Filmmaking

IBSEN REDUX

Filmmaker Cruz Angeles emailed about the website of Planet Ibsen, a film by his NYU-colleague Jonathan Wyche. And with so many American indies rehashing the same old family dramas or quirky tales of teen angst, I had to take special note of this film, which is a historical fantasia about the rivalry between August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen. From the website: “Planet Ibsen is an extreme adaptation of A Doll’s House play, written in 1879 by Henrik Ibsen. The story is told from the perspective of Ibsen’s real-life antagonist, August Strindberg, who never met Ibsen, but yet he publicly blamed […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2005 Filmmaking
“…LIKE THE NEW COKE”

Variety has an amusing (subscription only) piece by Nicole Laporte today about a bi-coastal party this past Thursday attended by 200 Miramax current and ex-staffers (pre-maturely dubbed “Mir-Anon’s” by the trade paper). Held at Barney’s Beanery in L.A. and a rooftop in downtown Manhattan, the evening marked for the distributor’s staff the end of the Weinstein era. From the piece: “Rick Sands, a Miramax alum who’s now chief operating officer at DreamWorks, planned to be there. Asked if the Weinsteins knew about the soiree, Sands said, ‘Absolutely not! They’ll be the subject of conversation. They won’t want to be there.’ […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2005 Filmmaking
FACT-FINDING MISSION

Perhaps my favorite doc this year is Garrett Scott and Ian Olds’ Occupation Dreamland, which opened this weekend at the Cinema Village in New York along with screens in Portland, Boson, D.C., and Berkeley. It’s an essential piece of filmmaking for anyone wanting to learn more about the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Scott, who was one of our “25 New Faces” back in 2002, and Olds previously collaborated on Scott’s incredible short doc Cul de Sac. That earlier film used the story of one man’s mental breakdown (the tale of a San Diego man who stole a tank […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2005 Filmmaking
THE NECESSITIES OF REALISM

David Denby has a good piece in the New Yorker this week, the rather self-explanatorily titled “The Moviegoer: Susan Sontag’s life in film.” He of course begins by discussing Sontag’s 1995 essay, “A Century of Cinema,” in which the late critic bemoaned not only the decline of international art cinema but the decline of cinephilia as a necessary intellectual and social endeavor in general. From there Denby jumps backwards, tracing the development of Sontag’s thinking with regards to art and politics as it appears through the lens of the movies she championed. In this passage, Denby hits on what seems […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2005 Filmmaking
THE SHOOTING SCRIPT

My first job in film was reading scripts for New Line Cinema. When I got rid of my old Epson desktop computer, which was a couple of years after I stopped reading, I counted the coverage files and realized that I read 1,300 scripts for the company over the few years I worked for them. And though that gig was some years in the past, I constantly hear news about writers whose name I recognize from decade-old scripts. One such writer is Tom Benedek, an early script of whose I remember reading and liking. The New York Times has this […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 6, 2005 Filmmaking
BRION’S CUES

The composer Jon Brion, who has done scores for directors such as Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, and Paul Thomas Anderson, has been getting a lot of ink this week for his producing and arranging work on the new Kanye West album. Here’s Rob Mitchum in Pitchfork Media, who compiles a 70-minute mixtape designed to update you on Brion’s eclectic body of work. From the piece: “The most talked about man in music right now is Kanye West, whose recently-released Late Registration album is already one of the most prominent critical battlefields of 2005. It’s no shocker that an expert […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 6, 2005 Filmmaking
HURRICANE HOUSING

MoveOn.org has launched a new project, HurricaneHousing.org, a website at which you can post offers to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina with free housing. If you are able to house someone displaced by the storm, head on over to the site.

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 4, 2005 Filmmaking
HURRICANE RELIEF

Please consider donating to the American Red Cross to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina.

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 30, 2005 Filmmaking
MOUNTAIN MAN

First assistant camerman and blogger John Ott emailed to tell us about the the blog he’s been keeping on the production of Rain in the Mountains, an indie feature written by Joel Metlen and co-directed by Metlein and producer Christine Sullivan. Ott blogs on everything from day-to-day production issues to “poor man’s ADR” to the stroke that affected one the leads just days before the film wrapped just last Tuesday. (The actor is recovering and Ott is regularly updating his progress.) Ott even links to Peter Jackson’s “making of King Kong diary so you can compare the difference between making […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 28, 2005 Filmmaking
AMERICAN INDIES, THE SLEEPING GIANT

Here’s our good friend Noah Cowan, co-director of the Toronto Film Festival in Indiewire today talking about a surprise in this year’s selection process: “The biggest surprise this year has actually been the United States. There has been a kind of copycat lethargy to the US indie scene over the last few years, from our perspective. Only a few films a year really stood out from the crowd as meaningful cinema. But we have been overwhelmed this year by strong, political films by filmmakers unafraid to take risks. There are maybe twenty or more films from the indie scene that […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 25, 2005 Filmmaking

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