Filmmaking

HYBRID DISTRIBUTION

The Hollywood Reporter’s Gregg Goldstein has a piece up about alternative distribution, discussing how films like Anytown, USA, The Dogwalker, and Tennis, Anyone are getting in front of audiences after being passed on by traditional distribs. In the piece, Peter Broderick coins the term “hybrid distribution” to describe these filmmaker/alternative distrib partnerships. Among the companies discussed: Without a Box, Truly Indie, Emerging Pictures and Film Movement.

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 30, 2006 Filmmaking
SNEAKER ENVY

Coolhunting reports that Adidas has hired seven directors to make short films for each of their new “adicolor” hues. The first is by the animation and design house Tronic. On their website, the outfit states, “The strength of Tronic lies in our ability to leverage our various backgrounds as architects, designers, art directors and directors to establish a collective fusing of ideas, images, movement and experience. By actively shaping all projects through a rigorous conceptual process, we transcend preconceived notions of how to arrive at a particular creative solution within any of the media that we work.” Their film for […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 29, 2006 Filmmaking
THE WRITER’S LIFE

Josh Friedman is blogging again following his cancer surgery. The screenwriter (War of the Worlds, The Black Dahlia) has a great post up in which describes waking up the day he’s to go the hospital and musing on his mortality. Friedman’s thoughts on the finite-ness of it all remind me of the end of The Sheltering Sky, Bertolucci’s adaptation of Paul Bowles’s great novel, and then he slips in this contemplation on the act of writing: At the end of the day, why do we write? We write to remember, we write to be remembered, we write to discover who […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 29, 2006 Filmmaking
ZAHEDI’S SIRIUS REQUEST

One of the things I’ve learned producing independent films and trying to get them publicity: it’s really hard to break into national television and radio media if you’re an indie movie. The bookers on Letterman, Leno and all the morning shows will consider your movie if you break $5 million at the box office and are in the top 50 markets… but usually not before unless you’re already a major celebrity. Still, I would have imagined that an exception might be made for Caveh Zahedi. Over at Zahedi’s blog, the writer/director of the autobiographical I am a Sex Addict is […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 28, 2006 Filmmaking
STANISLAW LEM, 1921 – 2006

One of my favorite science fiction writers, Stanislaw Lem, died yesterday of a heart ailment. The Polish writer’s work incorporated everything from Kafkaesque humor to political allegory to phiosophical inquiry in novels such as The Futurological Congress, Cyberiad, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and Solaris, the latter of which was made into films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. (All of the above are highly recommended.) Those who feel they’ve gotten their Lem through one of the two filmed versions of Solaris should pick up the late author’s novel, which is much less a romantic fable and much more a […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 28, 2006 Filmmaking
GUARDED FILMMAKER

Over at Sujewa Ekanayake’s Indie Features 06, the group blog where he’s invited filmmakers premiering their films this year to post, director Deborah Scranton has joined the mix. Her doc, The War Tapes, premieres at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival. Click on the film’s link to go to Scranton’s own site, where she’s posted clips of the film and maintains a running blog in which her own writing is complemented by others involved with her film. And here’s how she introduced herself at Indie Features 06: I’m a film director, single mom, former competitive ski racer, New England farm girl, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 26, 2006 Filmmaking
PARALYZED BY FILM

In The Observer, director Julien Temple describes his nervous breakdown to Simon Garfield when he felt “paralyzed by film” while making a documentary on the Glastonbury Film Festival. After shooting 250 hours of footage at the 2002 edition, Temple realized that there was so much more about the festival’s history that he wanted to capture. So, he put out a call to anyone who had any footage of any one of the Glastonbury festivals, and the envelopes starting pouring in: ‘These padded envelopes kept arriving and you thought, “Oh my God,”‘ Temple recalls in his converted editing barn near Bridgwater, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 26, 2006 Filmmaking
VIDEOTEQUE DEBUTS

The guys who run the new music/MP3 blog Good Weather for Air Strikes have launched a new blog devoted solely to music video downloads called Videoteque. Named in homage to Radiohead, the site features no streaming video, just downloads, many in iPod-ready MP4 format. First up, yes, a bunch of Radiohead clips by such directors as Michel Gondry and Jamie Thraves.

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 26, 2006 Filmmaking
MORE FILMS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND ARCHITECTURE

Over at Movie City Indie,, Ray Pride posts all manner of thoughts and links regarding contemporary cinema. But over at Shark Forum, the Chicaco artists online group, he posts more personal stuff that might not make the general-interest cut of his other sites. Like here’s a collection of photos Pride took following his various director interviews. He writes, “I consistently blank on any memory of shaking hands in greeting. After each of the interviews, usually at a luxury hotel on Michigan Avenue or River North, I’ve grabbed the first bold image to clear my head from a half hour or […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2006 Filmmaking
CONSERVATIVE VALUES IN THE MULTIPLEX

Nerve has just put up their new film issue, and a centerpiece is Justin Clark’s portrait of businessman Philip Anschutz, the conservative theater chain owner and film financier (The Chronicles of Narnia, Ray). The article is an interesting look at Anschutz’s various business interests and how some of them intertwine with his conservative politics. Of the latter, Clark writes: A heavy contributor to the Republican Party for decades, Anschutz helped fund Amendment 2, a ballot initiative to overturn a state law protecting gay rights, and helped stop another initiative promoting medical marijuana. More recently, he helped fund the Discovery Institute, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2006 Filmmaking

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