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
DESTROY HOT ACTION!

The folks at Fleshbot linked to this totally genius video blog, Destroy Hot Action, that is both web-based art and a Quicktimed portfolio of personal empowerment. In these short clips, posted daily, Philip Clark samples hardcore porn streamed over the internet and scrambles short bursts into totally abstract and strangely hypnotic video art. What’s more, he’s compellingly literate about the childhood roots and contemporary rationale behind his project: “My earliest encounter with hardcore video porn happened at a friend’s house, also late at night. They had cable at their house and my friend was scanning through some channels with really […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2005 Filmmaking
INDIE FILMMAKING, IRAQ STYLE

Anybody else check out the ABC News Nightline tonight? I’m watching as I’m blogging here about Ted Koppel’s interview with Cyrus Kar, an American documentary filmmaker who was held in an American detention center in Iraq for 55 days after the cab he was riding in was pulled over. When U.S. soldiers found a collection of washing machine timers in the cab’s trunk, suddenly his camera equipment, microphone wires and the cab driver’s timers all seemed elements of potential Improvised Explosive Devices. Kar was held briefly at Abu Ghuraib before being transferred to a prison near the airport that also […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2005 Filmmaking
MARKETING THUMBS UP

Most movie marketing sucks, so when a campaign for a new film catches my eye and causes me to surf to the site and learn more about it, it’s worth throwing some props towards the filmmaker and marketing team. I first noticed the sweetly ironic posters for Mike Mill’s Thumbsucker last weekend in the East Village, and now the website is up. Check it out and you’ll find some of the usual materials (cast bios, a trailer, etc.) but also a lot of other stuff that seems personal and direct from the filmmaker. There’s a page devoted to the Humane […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2005 Filmmaking
BRICK BY BRICK

I was on the international jury this year at Toronto’s Hot Docs, and one of the best and most original docs I saw there, Simone Bittan’s Wall, is receiving its U.S. premiere this Friday at the Quad in New York. Paris-based Bittan, who is both an Israeli and French citizen, was born in Morocco and considers herself an Arab Jew. Employing her hybrid identity as something of a structuring device, Wall documents the construction of the “security fence” that is separating Israel from Palestine, creating a portrait not only of a region divided but of a world in which the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2005 Filmmaking
BALLARD ON POWELL: “REALISM HAS FAILED US…”

I was a big J.G. Ballard fan in my late teens and 20s when I pretty much devoured works like Terminal Beach, The Atrocity Exhibition (made into an independent feature by Jonathan Weiss, linked to here), The Crystal World, and Myths of the Near Future. I’ve been interested then to see the dystopian science fiction writer pop up several times in The Guardian in just the past couple of weeks. I quoted him below in a blog entry on a new Helmut Newton book, and here he is again in The Guardian discussing the great director Michael Powell in a […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2005 Filmmaking
MYOPIAWOOD

I have an informal ban on the word “Indiewood” in Filmmaker. It’s just too cutesy for me. But maybe I’ll pick up Bill Mechanic’s “Myopiawood,” coined in this opinion piece posted over at the Movie City News site. In “Welcome to Myopiawood,” the producer and former Fox head criticizes suggestions floating out there by folks like Mark Cuban that the various “windows” separating theatrical exhibition of films from their release on home video and pay television formats should be collapsed or even eliminated. And for those of you who think this is an esoteric argument, well, the folks at CNN […]

By Scott Macaulay on Aug 20, 2005 Filmmaking

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