Filmmaking

JORDAN DOES RIGHT BY JACK

Mary Jordan’s Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, which premiered Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a real triumph — a great doc on an artist that manages to encapsulate the spirit and values of its subject while situating his work historically and testifying to his influence on the generations that followed him. Jack Smith was an artist, photographer, filmmaker and performance artist who achieved a blast of notoriety in the early ’60s when his experimental film Flaming Creatures was dubbed obscene and banned in various states and countries. But as Jordan details in her film, Smith […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2006 Filmmaking
MISSED CONNECTIONS

Over at his blog, Anthony Kaufman is blogging about developments in Net Neutrality:: Yesterday, a Republican-dominated House committee shot down an amendment put forth by a Massachusetts Democrat that would have prohibited broadband providers (such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) from blocking or degrading Internet connections to websites that they may deem as competitors. “Net Neutrality” has suffered a major setback… If you don’t think this affects your livelihood and freedom as artists, consider this similar to the Showtime/Smithsonian deal: It’s all about privatizing and monetizing institutions and archives (be they physical or digital) that should be free and equal […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2006 Filmmaking
GOOD NEWS FOR NEW YORK FILMMAKERS

For those worried about the announcement a few weeks back that New York ran out of money for its successful film tax rebate program, here’s an email from Pat Kaufman that arrived in my inbox this morning: The legislature has approved the Governor’s recommended expansion of the film credit!! We are pleased to confirm that funding for the NY State’s Production tax credit has been expanded and extended through 2011. New York State will continue to offer a fully refundable tax credit of 10% of the below the line budget of qualified feature films, episodic television and pilots. The city […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2006 Filmmaking
THE SCANNER IS ON

Warner Independent has just launched a very cool website for A Scanner Darkly, in which you the viewer are placed within the surveillance culture Linklater’s film dissects.

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2006 Filmmaking
SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES JUNE LAB PROJECTS

Indiewire has posted the writers and directors participating in the Sundance June Labs. Here’s the list and the descriptions of the projects: “A Breath Away”/Kit Hui (writer/director), U.S.A./ChinaAs a typhoon approaches Hong Kong, the residents of a high-rise apartment explore their need for human connection, family, and cultural identity in their increasingly isolated worlds.Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kit Hui immigrated to the United States at age 16. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program. Her short film “Missing” screened at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and she was recently […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2006 Filmmaking
NET NEUTRALITY, GRADUATE STUDIES

A few posts below I linked to a short video clip that is something of a primer on Net Neutrality. Here, via Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly begins what in this post is the grad school version — read up ’cause you’ll be tested on this tomorrow. First off , Drum offers a long discussion of the problems inherent in the Barton-Rush bill currently working its way through Congress. Drum starts off a little bit dubious that the issue is as big as some are saying, but he works his way through the pros and cons. He starts by […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 25, 2006 Filmmaking
AUDIENCE WANTED — APPLY WITHIN

Over at his blog,, Anthony Kaufman cuts loose on what he calls the “woefully underpublicized” Indiewire/Emerging Pictures Undiscovered Gems series, which I blogged about a few posts below. The series opens tonight with a 9:30 screening (repeated tomorrow) of Jem Cohen’s debut fiction feature, Chain. He writes: I wouldn’t have even known of the showing myself had I not received an email directly from the director. Emerging Pictures’ web address http://www.emergingpictures.com/undiscovered_gems.htm doesn’t even work; indieWIRE has no mention of the showing on its website, and the Sundance Channel, another sponsor, gives it no props. Maybe it’s just the crowded New […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 25, 2006 Filmmaking
GREEN CINE SPEAKS

Over at his blog, 40 Years in the Desert, Daniel Nemet-Nejat interviews Green Cine’s Jonathan Marlow. We all know Green Cine for its incredible daily blog, but Marlow is the company’s director of content acquisitions and business development and he discusses Green Cine’s distribution activities, including their VOD efforts. Check it out.

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 24, 2006 Filmmaking
SMALL SCREEN WOES

The Wall Street Journal has a piece up by John Jurgensen about declining budgets in the music video industry, a development that has something to do with both music business economics as well as new modes of viewing and distribution. From the article: But music executives also say the big video budgets of the 1990s are generally unnecessary, now that videos are most often watched on small screens like laptops and video iPods. Reality TV programming and the success of amateur “viral” videos that viewers watch and email to friends have changed the expectations of young viewers, says Monte Lipman, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2006 Filmmaking
LOOMPANICS, RIP

In a time in which plans for building a nuclear bomb or engineering a bio-terrorism attack are scarily available on the internet, let’s take a moment to note the closing of Loompanics, the Washington state publisher run by Mike Hoy whose titles were once deemed downright dangerous. Now, however, as the company announces a going out of business sale, Loompanics’s books seem, paradoxically, like quaint mementos of a more innocent time. I say “paradoxically” because there’s no doubt that the publisher, which experienced its share of First Amendment battles, suffered after passage of the Patriot Act when people reading books […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2006 Filmmaking

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