Filmmaking

CABIN FEVER

A colleague who programs for a regional film festival forwarded this link to screenwriter William Martell’s blog in which he launches a lengthy broadside against the purity of film festivals. An excerpt: You probably think of film festivals as some sort of important institution – a cultural event designed to select the very best motion pictures and give them the rewards they so rightly deserve. A place where commerce doesn’t matter, and artistic expression is worshiped. A place where people only care about the quality of the film, and only the best films are screened. Bullshit. Film festivals are about […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2006 Filmmaking
CURRICULUM EXPANDER

I came across journalism student Clementine Gallot’s blog Franco American after noticing a comment she posted to one of my postings on Gaspar Noe, below. Gallot posts in French and in English and here she is, excerpted, on Noe’s screening of his short We Fuck Alone to a group of NYU students: …Noe’s 23-minute piece features a couple having sex on television and a young girl masturbating to a teddy bear while a punk jerks off to an inflatable doll. Shot with a small DV camera between Los Angeles and New York, it employs strobes and the soundtrack of a […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 22, 2006 Filmmaking
HOPE AT THE HAMPTONS

Ted Hope was honored tonight out at the Hamptons International Film Festival with its annual Hamptons/Indiewire Industry Toast. The producer of over 50 movies (and an old and good friend), Hope was given this mid-career honor for producing a body of work that, so far, includes films by, among many others, Ang Lee, Nicole Holofcener, Michel Gondry, Ed Burns, Hal Hartley, and Todd Solondz; the creation of pioneering production companies (Good Machine and now This is That); leading several industry initiatives, including the indie battle against the MPAA screener ban; and, as James Schamus quite eloquently summarized at the evening’s […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2006 Filmmaking
JUNE AND JULY IN OCTOBER

Thought I’d congratulate Brady Hall who won the Best Feature at the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings festival last week for his feature June and July. I was a judge along with John Vanco of the IFC Center, Charlie Humphrey of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Lane Kneedler of the AFI Festival. The film is a somewhat unclassifiable drama about a pair of fraternal twins living in the Pacific Northwest as it mixes science fiction elements with what might otherwise be a small-scale indie relationship movie. Here’s the NWFF’s catalog on the film: Written and directed by Seattle filmmaker Brady Hall (POLERCHRIST, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 18, 2006 Filmmaking
A.S.L.: 2.7

Film scholar David Bordwell has a blog and it’s always worth checking out for his investigations into the art and industry of moviemaking. Here’s an excerpt from a piece on the Scorsese’s The Departed. After winding through a very interesting comparison of this film’s narrative resolution and the Hong Kong original’s, he discusses Scorsese’s editing style: The Departed has calmed Scorsese’s urge to track a bit, but that’s balanced by its over 3200 cuts. The result is an average shot length (ASL) of about 2.7 seconds. Not unusual for an action picture nowadays, but consider where Scorsese started by conning […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 18, 2006 Filmmaking
SPOILS OF WAR

Ben Fritz and Phil Gallo have an article in Variety this week titled “Biz’s share scares” that details the games the major entertainment congolomerates are beginning to enter into with the various media-sharing companies. In short, Universal Music has launched a copyright infringment lawsuit against Grouper Networks, which runs the media-sharing site Bolt.com. The two twists in the article are that Grouper is owned by Universal-rival Sony, which bought the network this summer, and that Universal Music recently signed a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, the largest of the video-sharing sites. Here’s the key passage in the article: The two suits […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 18, 2006 Filmmaking
FAMILY VALUES

Doug Block’s doc 51 Birch Street opens this week at the Cinema Village in New York. Here’s what Paul Harrill at Self-Reliant Film had to say about it: The film is being billed, not incorrectly, as a documentary mystery: Just a few months after Doug’s mother dies, Doug’s father suddenly announces that he’s engaged to his former secretary. It’s not long before Doug finds himself at their wedding, awkwardly toasting the new couple. At the reception his father, the groom, is a different man. What’s the story? Was his father unfaithful? Was his parents’ seemingly happy marriage a sham? Doug […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 18, 2006 Filmmaking
RANDOM YOUTUBE VIDEO #1

An Andy Warhol Braniff Airlines commericial from the 1970s:

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 17, 2006 Filmmaking
BRITNEY SPEARS: "EXTREMELY EXPERIMENTAL AND WEIRD"

The latest configuration of the Cleveland rock band Pere Ubu has a new album out, Why I Hate Women, and here’s frontman David Thomas in this month’s The Wire on the real avant garde: “In the early 70s,” he says, “the evolution of rock was very, very, very obvious. Analogue synthesizers and concrete sound was entering into the music. Various people had various strategies, and it wasn’t one thing. It was stuido techniques and other things. All of it, to us, was coming to this juncture. And it was very obvious to us that this was what rock music was […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 17, 2006 Filmmaking
EARLY WARNING

Over at his blog Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy,, Owen Hatherley writes about Todd Haynes’s Safe and recognizes its foreshadowing of our contemporary urban situation: From it’s opening sex scene onwards- the grim treadmill behind the neon-lit Southern California cityscape of the generic erotic thriller- Todd Haynes’ Safe is a depiction of the most important city of the early 1990s. The edge of apocalypse you can hear in the synth whines of Dr Dre’s The Chronic, the fire and brimstone of Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, Mike Davis’ City of Quartz and of course the LA Riots: in all this […]

By Scott Macaulay on Oct 17, 2006 Filmmaking

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