“I think we have really broken a new genre. It is the next evolution of factual storytelling.” So says Christine Connor, the creator and producer of ABC’s forthcoming drama-documentary hybrid series Final Witness, which begins its debut season in early 2012. In fall 2009, independent producer Connor pitched ABC’s Rudy Bednar the idea of a show that would present “true-crime murder stories told with an emphasis on narrative storytelling, narrated by the character of the victim.” A further hook was that Final Witness, in an attempt to move away from the look and feel of conventional true-crime re-enactment shows, would […]
As a child growing up in Scituate, Mass., Nick Flynn was often left to explore on his own, and he got into varying degrees of trouble. Flynn’s parents were divorced and he had no contact with his father, living instead with his mother, who worked in a bakery. She remarried to a 21-year-old Vietnam vet, and, after their divorce, Flynn wound up living with her and a new boyfriend — a member of one of the largest drug smuggling rings in New England. Around the age of 18, Flynn started working for the smuggler — unloading fishing boats and as […]
While the title of Eve Sussman’s (and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation’s) whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir –– shown as part of New Frontiers at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival –– refers to a seminal abstract artwork dealing with space, the video itself is all about time. In fact, this experimental piece’s apparent story about an American geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood) working in a post-Soviet industrial metropolis called City-A has no fixed time at all. That’s because the sum of the video’s parts aren’t just greater than the whole –– there is no whole. Through an algorithm, which Sussman has dubbed “the Serenity […]
The first thing I did after finally reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids this past summer was to get on YouTube to find the earliest clips of her I could. I wanted to sense the charisma she must have put out when she was young. It’s not like she’s not still charismatic, but it’s just that, like with every famous person, her charisma is now congealed with the aura of her fame. I wanted to see what she seemed like before she was “Patti Smith,” the woman who made Horses and Easter. Before she was that rock-and roll-icon, Smith was, as […]
Following up his impressive debut, Reprise, Joachim Trier uses a Pierre Drieu La Rochelle novel and the Norwegian capital to create the beautifully somber Oslo, August 31st. By Scott Macaulay
Directors Joshua Marston (The Forgiveness of Blood) and Braden King (Here) discuss the making of their very different pictures through the prism of their shared experience — making an independent film in Eastern Europe.
Without a doubt, this is an amazing time to be a storyteller. We have moved beyond the simple democratization of storytelling and production tools. Funding, marketing and distribution solutions are commoditized, providing filmmakers numerous opportunities to bring their work to an audience. And now a new phase is arriving, one that merges technology with the creative process. Filmmakers will soon be able to take advantage of a world of connected objects in what has been termed the “Internet of things.” And in this environment, as always, there will be a need for good storytelling to provide a level of understanding, […]
Robot and Frank (director, Jake Schreier) I got into film because I was spectacularly mediocre at everything else. I loved art and performance, but wasn’t much of an actor, was a pretty bad keyboard player and couldn’t draw at all. When I got to try out filmmaking at an NYU summer high school program, it was the first time where the things I made vaguely resembled the ideas I had in my head. That doesn’t really explain why Robot & Frank had to be a film, except that in my hands it would have made for a really cheesy song […]
On Aug. 19, 2011, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. entered an Arkansas courtroom for the final time. This was the last place these men, known better as the West Memphis Three, thought they’d be on this summer day — Baldwin and Misskelley were currently serving life sentences and Echols was on death row. But 18 years and 78 days after being sentenced for murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark., there was finally a glimmer of hope that the state would recognize that these now mid-30-year-old men were not the killers and let them go free. […]