Filmmaking

ADDICTION AND RECOVERY

Leave it to Caveh Zahedi to win the hearts of indie filmmakers at the Gotham Awards when he accepted the Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing in a Theater Near You” prize. In his remarks he said that too many great indie films don’t make it to the theaters because, frankly, filmmakers are “too tired” after finishing their films and expect, unrealistically, distributors, who are struggling to get their own slates out there, to do all the heavy lifting. Zahedi said that after recuperating a bit after his own shoot and festival jaunt, he got on the phone and asked distributors […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2005 Filmmaking
WHAT ARE WE… CHOPPED LIVER?

The Apple-oriented rumor site Think Secret has a must-read piece up in which it claims that Apple will introduce a revised Mac mini at January’s Mac World Expo, a new home computer that will serve as the hub of a new digital delivery service with a new digital rights management system. From the piece: “In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple’s new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user’s hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user’s iDisk, which Front […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2005 Filmmaking
APOCALYPSE JONZE

Spike Jonze’s genius new Gap commercial can be found here. Only Jonze could make a Gap ad that, until the last shot, might just as well be a piece of anti-globalization agit-prop. (Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.)

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 2, 2005 Filmmaking
DRIVE TIME

This Thanksgiving, I, like many of you, will be on the road, driving to see family and hoping to arrive at a socially acceptable interval before the turkey is carved. SeeingJean Baudrillard’s imperious visage peering out from the Sunday Times Magazine this past weekend (“France is a byproduct of American culture,” he said. “We are all in this; we are globalized.”) and thinking about that long drive reminded me of an old essay of his in Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic, which was kind of a po-mo bible during my college years. He writes about the automobile and the shift in […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 23, 2005 Filmmaking
“MY HOPE IS GRANDCHILDREN”

The ubiquitous but broke boyfriend-and-girlfriend filmmakers behind Four-Eyed Monsters get another jolt of publicity today as they become the poster children for Charles Lyons in his New York Times piece on the personal financial perils of indie-film financing. From the piece: “[Arin] Crumley and [Susan] Buice spoke about their 14-month ordeal making Four Eyed Monsters, which dramatizes how they met online, and in which they co-star. The movie was well received at its Slamdance Film Festival premiere in January and screened at 16 other festivals. But like so many independent labors of love, it has yet to attract a theatrical […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2005 Filmmaking
KATE MOSS, TOPLESS

I flew back from London this weekend and, at the airport, picked up the new issue of the U.K. magazine Dazed and Confused. It’s typically full of interesting and very of-the-moment stuff, including a piece about photographer Nick Knight and his Showstudio, a website intending to bring the “‘tech hippie’ world of the internet into fashion,” according to the magazine’s Lauren Cochrane. Through December Showstudio is presenting on its site “Moving Fashion,” a commissioned series of very short films — 30 seconds or so — by leading names in the fashion world. The films all incorporate items from the Autumn/Winter […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2005 Filmmaking
“A MUST-SEE FOR THINKING AUDIENCES”

I am very excited to see Steve Gaghan’s Syriana, which we tried to nab an early screening of for Matt Ross’s piece on George Clooney in the current issue of Filmmaker. But, they were editing down to the wire so we were simply intrigued and hopeful by the trailer like everyone else. Now, Todd McCarthy promisingly weighs in in the subscription-only Variety: “Those complaining that Hollywood never turns out films of topical or political substance are likely to embrace Syriana, a weighty and deeply intriguing look at the many-tentacled beast that is the international oil industry. Wide-ranging and restlessly probing, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2005 Filmmaking
FONDA LOOKS BACK

One of the most startling images in David Zeiger’s Sir! No Sir!, a documentary about the G.I. anti-war movement during the Viet Nam era that Filmmaker selected as one of its “Best Films Not Playing in a Theater Near You” this year, is that of Jane Fonda. Sitting regally in the amber-hued foyer of her luxurious home, coiffed to perfection and expertly lit, Fonda’s sheer visual splendor is surprising within the context of the film — most of the film’s other interviewees still visibly bear the painful hurts of the period — as well as within today’s entertainment world. With […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2005 Filmmaking
I SPY

While at the Creative Capital retreat this summer I met the L.A.-based French artist Marie Sester, who does fascinating work dealing with technology and the interstice of the individual and the social. From her website: “I was trained as an architect, then chose the visual and multimedia fields to examine the way that a civilization originates and creates its forms. These forms are both tangible — such as signals, buildings, and cities — and intangible, such as the aspects of values, laws and culture. My work questions the perspective of the West, and the meta-state of a New World Order. […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2005 Filmmaking
WILD POSTING

Via the very clever people at Coudal Partners, whose design-oriented website always has lots of film-related stuff, this link to a database of Polish movie posters. At right: Robert Altman’s 3 Women. Says Tom Kuznar, the site’s proprietor, “Although my goal is to (eventually) provide all available information on all Polish film posters ever printed and every artist who ever designed one, back here on planet Earth my emphasis is on the best period of the mid 50s to early 70s. Since the Polish poster practically ceased to exist at the end of the 80s (and stopped being great long […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 14, 2005 Filmmaking

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