Filmmaking

RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT

There’s a great lead article in Variety this week by Dana Harris and Claude Brodesser — sorry, subscription only — titled “Films Buried Alive.” And although the headline might lead you to think that the piece is about the many long-delayed films on the Miramax release shelf, it’s actually a perceptive article about the politics involved in greenlighting a studio film. It confirms in print something producers have long known: despite the importance placed by studio execs on the development process, the scripts that actually get greenlit by the studios are often the least developed ones. And if there’s one […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 20, 2004 Filmmaking
ENEMIES OF THE STATE

Sitting here editing the latest issue of Filmmaker, I came across this interview segment from Andy Bichelbauer, the “Yes Man” featured in Chris Smith’s outrageously entertaining political doc The Yes Men forthcoming this fall from United Artists. The Yes Men are a group of political performance-art provocateurs who infiltrate government and NGO-type events and pose as World Trade Organization officials. But lately the group has been having problems dealing with the implications of the Patriot Act, which broadly construes a variety of behaviors as potentially terrorist acts. Within the art world, the first casualty is that of Steve Kurtz, a […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 19, 2004 Filmmaking
FREDERIQUE WOULD LIKE TO BE OF HOLLYWOOD

In our effort to present to you, our dear readers, with links and contacts you won’t find elsewhere, I present the following sincere e-mail received by a reader of this blog, who has crafted a Flash animation site promoting both herself and Keanu Reeves and The Matrix: “Hello, first congratulations for your website :-) I present myself: I am a 36 year old young woman, impassioned by the cinema, Internet and Flashmx. I invite you, by the present one, to come to visit my 4 galleries of animated photographs, dedicated to the Matrix trilogy and Mister Keanu Reeves, on the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 17, 2004 Filmmaking
CLEAN BRIAN ENO

While writing the blogs below, I’ve been listening to the new CD remaster of Brian Eno’s great Here Come the Warm Jets, which was recently released along with three other Eno classics from the ’70s. Todd Haynes referenced this album in his Velvet Goldmine, and, if anything, it sounds more inventive and emotionally connecting after all these years. All four albums are thoughtfully reviewed at Pitchfork Media, and tracks from two of them — Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Before and After Science, along with a couple of other Eno albums, provide most of the soundtrack to Olivier Assayas’s […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 16, 2004 Filmmaking
ROBERT QUINE, 1942 – 2004

Back in 1999, the first film I ever worked on was Raul Ruiz’s The Golden Boat (James Schamus’s first production), and, using some grant money that I raised at my job at The Kitchen, I got my friend John Zorn to do the score. (I ran into Zorn on the street a while ago and he told me he’d score another film of mine if I asked — “But you know the drill,” he said. “I’ll do it, fast, cheap, but I get complete creative control!” Anyway, John did amazing work for not much money, and one of the score’s […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 16, 2004 Filmmaking
FILM AS RELIEF

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 […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 16, 2004 Filmmaking
WIRED FOR SOUND AND VISION

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 […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 15, 2004 Filmmaking
A SCANNER DARKLY NEWS

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 […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 14, 2004 Filmmaking
OBSTACLE #1

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.

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 9, 2004 Filmmaking
MADSTONED

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 […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 8, 2004 Filmmaking

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