Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Truth About Hollywood: On Ben Fritz’s The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies
Hollywood has been transformed. The six major studios — Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Fox, Sony, and Paramount — have all changed significantly. Few filmmakers understand how profound these changes have been and how they have altered their opportunities. What follows is my review of a recently published book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, that opened my eyes to the new configuration of studio filmmaking. It was written by Ben Fritz, who has been covering the entertainment industry since 2004 for Variety, the Los Angeles Times and currently the Wall Street Journal. The goal of […]
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More American Graffiti and Spetters: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Blu-ray Picks
For nearly as long as Hollywood has been making movies they’ve been making sequels, and for most of that time journalists and critics have grumbled about the studios’ lack of originality; yet there’s an honorable tradition of filmmakers using the perceived economic insurance of sequels to create some of the riskiest and most personal films ever to come out of Hollywood. Francis Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, John Boorman’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic, Peter Bogdanovich’s Texasville, Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2 and Jack Nicholson’s commercially disastrous but artistically triumphant Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes are all films that either greatly […]
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An Evolution in Shorts: Jamie Stuart on Five Films Leading Up to A Motion Selfie
Longtime Filmmaker contributor Jamie Stuart premieres his debut feature film, A Motion Selfie, direct to Vimeo tomorrow. To mark the occasion, he’s written this guest blog post about five of the short films he made for us over the years, using them to trace his progression as a filmmaker. 1) White Plastic Flower (2007) This short was really significant for me developmentally. Web video was still a relative novelty (YouTube had launched only a year before), so prior to this, most of my work maintained an offbeat comical vibe. For whatever reason, I went into this one without caring what […]
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Why I Am Hopeful: Programmer Eric Allen Hatch on the Future of Arthouse Programming
As a film programmer who recently made the painful but necessary decision to quit the organization at which I’d worked for 11 years, you might expect me to have a dim view of contemporary film culture. I don’t. Quite the contrary: I feel strongly that this is one of the great watershed moments in the history of cinema. Some of the reasons for my optimism are personal, but most can be generalized. Working more than a decade for a regional film festival that gradually entered the national discussion around independent film, I became increasingly aware of an alarming divide. On […]
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Wide Open or Ajar: Theatrical Windows in the VOD Age
It used to be so simple: Release a movie in theaters and, several months later, it would come to your local video store. Nowadays, each and every film’s release pattern and chosen distribution platforms are—or, at least, should be—idiosyncratic, unique, and specifically tailored. “The first thing you have to ask yourself,” distribution consultant Michael Tuckman says, “is who is your audience, and work backwards from there to figure out what windowing you’re going to do.” If the target audience is a young demographic who spend most of their time on devices, then, according to The Orchard’s Paul Davidson, “a SVOD […]
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How to Cast and Direct an Ensemble Film: Seven Lessons from Bernard and Huey Director Dan Mirvish
One of the great joys of directing a film is to work with actors, and when you make an ensemble film, you get to work with a lot of actors! But working with any big group of people — especially actors! — can come with a host of unique challenges. So, whether you’re making a blockbuster like the Russo Brother’s recent uber-ensemble Avengers: Infinity Wars or you’re making a web series in your back yard with all your high school drama class friends, many of the lessons are the same. My current film, Bernard and Huey may sound like a […]
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Designing Woman, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and The Fosters: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Blu-Ray and Streaming Picks
By 1957, television was competing with movies in a way that had driven studio films toward the epic widescreen aesthetic of Bridge on the River Kwai and The Ten Commandments, yet the relationship between TV and mainstream cinema was more complex than that of straightforward opposition in terms of style and scale. Although spectacles like those of David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille were designed to draw audiences to theaters for experiences they couldn’t get at home, the fact that older films from the ’30s and ’40s were suddenly accessible on the small screen gave some viewers a thirst for […]
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Wearing a Sandwich Board to Promote Your Movie: Tips from Bernard and Huey Director Dan Mirvish
There are two types of filmmakers: those who will stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board to promote their movies, and those who will not. Dan Mirvish is fearlessly in the former category, as evidenced by this video, which finds the Bernard and Huey writer, director and Slamdance co-founder outside the Laemmle Monica hustling passersby to come and see his movie this weekend (and also be passersby in a video about promoting via a sandwich board). Writes Mirvish in an email about promoting via sandwich board: It has some historical context: 22 years ago, I wore a similar […]
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Au Hasard Balthazar, Midnight Cowboy and Of Unknown Origin: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
Jean-Luc Godard called Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar “the world in an hour and a half,” and revisiting the film over 50 years after its release, it’s hard to disagree. There’s not a lot of plot in the conventional sense; Bresson simply follows the life of a donkey as he passes through various owners and uses the animal as a linking device between episodes depicting the human condition in all its variety — though he does tend toward the darker side of the emotional spectrum. For all the talk of salvation and transcendence in Bresson’s films that has been going […]
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Mulholland Drive Magician Richard Green on Catherine Coulson, The Log Lady
Catherine Coulson gathered her closest family and friends to help her survive her terminal illness just long enough to play the Log Lady on Twin Peaks: The Return, a character she had created decades ago with her lifelong friend, David Lynch. Why? Why must the show go on? What drives us as artists to overcome the obstacles, both real and within our heads, to finish the work? Lynch did seven years of newspaper routes delivering the Wall Street Journal till dawn to buy film to shoot Eraserhead, while Catherine took waitress jobs to feed him and everyone else on the crew. Why? I […]
