Features
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Outta Respect
“We tried to do everything we could.” “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean. He’s gone. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.” So kicks off an iconic sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, the emotional summit of a movie that’s basically one iconic sequence after another: the moment on the pay- phone when Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro) hears his old friend Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) has just been whacked. Jimmy doesn’t just hang up — he bashes the phone into the receiver, finally stomping the booth into the ground between muffled sobs while the film’s narrator, […]
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Greenslate’s John Finn Talks Rebranding and How Technology Can Revolutionize the Payroll Industry
John Finn, founder and CEO of Greenslate, remembers the good old days — and they weren’t that good. In 1995, when he first got into the independent film industry, he was a freelance production accountant, loaning himself out to productions where every penny counted. The standard practices of production accounting were daunting back then: there were seas of paperwork, year-end production company tax filings were strenuous efforts and, on set, accountants would spend entire days running around just trying to get signatures on start paperwork from producers and crew members. “I realized there was a need for financial acumen,” Finn recalls. […]
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The Velocity of Money: Breaking Down the Microbudget of Princess Cyd
My origins as a filmmaker split the past 25 years in two. I’m now nearly as close in time to my debut efforts as I was to the early 1990s American New Wave when preparation for those efforts began. As an aspiring filmmaker with no formal film training, nothing was more inspiring to me during the mid-aughts than soaking up the narratives of DIY filmmakers who took it upon themselves to make something from nothing, way back in the grand ol’ 20th century. In reviewing the logistical and budgetary recaps presented in these pages by Peter Broderick more than two […]
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It’s a Small World: Sean Baker on The Florida Project, Shooting 35mm and Going Union
I experience a bit of a disconnect when setting up my interview with Sean Baker about his indelible new feature about childhood, The Florida Project. The publicist tells me to meet Baker at the storied Stonewall Inn, where, before me, Baker will be doing an interview about the iPhone. It takes me a second to piece that together, but then I get it — Baker’s last film, Tangerine, starred trans actors and was shot on the iPhone, which marks its 10th anniversary this September. Baker, I guess correctly, is being interviewed for some tech website’s history of the transformative tech […]
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No Sell Out
In the infant years of this publication, Ted Hope wrote a piece musing on the death of 1990s off-Hollywood production models, and controversy arose! I was only 12 at the time, but I glean now that there was a sense then — at least in this tiny community of cultural producers and aspirants — that the debate within Hope’s “Indie Film is Dead,” (and then-partner James Schamus’s response “Long Live Indie Film”) mattered. But here we are, making magic together still. This 25-year-old magazine, and the tiny corner of the entertainment industry it covers with a level of detail and […]
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Image Shift
No stretch since the dawn of motion pictures 125 years ago has seen as much disruption in the ways we conceive, manufacture and consume cinema as the quarter century chronicled in the first 100 issues of Filmmaker Magazine. I know because I was along for the ride. My name first appeared in Filmmaker in 1993, in a Super 16 production article that covered an advanced cinematography workshop I gave at the Southeastern Media Institute in Columbia, South Carolina. State of the art at that time meant a Fostex PD-2 DAT recorder, Aaton film timecode, floppy disk-to-telecine audio syncing, new Eastman EXR […]
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Letter From Rome
For Abel Ferrara, now living and working in Rome, there’s no love lost between the renegade director and the New York of yesteryear, the New York of Bad Lieutenant. “Being in Europe, it’s very different,” Ferrara explains. “We thought we were free then, but it’s nothing compared to where we’re at now. We’re outside the system, working within the European financial community, which includes the socialist brand of government financing and various cultural ministries.” Continues Ferrara, “On Bad Lieutenant” — the cover of Filmmaker’s second issue — “we were totally free. The director has to have absolute freedom. Now, you […]
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Forced Perspective: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Consider the physical closeness necessary to feel air pass out of the lungs and through the nose of a Black man, the spatial distance needed for your nose to touch his sigh. Face to almost blurry face — so much that when the corners of his mouth dart up, down and around, when talking or gesturing or from involuntary conduct, you notice the landscape between his corresponding cheek and chin bow like the warping of a shimmering trampoline. The pinhole pores of this brown-laden terrain become another optical reveal that transpires only after your mind’s eye adjusts to the formerly […]
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Independent Film’s Sorry Quarter Century?
The American independent film movement began in a movie theater a little over 100 years ago when Oscar Micheaux watched, through clenched teeth, the racist Hollywood establishment blockbuster The Birth of a Nation. A few years later, the first American indie film was released to a targeted niche audience; Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader announced the beginning of a movement born of rage and profound personal vision. What followed were deeply personal, formally inventive narratives from such innovators as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Ida Lupino, Melvin Van Peebles and John Cassavetes. The films were made on low budgets with little to […]
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A Wonderstruck Tweetstorm
Larry Gross first appeared in Filmmaker with the Todd Haynes/Safe cover story of our Summer 1995 issue. A screenwriter (48 Hours, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Porto), producer and director, he has contribued many interviews and essays since, but, in our Winter 2015 “Super 8” column, we took note of another element of the Gross oeuvre: his seductive and compelling use of Twitter, in which carefully honed critical arguments on myriad topics cascade onto screens in the form of tweetstorms. For this 25th anniversary issue, we asked Gross to commit one of these tweet storms to dead-tree media before he […]
