“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, […]

It’s a rare thing for scholars to be asked to serve as advisors on studio films of any size, no matter the topic. (Hell, we’re usually not even asked to authenticate representations of academia itself.) So, it came as a pleasant surprise indeed for Brooklyn-based scholar and curator Leo Goldsmith and Georgia Tech film and media professor Gregory Zinman when they were asked by director James Gray to serve as advisors on his latest film, Ad Astra, scheduled for a September release by 20th Century Fox. Said to be a moody, existential science fiction film (Zinman and Goldsmith have read […]

I know, it’s maddening. People watch 10-hour series that take five hours to get good, but your 101-minute comedy is too long. Michael Bay makes three-hour Transformers movies, but your 95-minute drama is too long. Critics love seven hours of Sátántangó, but your 18-minute short is too long. Sorry, but it’s probably true. I learned this the hard way on my first feature film, Jake. After our initial 118-minute cut, we proudly got it down to 104 minutes. We couldn’t cut a frame more! We locked picture and sent out our perfectly formed film to festivals. Final runtime? 88 minutes. […]

There’s a simple definition of producing that mostly has to do with developing and financing a production, overseeing the shoot, protecting a vision. But scratch a little deeper, and producers will open up with more personal responses. Producing is about love, for example — loving the movie, above all, and continuing to love it over the years and decades of its existence. Producing is about support — being everyone’s advocate, from the director to the actor to the crew. Producing is about protecting a vision, yes, but also assuaging the fears of partners who worry that that vision is too […]

You might not recognize the name Douglas Trumbull, but you will certainly recognize his work. He is the man behind the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and also the director of Silent Running and Brainstorm. In recent years, he has dedicated himself to “figuring out the future of cinema.” The result: Magi cinema, a means of shooting and projecting films in 4K 3-D at 120 frames-per-second (fps). In the beginning films were shot at around 16 fps before becoming standardized at 24fps, which has remained unchanged since. Many aspects […]

The production designer Kelly McGehee called me one afternoon. I had been a production PA on a film we had both worked on. She told me she was starting a new movie and asked if I knew any art department coordinators. I didn’t — in fact, I didn’t even know what one was. But like any ambitious young person I did what you do in that situation: I said, “I can do it.” Not knowing what Google was yet, I hung up and did what you used to do when facing questions such as this one: call an actual human […]