Filmmaking

PRODUCER REPORTS ON SRI LANKA AND TSUNAMI RELIEF

Indie producer Tanya Selvaratnum (On Line) sent an email out last week to her friends detailing the devastation that occured in her native Sri Lanka due to the tsunami. Her own family is safe but a number of family friends were lost, and Selvaratnum notes that 1/13th of the country’s entire population has been displaced by the disaster. In trying to figure out the best way to donate relief, she contacted the Sri Lankan government: “Something hilarious happened when I tried to contact the Sri Lankan government directly. I emailed the Prime Minister asking how we expats can help the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2005 Filmmaking
Artist and Filmmaker Gretchen Bender Dies at 53

I learned over the holidays that artist Gretchen Bender, whose intelligent, visually seductive work crossed lines between visual art and film, sculpture and video, died in New York on Sunday, December 18 of cancer. She was 53. Bender, who, early in her career exhibited at the East Village Nature Morte Gallery and later Metro Pictures, created conceptually concise and elegant work that often critiqued mainstream media and the power imbalances contained within its representations. And while many artists at this time were working with appropriation and engaging in similar sorts of critique, Bender’s work always cunningly embodied within itself a […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 3, 2005 Filmmaking
TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE

“Adam and Eve” files, darknets, curries, topsites — no, I’m not referring to some kinky download website but rather the topics discussed in Wired Magazine’s essential January cover story by Jeff Howe referred to in the post below, which has just been posted online. It’s a look at how pirated material winds up on the web and for those who imagine it’s via teenagers sharing files with their friends, think again. The pirate internet distribution system is as rigidly controlled and hierarchical as the studio system except it boasts an entirely different group of players competing not for dollars but […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 30, 2004 Filmmaking
STARS OF TOMORROW

Via Defamer comes this odd L.A. Craig’s List talent call which I’m not quite sure speaks for itself: We are looking for the new Vincent Gallo & Chloe Sevigny!!! Independent Feature Film Production Company is casting adult male and female actors as well as experienced traditional actors for a new narrative film that has explicit scenes of sexuality. The film is a cross between “The Brown Bunny” and “Reservoir Dogs.” It’s the romantic and thrilling story of two professional hitmen who fall in love one night and the woman who comes between them. We finished a very successful narrative feature […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 29, 2004 Filmmaking
BLACK-MARKET BANGKOK

Former Filmmaker editor Chuck Stephens penned this engaging report from Soi Thonglor, the street he lives on “deep in the heart of Bangkok… where intellectual property rights aren’t exactly chief among local law enforcement’s concerns.” His “Ten Best” list (Number 1: Tropical Malady) includes a number of titles seen on bootleg DVDs Stephens picked up at his local grocery store. In the article, Stephens points out that apathetic distributors worldwide are causing dedicated cineates to rely on cheap black market DVDs just to keep up with the artform. Also great reading, although not on the web, unfortunately, is Wired‘s cover […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 29, 2004 Filmmaking
BE VERY AFRAID…

I’ve long been a fan of Dennis Cooper’s, the author of such formally audacious, heartbreakingly terrifying and sexually transgressive novels as Closer, Frisk and My Loose Thread. He has a new novel, God, Jr., a “PG-13” one, coming out this spring, but in the meantime Cooper has chosen the small Void Books to publish a “side project,” The Sluts, he considers too much for his regular publisher, Grove. Considering that Cooper has spent his entire literary career living outside the envelope, it does make me a little afraid to contemplate this new one. Says the press release: Set largely on […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2004 Filmmaking
FILM COMMENT’S 50 BEST — RELEASED AND UNRELEASED

Film Comment editor Gavin Smith is always kind enough to send me the ballot for the magazine’s annual “50 Best” rundown (actually, two rundowns — the “50 Best Released” and “Unreleased” Films of the Year), but as a reader of the magazine I’m always a bit intimidated by how much I don’t manage to see in a given year — especially this one, in which I spent about six months out of town, five of them in a arthouse-deprived place where Anchorman was my top viewing experience. So, I sit on the ballot rather than skew the results due to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2004 Filmmaking
UNDERGROUND USA

I’m curious to see the New Museum’s new East Village USA exhibition, which memorializes the downtown art world of the early to mid 1980s, a time in which art, fashion, film, hip-hop, and rock all jostled and congealed into a movement that can now be encapuslated into something like, well, a museum exhibition. (That it was also a time when AIDS rampaged through the New York arts community gives the show its measure of sadness for those who lived in New York at the time and knew many of these people.) Writes curator Dan Cameron, “Imagine a village where everybody […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 11, 2004 Filmmaking
BACK IN THE DAYS

Kudos to Indiewire for nabbing the text of Dan Talbot’s engagingly long-winded speech at last week’s Gotham Awards. Personally, I found Talbot’s trip down memory lane kind of a blast, sitting as I was before the teleprompter which kept flashing “Please wrap it up!” Anyway, for notes on how it used to be in NYC art film exhibition, click on the above.

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2004 Filmmaking
MANOHLA TALKS BACK

I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying tremendously Manohla Dargis’s film writing in the New York Times, particularly the more freewheeling attitude that runs through her pieces. Her Godard interview of a few weeks back was brilliantly edited. Leaving in his intellectual japes and her bemused ripostes — bits that might have been edited out in the hands of another Times critic — both made the piece entertaining and indicative of Godard’s entire enterprise. In today’s Times, Dargis steps in front of her byline to frankly answer questions from readers. (Registration required.) In response the various queries she raves […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2004 Filmmaking

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