Columns
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Can You Finance an Independent Film During a Pandemic?
In the middle of the global pandemic and one of the worst economic downturns in a century, Maven Pictures’ Celine Rattray, a producer of Driveways, The Kindergarten Teacher and American Honey, had several projects interrupted. But in early April, a timely new project—in which the crew and cast could work remotely from their own homes—was suddenly greenlit. She spoke to a private equity investor who she believed would be a good fit for the film, budgeted at six figures, and the financier agreed to fully fund it during their phone call. “The deal closed in a couple days,” says Rattray. […]
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Quarantines and Future Dreams
Contact—yes, the 1997 Robert Zemeckis blockbuster—isn’t about a pandemic. It’s not celebrating an anniversary year or set for rerelease, nor is it a stone classic like Alien. But this moment of quarantines and uncertainty makes for an excellent time to revisit it. What feels rare about the movie is its depiction of solitude rather than loneliness. I suppose this is true of many astronauts on the screen, but this one is unique because Ellie Arroway—the main character—experiences solitude continuously; it is more than just her journey in the third act. Actor Jodie Foster is routinely alone in the film, in […]
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In My Room
The big question for film educators this summer is how to prepare for classes this fall. Some campuses will host all of their classes online; others, like mine, are figuring out a hybrid model, with some production classes held on the sound stages with careful social distancing, masks and lots of hand sanitizer. In the meantime, many of us have been figuring out ways to inspire our students to keep making film and videos, even within the confines of their bedrooms, apartments and family homes. Luckily, there’s an exciting history of projects that demonstrate the power of a small space. […]
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“The Starting Point is Authenticity… Would This Happen in Real Life?”: The Sophisticated Location Work of HBO’s Succession
A show like HBO’s Succession risks being either tone-deaf or ineffectual, especially at a moment of heightened sensitivity toward income inequality and billionaires’ amoral business practices. Armstrong’s background in unsparing British cringe/political comedy, namely acclaimed sitcoms Peep Show and The Thick of It, helped him adopt an intimately satirical approach to the story of the dysfunctional Roy family, nouveau riche owners of the fictional media/hospitality empire Waystar Royco (a la the Murdochs and News Corp or the Redstones and ViacomCBS). Armstrong filters Shakespearean and Grecian tragedy into the series’ premise—patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) fights to preserve his empire from the […]
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Two or Three Things They Know About You: Marketing Independent Film with Behavioral Data
Dear filmmakers, surveillance capitalism is your friend. Like every other thing we purchase nowadays, movies have been subsumed into the new digital economy, where behavioral data, influence campaigns and social media marketing are an integral part of doing business. Morally, you might have a problem with Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate practices, but there’s no getting around the fact that Facebook and Instagram hold some of the most powerful tools to reach people and manipulate their decision-making—including their choice of which movie to see on a given weekend. “It’s definitely been a help for smaller filmmakers,” says Stephen Metzger, director of marketing […]
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Messing With the Medium: On the Textured Pleasures of the Handmade Film
Last summer, filmmaker Jennifer West and I were invited to talk at Femmebit, an LA-based triennial celebration of media made by women. I had been thinking about materiality and mediamaking practices, and Jennifer is known for a stunning body of work centered on physically manipulating strips of film. We decided to call our event “Messing With the Medium: Radical Materiality in Feminist Media” and challenged each other on stage in a battle of clips, each of us presenting a visual example of some sort of feminist creative intervention, along with a two-minute argument for its contributions to an expanded history […]
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Conceiving the Future: The Prescient Lynn Hershman Leeson
There’s no question that Lynn Hershman Leeson is a prescient artist and filmmaker. Prescience is even a theme in her work, one she grapples with as a double-edged sword. Impossible to measure except in retrospect, it is a lonely quality to have in the present. After Leeson rocketed to art stardom following a 2014 career retrospective at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, her success was widely praised as “overdue”—another word that culture’s Cassandras are used to hearing. It seems unwise to disentangle her originality and influence from her tenacity and patience. Her 2019 interactive installation “Shadow […]
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Hits & Misses 2019: Surveying the Success of the Sundance Film Festival’s Theatrical Releases
The times, they keep a-changin’. In its immediate aftermath, the story out of Sundance 2019 was its bounteous acquisition market and record-setting sales numbers—from New Line’s $15 million purchase of Blinded by the Light to Amazon Studios’ $27 million splurge on Late Night and Brittany Runs a Marathon. By the summer, a different narrative began to emerge. While these top acquisition titles earned millions of dollars at the box office, they all still under-performed in theatrical release. Then, Amazon Studios’ veteran head of theatrical distribution Bob Berney left the company, a departure that potentially signaled shifting priorities at what had […]
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The Inner Reaches Out of Space
“I think one of the things I am most concerned about is how we interact with space in a bodily way,” says LA-based video and VR artist Kate Parsons, who will co-teach an undergraduate studio class, “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space,” next spring at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, with VR veteran Ben Vance. The pair was asked to teach in the Immersion Lab by professors Jenny Rodenhouse, a faculty member in the graduate Media Design Practice (MDP) program, and Maggie Hendrie, chair of Interaction Design. Parsons, who teaches a basic video production course for first-year graduate […]
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Digital Wanderlust: On Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World
Two major anniversaries in digital technology happened in 2019. October 29th marked the fiftieth year since the first message was transmitted via ARPANET, an early network of computers developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and hosted at universities including UCLA and Stanford (where the message was, respectively, sent and received)—a relatively pat and mutually agreed upon milestone for the beginning of the internet as we know it. The other anniversary—the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web—is much less decisive: You might notice people celebrating the thirtieth year of the internet’s most transformative application well into 2021. A quick […]
