Filmmaking

VAL KILMER RETURNS TO GOTHAM CITY

The Gothamist does some investigation into an urban mystery: the preponderance of Val Kilmer grafitti-heads plastered on buildings and billboards around town. Gothamist links to Fox News, which goes so far as to inquire with Kilmer’s reps as to whether the heads are part of a publicity campaign for the actor: “‘Val is against the defacement of any public property,’ said his publicist Michael Yanni, adding that while Kilmer won’t comment directly on the peculiar postings, he is aware of them and ‘definitely intrigued. He is wondering about the why and who of it all.’” The why and who of […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2006 Filmmaking
THE GAYEST SUPERHERO?

Screenwriter and critic Larry Gross offers a deep reading of V for Vendettain Movie City News in which he claims that not only is the film’s masked figure “the gayest superhero of all time,” but that the film’s narrative uses “the gay political agenda” as a narrative force against a more generalized repressive order: In any case, V for Vendetta forwards the gay political agenda far more vigorously, unapologetically and, one might say, passionately than Brokeback ever did. But I wonder if the gay community wants this kind of almost apocalyptic gesture any more than the Democratic party wants Feingold […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 24, 2006 Filmmaking
A WEB TEASE

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles has a reaction/review to the upcoming The Notorious Betty Page, Mary Harron’s bio-pic on the ’50s pinup and fetish queen. He’s in love with the film, writing, “The flick has an innocence and a joy for life that you just don’t see in many films. Especially films about an ‘exploitive’ lifestyle.” Knowles goes on to link to a clip from the film, Harron’s light-hearted recreation of one of filmmaker Irving Klaw’s soft-core bondage films starring Page, who is played in the film by Gretchen Mol. The Quicktime version of the clip can […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2006 Filmmaking
HOW TO FIX TIME WARNER

I linked to Erick Schonfeld in the post below and now just see on Anne Thompson’s blog this link to a new piece of his, “5 Ways to Fix Time Warner.” It’s a very interesting piece with ideas that should be considered by anyone distributing media today. For example, Schonfeld advocates a move away from the blockbuster to the “nichebuster”: Once the businesses are organized around audience niches, creating blockbusters becomes less necessary. Instead, media businesses that are focused on narrow audiences will naturally give rise to the more cost-effective “nichebuster.” A nichebuster is any kind of content that becomes […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2006 Filmmaking
SHARING THE WEALTH

A depressing element of the music filesharing revolution has been the suggestion by its proponents that tour income and t-shirt sales will be the new revenue model for bands losing the royalties they would have (in a perfect world) received from consumers buying their music. I’ve wondered, what if a band or musician didn’t want to spend his life touring and just wanted to make records? Obviously a similar challenge is about to face filmmakers as increasing storage capacities and new digital download services arise to reshape the way films are distributed. Already sites like the Google Video Store and […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2006 Filmmaking
THE RIGHTS STUFF

I’ll have more to say in a future post about the situation in France involving iTunes and Apple’s proprietary “Fair Play” technology. Briefly, the French government is considering a bill which would require Apple to share it’s proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology so that a consumer could play songs downloaded on iTunes on any iPod-competing music player. This is big news for Apple, as it threatens the near-monopoly they’ve developed on portable music players and online music downloads. And as iTunes is positioned to be a market leader in movie downloads as well, anything that challenges their business model […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2006 Filmmaking
THE POWER OF NARRATIVE

Green Cine notes this interesting piece by Andrew Tracy in Cinema Scope about the new director’s cut DVD of James Gray’s The Yards. He’s got a great opener, a provocative discussion of what he sees as the diminished respect given classical movie narrative today that winds up as a preamble for his discussion of Gray’s ’70s-inspired gangster pic. From the piece: As a means of telling us about our world, classical narrative cinema—that is, American narrative cinema—has been steadily losing ground. James Agee’s faith in the scenario seems somewhat quaint in the midst of our fascination with hybridity. Documentary, whether […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2006 Filmmaking
FRIENDS IN NEED

The Association of Independent Film and Videomakers is one of the country’s oldest media arts groups as well as publisher of The Independent. It recently announced a reinvention due to a financial crisis and is calling on members and supporters in the indie community to help. Click on the links above and let the organization itself tell you how they are reorganizing and how you can aid them in this pressing time of need, or listen to filmmakers like Paul Harrill, who, on his blog, spells out the reasons why he’s sending them $100 and is urging you to do […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006 Filmmaking
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

Over at his Video Watchblog, Tim Lucas self-analyzes his compulsive DVD collecting, tracing it back to an incident in his youth: When I was six or seven years old, my mother married a man who, a week or two into their short-lived marriage, sold every toy and comic book I owned in a yard sale and used the money to get drunk. When I was sixteen years old, I made the decision to leave home and, for various reasons, I could take with me only what I could carry. Aside from clothes and other essentials I could fit into two […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006 Filmmaking
LEGENDS OF DIY

Caveh Zahedi has a blog up promoting his new film, I am a Sex Addict, which is opening from IFC Films next month. So far there’s been a lot of talk about porn star Rebecca Lord’s nipple (which would be pictured, but Blogger’s been having a problem uploading pictures, which is why photo placement on this blog is kind of erratic), but the blog is also prompting discussion of the efficacy of sef-distribution today. Zahedi, you’ll remember, was prepared to go the DIY route with his new I am a Sex Addict until IFC picked up the film following its […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006 Filmmaking

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