Filmmaking

PARTYING LIKE ITS 1994

In the beginning days of Filmmaker, Kevin Smith’s Clerks was one of our big topics, a movie that really connected to our readership and helped define the whole indie movie DIY thing. And now, 12 years later, Smith has made a sequel. Somehow, the timing feels right…

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 3, 2006 Filmmaking
YOUTUBE — HERE TO STAY

CNET covers Youtube: Executives from heavyweights such as Yahoo, America Online and Turner Broadcasting were buzzing about YouTube’s sudden success at the Digital Hollywood conference here this week. Even though it’s not clear exactly how YouTube will make money, no company generated as much excitement at the gathering of Hollywood studios, electronics manufacturers and Internet media companies….

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2006 Filmmaking
A DEFINITION OF MENTORSHIP

In Simon Reynold’s great history of post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again, the critic describes trips taken by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt (who, with Eno, co-created Oblique Strategies, a set of simple directives on playing cards — example: “Don’t avoid what is easy” — intended as creative aids) to the British art school Watford in the ’70s where Eno would help students with projects. On some nights Eno and Schmidt would give Colin Newman, founding member of Wire (pictured), a lift, and Newman’s quote is a good description of how one generation supports another when it comes to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2006 Filmmaking
JOHN AUGUST’S WORST WORKING HABIT

From “10 Things I Hate About Me” posted on the great blog by the screenwriter of Go, Big Fish, and Corpse Bride, among others: Particularly when I’m re-writing a script, I suffer from what my friend John Gatins refers to as the line-painter dilemma. Here’s the short version: A guy is hired to paint the yellow line down the middle of a country road. The first day, he paints five miles. His supervisor is impressed. The second day, he only paints two miles. His supervisor thinks, “Well, maybe he had a bad day.” But the third day, the guy only […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 30, 2006 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

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