Producers don’t get all the props that they deserve, so I was happy to see the glam portrait of downtown New York producer Caroline Baron, whose credits include Monsoon Wedding and Bennett Miller’s upcoming Capote, in the new Vanity Fair. The article was as much about Baron’s activities as a specialty exhibitor, though, as her producing. What is her specialty distribution biz? Baron is the founder of FilmAid International, a non-profit organization that brings outdoor cinema to both countries devastated by war and the populations displaced by its effects. The organization also runs a video program that puts cameras in […]

The great U.K. music magazine The Wire doesn’t have much of a Web site (there are some long interview transcriptions and MP3 downloads from artists like Sonic Youth’s Jim O’Rourke), but the print edition remains invaluable for anyone interested in new music. The mag has a small column on the Web and, this issue, it points to a couple of interesting sites. The first is The Eye, a Web site containing mini downloadable documentaries on music and media groups like Wire, Papa M, Locust and others. The column also mentions something closer to home — the launch of P.S. 1’s […]

For Philip K. Dick fans out there — and I’m one of them — there’s a lot of excitement surrounding Richard Linklater’s new film, A Scanner Darkly. Based on one of Dick’s best books, the film promises to capture the Dick-ian mindset, with its mixture of philosophical paranoia, ’70s drug-era existentialism, and topsy turvy identity questioning, in a way that none of the other Dick adaptations (Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc., have done. Jason Koornick has long operated a Philip K. Dick fansite which recently went “official” with the participation of the Dick estate. On the site, there’s now […]

Via the folks at the excellent music ezine Pitchforkmedia comes news of this Matador Records contest in which contestants are asked to create a film for the upcoming release of the great NYC band Interpol. Visit either site for more info, but entries are due by July 5 and winners receive $1,000 and some footage of the band to make their video.

When I was a teenager growing up in Washington, D.C., I was held briefly in the thrall of an amazing radio station, WGTB. I say “briefly” because the station, a fixture in the D.C. alternative/punk/progressive/radical politics communities, was shut down by its patron, the Jesuit-owned Georgetown University, over an abortion rights program only a couple of months after I had discovered it. But during that time, the programming (the closest comparison for New Yorker’s is WFMU) had a big impact on me, and bands and musicians I discovered on its airwaves shaped my tastes forever. One of the things WGTB […]

Filmmaker‘s blog, which we are having fun doing, hasn’t either ascended or descended, according to your point of view, into the realm of the purely personal yet. I have to say, while most of my favorite blogs are either link-oriented (like the great Greencine Daily) or else a mixture of links and commentary (like my favorite political blog, the Whisky Bar), I do admire those who lay their lives out on the web, updating the world on their business and/or personal adventures. There aren’t a huge number of working filmmakers who are doing this, but there are a few. Writer/director […]

One of my favorite new writers at Filmmaker is Graham Leggat, who contributes our “Game Engine” column. (Check out this issue’s piece, in which Leggat takes filmmaker Derek Cianfrance for a spin test driving the upcoming Dr3ver videogame, which comes complete with a groundbreaking video editor. In addition to his column next issue, Leggat wrote a short report on the filmmaker Shannon Plumb (who, coincidentally, happens to be Cianfrance’s wife). I just finished editing it when I got an email press release from the folks at Fountainhead Films, the company behind the feature Quatro Nozza. The company has just released […]

For all you Tarkovsky obsessives out there, check out this link, in which the great Russian filmmaker’s son Andrei posts and annotates some of his father’s Polaroid pictures.

From the excellent music online mag Pitchforkmedia comes this interesting review of The Advantage, the self-titled debut of a California five-piece band which exclusively plays “heavy, dynamic” indie-rock covers of Nintendo game music like Castelvania III and Super Mario Brothers 2 “that go far beyond simple nostalgia, exploring and ofthen enhancing the brilliance of their source material.” Continues Pitchfork’s Matt LeMay, “The music for the Nintendo Entertainment system was created under tremendously limiting circumstances– during the time that most of the songs covered here were written, composers had only three individual voices to work with at any given time, each […]

Most producers I know have their favorite teamster captains and are skilled at figuring out whose personality will mesh best with the particular needs of production. But the “teamster casting” process takes a new twist according to day’s Variety, which notes that 500 New York and L.A. casting directors are formally seeking to be represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “The casting directors and associates cite lack of health care coverage, late pay and performing uncompensated work as key issues that have driven the organizing effort,” Variety writes. The Variety article goes on to suggest that casting directors may […]