Filmmaking

GIULIANI REVISITED

Newsweek has a good interview up with director Kevin Keating, whose documentary Giuliani Time opens in theaters this week. I saw the doc in Rotterdam a couple of years ago, and it’s a straightforward and worthwhile pic that tries to throw some balance on the public’s reckoning of Rudy Giuliani. Before 9/11, Giuliani was suffering a severe case of second-term lethargy, forgoing any sense of mayoral ambition and instead initiating regressive policies targeting welfare recipients and the homeless, among others. (For those who wonder how Giuliani cleaned up N.Y.’s “homeless problem,” this film tells you how, and it’s not pretty.) […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 13, 2006 Filmmaking
A TECHNOLOGICAL BUBBLE?

Boing Boing transcribes an interview science-fiction author William Gibson gave to Open Source Radio about the current NSA wiretapping scandal. Here’s the entirety of their quote: I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some… The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don’t think species know what they’re about. I don’t think humanity knows why […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 13, 2006 Filmmaking
DATE NUMBER ONE PREMIERE

Sujewa Ekanayake, who blogs over at his DIY Filmmaker site, is a regular commenter at these and other blogs, and this Saturday he’s premiering his new movie in Washington, D.C. A comedy about several first dates, Date Number One will screen at the Goethe Institute, 812 Seventh St., N.W., at 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. in a benefit for We are Family. This screening is the kick-off to a series of DIY screenings he’ll have over the next year. For more info on the film see Wilddiner.com.

By Scott Macaulay on May 9, 2006 Filmmaking
PTAK FIRES UP ARSENAL

Gabriel Snyder in Variety has the big news that CAA agent John Ptak is leaving the agency to head up Arsenal with partner Philip Elway. Ptak is one of the smartest guys around when it comes to structuring innovative foreign and equity-based financing arrangements, and the new company “will advise producers, distrib companies and private equity funds.” From the article: Arsenal’s initial client list will include Exception-Wild Bunch, Endgame Entertainment, Spitfire Pictures, Kadokawa Pictures USA and Davis Films. Shingle plans to be up and running just after this year’s edition of the Cannes fest closes. In a statement, Ptak said […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2006 Filmmaking
7’08"

Okay, he didn’t make it to his goal of nine minutes, but hats off to David Blaine for the culmination of another incredible piece of public theater. I was having drinks with a friend on the Upper West Side on Saturday night and walked down to Lincoln Center at 2:30 in the a.m. and there was a line a half hour long to see him underwater in his glass sphere. Tonight I watched the ABC special and found the seven-minutes-plus he held his breath impressive enough. But, most of all, I like that Blaine’s stunts, like Houdini’s almost a century […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2006 Filmmaking
SCORSESE, CBS RESPOND TO FCC, U.S. STORY EDITOR

William Triplett in Variety reports on a truly alarming development: the levying of fines by the FCC to broadcasters whose program content they deem not justified by story needs. The background: the FCC has issued $3.5 million in fines to 100 CBS stations for their airing of an episode of Without a Trace that included “two brief scenes suggesting a teen sex party, which the commission said was ‘unnecessary’ to the story.” CBS has filed a complaint, arguing “that this is a new assertion of authority that constitutes a ‘deep intrusion into the editorial process.’” The article continues: For the […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2006 Filmmaking
I AM CURIOUS, "YELLOW"

Via Coolhunting comes the latest in Adidas’s short-film series, Yellow, directed by Neill Blomkamp. The shorts have all been commissioned by the sneaker company to introduce new colors in its line, and, I have to confess, I find the shorts kind of confusing in their strange lack of relationship to the product coupled with their general inability to stand on their own as short films. A while back I linked to the first in the series, a mixture of animation and Jenna Jameson. (Thanks, Jenna, for spiking our traffic by linking to us from your MySpace page!) This new film […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 7, 2006 Filmmaking
SPIRITS RISING

In his weekend report, Len Klady over at Movie City News cites the solid box-office performance of Courtney Solomon’s An American Haunting this weekend: The frame’s other national freshmen targeted horror and family fans to varying effect. An American Haunting, based on the historic Bell Witch incident, ranked fourth with good response that should pave the way for very good ancillary exploitation. Depending on who you quote, the film grossed between $5.9 and $6.4 million this weekend, and it opened against Mission Impossible 3. What’s really interesting, though, is that An American Haunting isn’t a studio release but an independent […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 7, 2006 Filmmaking
MORE ROOM

A while back I blogged about Tommy Wisseau’s The Room, which for years has screened monthly in L.A. in screenings organized by the filmmaker. Now, NPR has picked up on the story: The consensus is that the movie is so bad it’s actually painfully funny to watch. What makes the experience so much fun are the hundred or so fans that routinely show up for screenings. During the movie, audience members shout out their own commentary about the dialogue, the sets — and notably, the framed photograph of a spoon that inexplicably reappears. Each time this happens, plastic spoons are […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 6, 2006 Filmmaking
TRUTH IN PACKAGING

Screenwriter turned director Jessica Bendinger (Stick) interviewed on Box Office Mojo discussing the issue of writing credits and multiple writers on a single picture: Bring It On is the only original movie I’ve written. On First Daughter, I was the 15th of 17 writers and we all know what happens when you write by committee. I think the [writer’s union] and movie studios need to get real. I’m not opposed to truth in labeling. If you have so many writers, I think it should be required to say how many wrote it and then people wouldn’t go see it. Certain […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 6, 2006 Filmmaking

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