Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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TENDER IS THE EGO
Depressed screenwriters upset over their latest rejection should check out this unusual front page New York Times story detailing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed Hollywood screenwriting career. Quoting documents just unearthed from the Fitzgerald estate and collected at the University of South Carolina, the story paints a portrait of an earnest, dedicated writer futilely struggling to balance art and studio politics on a succession of never-realized pictures. There are some great quotes in the piece — Billy Wilder dubs Fitzgerald “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job” — and the documents overall correct, in the words of […]
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BOND… ON THE Q.T.
Casino Royale Via Elston Gunn’s invaluable Weekly Recap in Ain’t It Cool News comes this link to an online petition urging the once daring but now depressingly conservative Broccoli clan to accept Quentin Tarantino’s offer to helm a remake of Casino Royale as the next James Bond film. Remembering pre-adolescent times when Bond films were the essence of forbidden entertainment, I put my name down. If you’d like to as well, click here.
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GERSH GOINGS ON…
If you’re like me and you skim through Variety online each day and then catch up on the pile of print editions every week or so, it was easy to miss the news, buried under the headline “Lit topper books a new gig,” that the Gersh Agency’s veteran NY agent Mike Lubin has, as the pub would say “ankled the tenpercentery.” Lubin’s clients include The Woodsmen director Nicole Kassell, director Alan Taylor, screenwriter (and former Filmmaker managing editor) Mike Jones, and director Rose Troche. At Gersh, Lubin always kept his eye out for emerging new indie film talent so it […]
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POLITICAL BEDFELLOWS
Porn is an easy election-year target, and along with the $495,000 Clear Channel/Howard Stern fine that was announced by the FCC this week, the Baltimore Sun reported that the Justice Department is gearing up for a crackdown on the industry in this election year. But it may not be the ACLU and free-speech types who lead the defense this time around. The article points out that porn is a $10 billion a year business with profits that flow to many Fortune 500 companies, including Comcast, whose Hot Network channel streams porn to hotel room customers at $12 a pop. And […]
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CROWD MANAGEMENT
Congrats to Filmmaker Managing Editor Matt Ross for the successful reading of his screenplay Plays Well with Others at Tom Noonan’s Paradise Theater this past Wednesday night. The reading, which featured Cynthia Nixon, Sonia Braga, Tom Gilroy, Dean Wareham and others, was the first in a series sponsored by the Hamptons International Film Festival. When I say “successful,” though, I’m basing that on heresay. As this Indiewire piece notes, the reading was wildly overcrowded, and the dutiful Filmmaker staff who showed up — Mary Glucksman, Peter Bowen and myself — joined a sizable group (which included development folks from some […]
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SCARY FLORIDA
I’ve got no plans to jet down to Miami anytime soon, but if any of our readers happen to be down there, check out this gallery exhibition featuring artists like Sue de Beer (pictured) and Cameron Jamie, and shoot us an email about it. It sounds cool, and I’m sorry I missed it in New York. From the press release: “SCREAM at THE MOORE SPACE 10 artists x 10 writers x 10 scary movies Curated by: Fernanda Arruda and Michael Clifton April 8 – July 3, 2004 Opening Reception: Thursday, April 8, 2004, 7 – 10 pm THE MOORE SPACE […]
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Great Expectations
Years ago, before I worked in film, I was a curator and programmer at The Kitchen, New York’s center for contemporary performance and video. In my first year there, the organization produced a one-off TV special entitled “Two Moon July,” and in it David Byrne performed a work of solo performance art that involved the Talking Head running in giant circles through The Kitchen’s Soho loft space, chanting out the names of future movies culled from the AFM issue of Variety. It might sound a bit slim, but it was a nice piece — there is something oddly poignant and […]
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IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES
There was interesting news in Variety today — Rick Linklater has been greenlit by Warner Independent Pictures and New York’s Thousand Words to film his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s great A Scanner Darkly, which will star Keanu Reeves in his first post-Matrix trilogy project. An earlier script was penned by Charlie Kaufman, and the good folks at Muse Productions had the option once — and still list a Chris Cunningham-directed version on their website. Now, however, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s Section 8 are producing the current project with Thousand Words. Most interesting is the note that the movie […]
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CSI JERUSALEM
Sorry for the lack of blog postings, but the Filmmaker staff has been busy crunching on the next issue of the magazine, which is slated to go to the printer this week. In the meantime, I got this interesting press release from the folks at Feral House, the scabrous L.A. publisher who can always be counted on for ghoulish esoterica. However, given the various marketing tie-in’s — plastic stakes? — that The Passion of the Christ has already produced, the reissue described below seems almost tame. “Feral House, publisher of The X-Rated Bible and Apocalypse Culture,, issued the gruesome Catholic […]
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THE CUBAN CONNECTION
With his purchase of the Landmark Theatres and Magnolia Pictures and his creation of production company 2929 and the high definition cable network HDNet, which boasts an NYC-based production arm run by Open City Films’ Jason Kliot, Dallas Maverick-owner Mark Cuban has quickly announced himself as one of indie film’s key players. For those who want to know more about Cuban, check out his weblog, which boasts regular postings about the Mavericks, Godsend, the Robert DeNiro/Rebecca Romijn-Stamos movie Cuban produced with Todd Wagner, and Mamma.com, the search engine he just picked up stock in. Regular reading might help you figure […]
