People who never experienced this dog’s tale before will be wondering “What’s the big deal?” Regardless of whether you’ve seen the movie or not, it’s not hard to realize that Reservoir Dogs is […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 30, 2006 Filmmaking
PAY BY THE BYTE

Paul Harrill has a good find over at his Self-Reliant Filmmaking blog. It’s a site that is figuring out a way to raise production funding for web-distributed short-form work. From Paul’s post: A few weeks ago, in an effort to show my students some of the more interesting film and video work being created for the web I discovered Have Money Will Vlog. It’s an ingenious site that helps media artists raise funds to produce their web-distributed videos and films. The project budgets are in the $2000 – $3000 range, and the donations are usually small — $10, $20, and […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 30, 2006 Filmmaking
ROAMING PLAN

Here’ s someone — typically, not a narrative feature filmmaker — who has figured out how to build a big audience on YouTube with a series of entertaining no-budget films designed especially for the web. Marco Tempest is a magician who has created a fresh persona quite different from David Blaine and Cris Angel. He presents his tricks as entertaining puzzles which he’ll occasionally let you in on, and his YouTube channel contains dozens of clips made for international television and the Microsoft Network in Japan. In his most popular creations, the PhoneCan Magic series (also available as free videopodcasts […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 29, 2006 Filmmaking
15 SECONDS

Over at Ain’t it Cool News Moriaty has up a detailed review of David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which the filmmaker is reportedly self-distributing later this year. I missed it at the New York Film Festival and while I heard mixed, Moriaty’s review really got me psyched. But before the review, he relates this anecdote of Lynch using his apartment as an impromptu location a couple of years ago, an evening that yielded about 15 seconds of footage in the finished film: “They told me that they’d be shooting something for Lynch’s website, a short film. I was shocked to see […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 29, 2006 Filmmaking
TOP RANKED

I don’t know why I’m mentioning this now — we meant to run a blurb in the Summer issue but forgot — but those little numbers that sit next to the different people in our 25 New Faces feature each year… they’re just graphic elements. They don’t mean anything. They let you know we know how to count. We love all of our 25 equally. So filmmakers, enough with the “#7 on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces!” on your C.V.’s!

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 29, 2006 Filmmaking
TRAUMATIC PURCHASE

While out at the Film Independent Filmmaker Conference, which I’ll write more about hopefully later today, I sat down with filmmaker Lance Weiler and learned more about his very impressive model for self-distributing and marketing his independent films. One of his achievements is to simply get as an indie the kind of attention from the big box retailers that studios are used to getting when their videos street. Today, for example Best Buy offers a $5 discount on a package of Weiler’s two films, The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma. Here’s a short piece from Indie Features 06 that gives […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 29, 2006 Filmmaking
THE FUTURE OF HORROR

While SAW 3 slays at the box office this weekend, check out this excellent dialogue between Scott Tobias and Noel Murray over at The Onion‘s A.V. Club on contemporary horror. Here’s an excerpt from Tobias’s comments: So where is horror going? It seems to me that the genre has hit a crisis point creatively: J-horror is dying off, Hollywood is running out of ’70s and ’80s horror staples to remake, and surely at some point, the Saw and Final Destination franchises will lose their novelty. (Though maybe I’m giving audiences too much credit on that last one.) At the same […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2006 Filmmaking

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