Production
Filmmaking - Production
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Golden State Granddaughters Discuss California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown
While Ethel, Rory Kennedy’s portrait of her mom, widow of dad Bobby, might have made a splash at Sundance, it’s not the only descendant-directed doc about a member of political royalty to have played the fest circuit this year. With California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown, director Sascha Rice and her sister, executive producer Hilary Armstrong – both of them daughters of former California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown – have chosen to bring to the screen the story of their grandpa, the late Governor Pat Brown. Nicknamed the “Architect of the Golden State,” the two-term governor had a slew […]
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Tim Mangini on Documentary Production at Frontline
Part Two of our interview with Tim Mangini, the Director of Broadcast for WGBH’s Frontline: (Read part 1 here) Filmmaker: Do you feel like you’re now moving away from DSLRs at Frontline? Mangini: When Canon made the 5D they added the video capability almost as an afterthought. It was not, “Hey, let’s revolutionize filmmaking.” Well little did they know, they revolutionized filmmaking. Along the way, people started asking for things like, “It would be really great to be able to record audio that was worthwhile, or it would be really good if the files could be transferred easily, or it […]
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Documentary Production at Frontline: An Interview with Tim Mangini
Tim Mangini is the Director of Broadcast for WGBH’s Frontline. His overarching role is to make sure the programs get made and that they get made on time, on budget, and that the quality level meets Frontline’s expectations. Tim began his career working in animation and sound in Hollywood, then came back to Boston and worked in the corporate and broadcast video world before joining WGBH in 1995 as a post-production supervisor. One of his roles as Director of Broadcast is to work with producers to identify the equipment they need to capture their vision. We recently spoke to him […]
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Storm Song: Beasts of the Southern Wild and Tchoupitoulas
After the recent BAMcinemaFest screening that marked the first time Benh Zeitlin’s magical-realist Beasts of the Southern Wild screened alongside Bill and Turner Ross’s immersive New Orleans documentary Tchoupitoulas—both South Louisiana-shot pictures produced by members of the film collective Court 13—there were two celebrations on either side of BAM. At the beautiful dive-bar Frank’s, the Ross brothers and various doc and indie film bros were watching the NBA championships with loud exuberance and strong opinions. There was a rumor that there was a dance party across the street at the Fox Searchlight-hosted party for Beasts, which was flowing with delicious […]
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Andrew Neel and Louisa Krause Talk King Kelly
While there have been many films riffing on reality tropes in the last several years, few have been as cleverly conceived and entertainingly executed as Andrew Neel’s debut fiction film, King Kelly. Set in the world of amateur webcam porn, the film depicts a monstrously fascinating Tracy Flick for our oversexualized social media age. Played ferociously by Louisa Krause, Kelly is a high-school student who runs a profitable one-woman porn empire from her suburban bedroom, with her parents none the wiser. Stripping on cam, uploading details of her everyday life and ruling over her chat room with a gonzo glee, […]
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A Call to Producers: Innovate or Die!
The following blog post originally appeared at the IFP’s site and is cross-posted with permission. — Editor. I’m very fortunate to be friends with many accomplished independent film producers–people whose films have screened at the best festivals, won significant awards, gotten picked up by major distributors, earned healthy gross receipts, and received accolades in the mainstream press. We hang out sometimes, one-on-one or in groups, to catch each other up on our projects, share recent experiences, exchange opinions on companies and people we’ve worked with, etc. But essentially, we get together for emotional support against an industry and an economy […]
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Alex Holdridge: “I’ll Never Go to Los Angeles Again”
I fell in love with Alex Holdridge’s gorgeous, smart black-and-white LA-set romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss when I saw it on the film festival circuit in 2007, and later interviewed Holdridge for Filmmaker when Kiss was released theatrically in 2008. In the intervening years, Holdridge and I were in occasional contact, and through Facebook I was aware that he had left L.A. and decamped to Berlin. But little more than that. When I read earlier this spring that he was in postproduction on his follow-up feature, Meet Me in Montenegro – a film co-written by and co-starring Holdridge […]
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10 Tips On Producing And Financing From SXSW
Troublemaker Studio’s Aaron Kaufman hosted a panel titled “Making it Happen: Financing an Independent Film” at SXSW this year, gathering together fellow execs Katie McNeill (V.P. of Production, Electric City Entertainment, the new venture between producers Lynette Howell and Jamie Patricof) and Garrick Dion, Senior Vice President of Development at Bold Films, and a co-producer of Drive (pictured). (Troublemaker, of course, is the production company of Robert Rodriguez.) The three offered thoughts on how to develop and put together projects able to financed in today’s independent film marketplace as well as tips on keeping that development on track. Here are […]
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Test Version – What is Producing?
What is producing? I ask myself this question a lot, and the title on my business card literally reads “Producer.” I’m staff at a rad women-run studio in Brooklyn while also producing my own films as well as a handful of others. I say all this to reiterate just how amorphous the craft of producing can be. Because of its fluidity, it can also be a challenge to learn how to be better at it. Plus, producers rarely get interviewed in the industry articles that offer insights into filmmaking process. When they are featured, producing technique can be difficult to understand […]
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Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Director Abel Ferrara
The original King of Indie Abel Ferrara made a stop at Emir Kusturica’s Küstendorf Film and Music Festival this January to screen his latest film 4:44 Last Day on Earth. The Loisaida-set film paints a picture of addiction at the end of the world, starring Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh. Ferrara felt very welcome at Küstendorf, Emir Kusturica’s wooden village high in the mountains of Mokra Gora. “We just kinda have a connection, other than I look like him,” Ferrera told me of the famed Serbian director, minutes before entering a workshop to discuss the film with students who had descended […]
