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An Improved Revision: Gregg Araki and the Restoration Team Behind “Mysterious Skin”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Mysterious Skin
Toward the end of my interview with Gregg Araki, I remind him of his scene from Michael Almereyda and Amy Hobby’s 1995 documentary At Sundance. Sitting on a couch next to Todd Haynes, Araki is at that year’s festival with… Read more
Lines Begin Here: Independent Animation’s New Generation
Boys Go to Jupiter
Coming up in the animation world in the 2010s, artist Julian Glander identified a clear pipeline for industry success: “An animated short would premiere at a great festival like Sundance, Toronto or Annecy, collect festival laurels for a year, then… Read more
Tour or Perish: A Self-Distribution Case Study
Time Passages
In the 1957 musical The Music Man, con man Henry Hill makes a living convincing small-town folks to buy expensive band instruments, ostensibly to keep their kids out of trouble. Really, he’s just fleecing them before skipping town, but then… Read more
Learning By Doing: Producing My First Feature
Stephen Musumeci and Jim Cummings on the set of The Big Game
At nearly 6:00 a.m. on a Wednesday in late March, the sun began to rise in Tampa, Florida, and Stephen Musumeci called cut on The Big Game’s martini shot. The crew clapped and hugged, and Musumeci, who wrote and directed… Read more
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Fresh Starts: Four New Innovative Independent Film Distributors
The crisis in independent film distribution started in 2007/08, when the global financial crisis hit; acquisitions plummeted and studios shuttered their specialty divisions. Since then, fewer and fewer filmmakers have walked away from festivals and markets with satisfactory distribution deals. This crisis has led to more of them pursuing an independent path to distribution, either by choice or necessity, but it’s also led to newer companies embracing social media and sophisticated psychographic marketing, such as A24, NEON and MUBI. Now in the mix are a fresh crop of smaller distributors, such as the ones profiled here, reinventing the filmmaker/distributor partnership. […]
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Disc Security: How to Care for Physical Media
There has been no shortage of articles recently regarding the premature death of physical media and, most specifically, physical home video. While vinyl LPs have had a well-publicized resurgence in recent years, with much ink spilled about Taylor Swift’s assistance in that area, the opposite could be said for Blu-ray, 4K UHD and DVD, all of which are currently active, disc-based, home video formats vying for consumer shelf space in the studio and the boutique marketplace. Physical media, in general, can feel nebulous; when speaking about it, both positively and negatively, it can be used to cover a swath of […]
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Frequent Flying: Location Shooting in 2025
Carson Lund understood choosing rural New England for his directorial debut, Eephus, would be an unorthodox experience, but he couldn’t have predicted that securing a dream location would find him pitching an intimate town meeting on a Tuesday night. Eephus takes place over the course of the last amateur “Fall ball” baseball game on an old field before a new school is built on the site. Using Google Earth satellite view and following up in-person if a field looked promising, Lund estimates he visited upwards of 100 baseball fields across New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. Often, he was disappointed to […]
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Made in the USA: Tax Credits in 2025
Canada has long been known as “Hollywood North,” with American production companies taking advantage of the country’s favorable exchange rate, tax incentives and crew base to make movies for cheaper than they can in the United States. But, increasingly, a number of other countries and regions—the United Kingdom, Spain, the Canary Islands, Eastern Europe—have instituted enticing tax credits aimed at attracting international production, so much so that, for many U.S. independent producers, making a low-budget indie in the States is no longer an automatic proposition. After considering multiple locations, for example, Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist wound up faking the […]
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Arriving at a Resolution: Remastering Movies for 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
We have reached a tipping point in the format wars, with UHD poised to overtake standard definition DVDs for first place. Now, there’s a new species of reply guy—one who responds to every Blu-ray release announcement with, “Why no 4K?” As a home video producer for Kino Lorber, I will try to explain the continuing rise of 4K UHD, as well as the economic realities of why it’s not possible to release everything in the format. 4K UHD (full name: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray) is the highest resolution disc available and the one preferred by collectors. Introduced in February 2016 […]
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Striking Film Prints in a Digital World: Laser Printing, CRT Screens and a One-Stop Film Recorder from Norway
In 2006, Rune Bjerkestrand was on the Universal lot in Hollywood, far away from his home country of Norway. His brand-new invention, the Cinevator, could create a film negative from a digital file in real time—a vast improvement over other recorders that could take 10 days or more to craft a negative for a 90-minute film. But was the quality there? Technicolor set up a blind test to find out. “We didn’t really have a clue about film, about film technology, about the film industry, about film machines—nothing,” Bjerkestrand says. After the split-screen test footage ran, everyone in the theater […]
