Filmmaking

ELVIS RETURNS

Richard Prince (the Washington Post writer and editor of the Black College Review, not the novelist/screenwriter) reports in his column called “Journal-isms” for the Maynard Institute that former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell has returned to journalism it was reported that he had accepted a development job at Columbia Pictures. Apparently, the Columbia gig, which interested every young indie director he had given a good review to, never fully panned out. From the piece: Elvis Mitchell returned to National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition Saturday” this month for the first time in a year, since it was announced that […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 28, 2006 Filmmaking
GUANTANAMO A DIFFICULT IMPORT

There’s a good feature up at The Guardian by David Rose, the British journalist who was the first person to interview the “Tipton Three” following the release of these British Muslims from Guantanamo Bay. Now he’s writing about the film by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitcross, The Road to Guantanmo and discussing its chances of being released in the U.S: To date, says producer Andrew Eaton, the film is set to be shown in 18 countries. But as yet, although there have been expressions of interest, there is no distribution deal for the one nation where it most urgently needs […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 28, 2006 Filmmaking
FOTOPOULOS UPS HIS BUDGETS… BY ABOUT 1,000 TIMES

Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride notes this Reel Chicago piece reporting that Chicago-based avant-gardist James Fotopoulos is about to embark on his first “commercial production,” a $2 million adaptation of Jay Bonansinga’s police novel The Sleep Police. Ray links to his own profile of Fotopolous, but two can play at that game — here’s Travis Crawford’s interview with Fotopolous appearing in Filmmaker.

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 28, 2006 Filmmaking
OTHER COMEDY

The folks who comprise Human Giant have come up with a very funny short, below, that takes a Clerks-style approach to the indie music scene and which sets its story at my favorite music store, Other Music. My only quibble with the short is that its take on the Other Music clerks is fairly off — they’re actually pretty nice guys. On the other hand, I guess I’ve never asked for the Garden State soundtrack.

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 26, 2006 Filmmaking
A HERO’S WELCOME

Mary Glucksman covered Jason Rosette’s Susan Hero in her “In Focus” column back in 2004, and now Rosette emails to say he is finishing his Santa Fe-shot film… in Cambodia. Rosette moved to Cambodia where he teaches video production at the Royal University in Phnom Penh. He’s got his film on 500 gigs of hard drive space, an occasionally updated blog up detailing his adventures in both Cambodia and in the trenches of film festival submissions, and a website where he aggregates all his filmmaking activities, including info on his previous film, Book Wars.

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2006 Filmmaking
STARRY EYES

Via Filmmaker‘s MySpace page comes word from the folks at the Studio City-based Starway Pictures, who have created a new blog devoted to their films and also technical developments in indie filmmaking. Starway’s Robert Sanders writes, “We’ll try to post our thoughts and feelings about ‘the process’ of filmmaking and the industry. For the hard-core gear heads and geeks, we’ll also discuss digital filmmaking technology and our philosophies about digital cinema. And maybe a rant or two.” Already up are some evocative L.A. location photos for their upcoming shoot, The 23rd Letter, fundraising trailers for their horror pic Shadow Falls, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2006 Filmmaking
ADDITIVE CINEMA

Holly Willis has a fascinating piece up at the L.A. Weekly about an internet-based new-media film entitled No Animals Were Hurt by Peter Brinson. Writes Willis: At the very moment I write this, Peter Brinson’s online biopic of inventor Alan Turing is 33 percent its proper length. That’s because since early January, when the site with the video was launched, there have been 17,044 viewers, each one unlocking and revealing a single frame in the video’s 5,000 frames. As the number of viewers grows closer to multiples of 5,000, the video images slow down, allowing the voice-over to complete the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 23, 2006 Filmmaking
FEVER DREAMS

Redford on this year’s Sundance on Yahoo: “It’s gotten to the point now — almost to a breaking point — where there’s a fever that has taken over the festival that creates an enormous amount of chaos and excitement and tension,” the 68-year-old actor said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s gotten a little bit harder on me… “The festival that we do is the same one as we did the first year,” he said. “We program it exactly the same every year, which is for new voices and more experimental films.” The difference now, Redford said, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 23, 2006 Filmmaking
A LIFE IN TICKET STUBS

There’s an eccentric tracking of life and movies through ticket stubs posted by Mike over at Botsko.net. Having collected all his movie ticket stubs for six years, he puts their data in a spreadsheet and analyzes his moviegoing habits through dating, Fandango, ticket price increases, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the birth of his child. One of his conclusions: he wound up paying more for movies he liked: What’s interesting though is that the average price I paid per ticket reflects my opinion of the movie. The better I rated the movie, the more I paid on average […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 23, 2006 Filmmaking
CRANKED UP

Twitch, which is a great site covering what it calls “strange little films from around the world” (with a heavy emphasis on Asian art and genre films) links to Handcranked Films, a collective of filmmakers who include War (pictured) director Jake Mahaffy, one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2005. What I didn’t realize until Twitch’s piece is that Handcranked includes a number of other filmmakers, including Daniel Sousa and Jeff Slas, and that all of their work is featured on the site. Here’s what Todd at Twitch has to say about them: “Handcranked is a collective of film makers […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 22, 2006 Filmmaking

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