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
NET NEUTRALITY 101

Alex Curtis at Public Knowledge created a short two-minute clip explaining just some of what’s at stake in the upcoming battle for “net neutrality.” And here’s from Save the Internet, a new website launched by a coalition supporting net neutrality. From the site: Congress is pushing a law that would abandon Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to have its […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2006 Filmmaking
DON’T FEED THE TROLLS

Over at Caveh Zahedi’s blog, the director of I Am a Sex Addict ponders the downside of posting one’s daily thoughts as a way of promoting a film: One of the interesting things about having a blog is that anyone can attack you anytime and can do so anonymously. At least with film critics, their names are on their reviews. But with a blog, anyone can post a hostile comment, without any kind of accountability. In short, a blog, like a personal film, can serve as a lightning-rod for free-floating cyberspace aggression. I’m not sure what to do with these […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2006 Filmmaking
I POD

The distribution panel I moderated last week is now a podcast. (If I had known this was to be archived on all of your hard drives, I probably would have been more concise in my questions…) Click on the link above to hear Caveh Zahedi, Jay Duplass, Susan Leber and me discuss the treacherous shoals of DIY distribution and offer some hard-earned advice to all of you aspiring directors and producers out there. For a print preview, here’s what Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez had to say about it.

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2006 Filmmaking
CANNES LINEUP

The Cannes lineup is in a bunch of places: here’s the link to Indiewire’s piece. Quick take: Inarritu’s Babel, Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, new films by Bruno Dumont, Pedro Almodovar, Ken Loach and Aki Kaurismaki, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (which we have a tiny preview of in the new issue — more when it comes out), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s follow-up to Distant all in Competition. Andrea Arnold’s Red Road the sole first feature in Competition. (I’m wondering what happened to Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain — Variety reported that it would be the festival “somewhere” just […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2006 Filmmaking
SHOW STOPPERS

Nick Knight’s U.K. fashion and media website SHOWstudio regularly streams some of the most interesting collaborations between media artists and the fashion world. As Knight writes, ““SHOWstudio is based on the belief that showing the entire creative process — from conception to completion — is beneficial for the artist, the audience and the art itself.” Now, SHOWstudio is broadening its community by creating interactive projects with both outside artists and viewers. From the website: Initial investigations into live, interactive fashion—contained within a 180-strong archive of projects on the site—are now being extended into opportunities for SHOWstudio’s international viewer-base to be […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2006 Filmmaking
GUATEMALAN HIGH-FIVE

Over at Green Cine Jonathan Marlow posts a long interview with Todd Rohal, director of The Guatemalan Handshake. The film is one of my favorite indies so far this year. (I’ve actually been following the film for a while as I selected it to be part of the IFP’s Rough Cut program last year.) The film opens this week at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, and for more on the film, go to its website and, while you’re there, click on the iTunes link and subscribe to its podcasts. In the interview, Marlow asks Rohal about casting two musicians […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2006 Filmmaking
FOUR-EYED MONSTERS CONQUER THE EARTH (AND THE APPLE STORE)

Our favorite podcasters, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice of the film Four-Eyed Monsters, are appearing next week at the Apple Store in Soho, New York. The event is part of the Indiewire series there and will be moderated by Eugene Hernandez. Expect to hear about the duo’s evolving plan to self-release their film, a plan which takes the grassroots, DIY approach they’ve developed to market their film to even new levels. Crumley and Buice are splitting their excellent podcast series into two strands. The first continues the soap opera that was the completion of their film and its premiere at […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2006 Filmmaking

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