Filmmaking

GROWING PAINS

If you’re in NYC tomorrow night, here’s news of a panel event sponsored by the IFP which is free to readers of the Filmmaker blog. And also take note of next week’s Independent Film Week promotion, in which tickets to a bunch of NYC independent theaters are discounted to only $6. IFP and The New York Times present a Special TimesTalks Panel with Independent Filmmakers FREE for Friends of Filmmaker Magazine! “COMING OF AGE ON SCREEN” Don’t miss this conversation with independent filmmakers whose own rites of passage inspired their films and captured an era. Moderated by David Carr, New […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 12, 2006 Filmmaking
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG WOMAN

The Paris Review has scored the first published interview with Laura Albert, the “woman who was JT LeRoy.” There’s only a small excerpt on the website from Nathaniel Rich’s interview with Albert, which I’ve quoted in its entirety below. To read the rest, we’ll have to pick up the magazine. The quote below details that “Eureka!” moment in which a young Albert developed a strategy that she would finetune in later years. From the interview: INTERVIEWER: Did you have many friends at school—kids your own age? LAURA ALBERT: I was friends with all the nerd guys. And the popular kids […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 12, 2006 Filmmaking
WIDESCREEN BLUES

I’ve vowed not to link to James Ponsoldt’s blog too much since I produced his feature Off the Black, but he’s a prolific writer who is frequently posting pieces that are interesting and useful enough to other filmmakers. So, here I’m busting my conflict-of-interest self-censorship to note his comments on shrinking Tim Orr’s widescreen compositions to 1:1.35 for our video transfer: On Tim’s off-days, he and I met at Technicolor to begin the color-timing process (for video/DVD) with the brilliant MIKE UNDERWOOD. Mike’s a colorist, and worked with Tim on both “All the Real Girls” and “Undertow.” The two of […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 5, 2006 Filmmaking
THE LONGTAIL APPROACHES

Via Brian Newman’s blog this movie trailer timed to the release of Chris Anderson’s new book, The Long Tail. Historical point of reference: Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s 1973 video, Television Delivers People.

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 4, 2006 Filmmaking
SCARLETT FEVER

Here’s Bob Dylan’s new music video, “When the Deal Goes Down,” directed by Capote helmer Bennett Miller and starring Scarlett Johannson.

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 4, 2006 Filmmaking
BLOGGING TORONTO

The Toronto Film Festival doesn’t start until later this week, but already its new doc blog is off to a great start. It’s both an online destination to update yourself on festival news as well as a place for Festival filmmakers to write about everything from the making of their films to other films at the festival they’ve been compelled by. There are a bunch of great pieces already up. Here, for example, is Sophie Fiennes on her Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a three-part documentary in which Slavoj Zizek analyzes films by such favorite directors as Hitchcock, Lynch and Tarkovsky: […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 4, 2006 Filmmaking
SECOND DATES

Sujewa Ekanayake emailed with a couple of good links. The first is Alison Wilmore’s piece on IFC.com detailing three filmmakers — Ekanayake plus Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation) and Lance Weiler (Head Trauma — who have gone the self-distribution route. “September may be the month self-distribution comes into its own,” she writes. And then there’s Ekanayake’s interview with Michael Tully on the eve of his Cocaine Angels New York premiere. Check them out and support these filmmakers as their films get released this month.

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 3, 2006 Filmmaking
DRIFTING

The album of the year — Scott Walker’s The Drift — now has an amazing, sepulchral music video to go along with it. It’s late, I’m tired, so I’m just going to quote from Pitchfork: Animator/Tomato-associate Graham Wood has assembled an appropriately eerie, nightmarish mindfuck of a video for Scott Walker’s “Jesse”, from this year’s Best New Music’d The Drift. The piece, which recalls both Stanley Donwood’s work with Radiohead circa OK Computer and the storied 4AD aesthetic, features familiar symbols and pictograms (smiley face, generic man and woman, cross) a-Drift in a kaleidoscope of dissolving lines, patterns, and textures. […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 31, 2006 Filmmaking
BLOG ROUNDUP

The fourth Tuesday of every month Nicole Rafter, author of Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, contributes a column on crime films to the Oxford University Press blog. In her latest column she takes on my favorite whipping boy from one of my favorite directors, this summer’s Miami Vice: It may be that crime films in general are running out of gas today after the revival and boom of the late 20th-century that began in 1967 with the release of Bonnie and Clyde and went into high gear in 1971, when Dirty Harry introduced the new genre of […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2006 Filmmaking
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride tips this L.A. Times piece by James Ellroy in which the noir author ruminates on his flight from and return to Los Angeles, the city that has inspired so many of his novels. With Brian DePalma’s adaptation of The Black Dahlia (pictured) just a few weeks away, Ellroy sketches the psychic landscape of the city while discussing emotional and mental breakdowns, literary mania, and general sleeplessness. From the piece: L.A. bids pundits to spin epigrams. W.H. Auden called L.A. “The Great Wrong Place.” I’ll ascribe intent. Auden saw L.A. as a lodestone for […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2006 Filmmaking

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