Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
MICKIE REALIZES DREAM
When Canada’s entertainment conglom Alliance Atlantis announced a few months ago that it would be shuttering its film production and sales divisions, independent filmmakers wondered where its Managing Director of Motion Picture Sales Charlotte Mickie would wind up. Throughout the ’90s, Mickie has been a reliable and accessible presence on the scene, picking up many noteworthy American indies and often propelling them to solid international sales. Among the many titles in her Alliance Atlantis catalog are Bowling for Columbine, The Station Agent, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and In the Company of Men. So, we were happy to hear yesterday that […]
-
FCC — WTF!
Um, is anyone else out there following the very scary goings on at the FCC these days? I know there’s been a lot to write about — the Oscars, The Passion of the Christ — but the collective entertainment blogosphere has been awfully quiet when it comes to Congress’s proposed changes to the FCC charter. From the Howard Stern/Clear Channel ban to some of the measures detailed in this Washington Post article, risk-taking programming is under siege at the moment. Note the article’s last paragraph: by only one vote, a Senate provision sponsored by Senators Byron Dorgan and Trent Lott […]
-
BETTER THAN NEW
Vincent Gallo fans — and perfectionist filmmakers with money to spare — must check out this eBay page in which Gallo sells the camera, lights and sound package used to create The Brown Bunny. (Being a fan, I hope this doesn’t herald a retreat from filmmaking for Gallo.) The package contains two Aaton 16mm cameras, Super Baltar lenses, the last Nagra 4 STC made by the company, and an Angeniuex zoom purchased from the Kubrick estate! Writes eBay seller nbvbn, who, by the way, has a seller rating of 76 with 100% positive results, “Vincent Gallo, the director of Buffalo […]
-
THE EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
Holly Willis, Karol Martesko and I founded Filmmaker back in the fall of 1992 and for many years after that Holly served as our West Coast Editor before moving on to her current position as editor of the quite excellent Res magazine. We were trading e-mails recently, and Holly asked if we’d link this site to the European Graduate School, where she is working on her second Ph.D. When she wrote to me that the program was “ridiculously perfect — it brings together amazing philosophers with filmmakers for intensive three-week seminars in a tiny town in the mountains of Switzerland […]
-
DANGER AFTER DARK
Haute Tension If you’re a regular reader of Filmmaker, you’ll recognize Travis Crawford‘s byline. He’s often in our pages writing about cutting-edge genre films, Asian auteurist work, and unclassifiable Euro arthouse pics. (See his feature on Bruno Dumont’s 29 Palms in our current issue.) But when he’s not writing for Filmmaker, Crawford is, among other things, programming the Philadelphia Film Festival‘s “Danger after Dark” program, the genre-section that allows him to cherrypick the best new titles as well as the essential works that have been on the fest circuit for the past year. Crawford is the king of the long, […]
-
SUPER SIZE THIS!
Count Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me along with Bowling for Columbine and The Thin Blue Line when discussing contemporary documentaries which have actually produced real social change. In an upcoming Filmmaker piece, Spurlock discusses the influence Moore has had on his Sundance hit Super Size Me, in which the filmmaker explores America’s fast-food mania by eating only McDonald’s food for one month. (By day 21 he’s gained almost 20 pounds and is on the verge of liver failure.) Today, in an echo of K-Mart’s decision to stop selling bullets following Moore’s cinematic targeting in Bowling for Columbine, McDonald’s has turned […]
