Issues
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True Crime Schedules and Teams
The Alliance of Documentary Editors published scheduling guidelines that suggest one month per ten minutes of finished content as a reasonable editing timeline for the “average” documentary, with adjustments based on quantity of footage, team members’ experience levels and so on. For a single episode of a miniseries, the guide recommends “20 to 24 weeks for a full hour (60 min)” as a starting point. (I am a member of the organization but had no involvement in this paper.) True crime editors report that, increasingly, edits are falling well short of those benchmarks, for reasons that are complex and reflect […]
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Internal Lives: Annie Baker on Janet Planet
For a playwright, making their feature directorial debut comes with a certain degree of anticipatory hype, and the results are evaluated with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they aren’t too “wordy” or “stagey.” As with David Mamet’s House of Games, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano or Celine Song’s Past Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s Janet Planet should put any fears to rest as to how the director would take to creating specifically for the screen. Not that there should have been any doubt: Her interests have long been steeped […]
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Over the Horizon Line: Looking for a New Climate Cinema
Everyone who welcomes the seriousness of the climate crisis into their lives does it in a different way, but there are common patterns. For me, it was precipitated by a weeks-long period of research into climate science for work, creating a new intensity that physically manifested as a panic attack, my first time experiencing this. There are a few representations of such realizations/radicalizations in recent films. In First Reformed, there are scenes of Reverend Toller, his face lit by the computer screen at night, researching climate change, looking at many different websites and reports on his computer. In How to […]
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The Cold Realities: Producer Kurt Ravenwood on Hundreds of Beavers
Visit the website of Emmy-winning Milwaukee-based advertising and marketing company SRH, and you’ll be presented with a graphic extolling the firm’s concept of “empirical marketing.” In return for a mailing list signup, a free ebook download promises to teach you how to “burn fat & grow muscle” and to “trim flabby, underperforming campaigns.” And while many of the clients listed on its site hail from the health and wellness space, the lean, low-fat philosophy suggested by the company’s branding can extend to film as well, as Kurt Ravenwood—the “R” in SRH—has proven with the independent adventure comedy hit Hundreds of […]
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Mutual Assists: Joanne McNeil on How a Massachusetts Video Store is Aiding Local Journalism
Imagine you are in the basement of a home somewhere in the suburbs amid towers of cardboard boxes and items bought in bulk. There are bikes with training wheels and cobwebs between the spokes. Behind a broken recliner is a fake Christmas tree with garland and fairy lights still on it. On wire shelving racks are boxes filled with VHS tapes and DVDs. You see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Meet the Fockers, Waiting to Exhale, The Godfather trilogy box set and the 25-disc edition of Six Feet Under. A few of the videos are still wrapped in […]
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Loving Cinema, Frame by Frame: The Art of Cathy Lomax
Every now and then—winter break, summer break—I purchase a new notebook at the local Blick intending to take up drawing, a practice far from my discipline of cinema studies. This notebook need is not driven by my usual academic hubris, which asks smugly, often with a shrug, “Really, how hard could it be?” but by something more feral and fervent. Like, if I could put pen or pastel to paper, something pure would pour forth, heart to hand to drawing. There would be color and expression and the ineffable, all in a scribble. And if you think I’m exaggerating: There […]
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Late in Life: Jonathan Lethem in Conversation with Between the Temples‘s Nathan Silver
Our Summer issue cover story, Between the Temples filmmaker Nathan Silver interviewed by novelist Jonathan Lethem, is being brought out from our paywall today as the film arrives in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. — Editor In Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman, looking suddenly on the verge of middle age, and with a disconcerting new depth to his eyes, plays a cantor unable to find his singing voice. “The cantor who can’t” might be the hook for any number of lively (or annoying) comedies set in a synagogue, but Nathan Silver has delivered not only the version I’d actually want, […]
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Can’t Look Away: How True Crime Series are Edited
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the number of cadavers I saw—the four-day cruise was, after all, never about the destination (Cozumel?) and entirely about the journey, hundreds of miles through legally murky international waters with the promise of a lethal formula: “Hot sun. Cold cases. Unforgettable vacation.” A marine offshoot of the hugely successful CrimeCon, the 2023 CrimeCruise promised lectures from famous crime scene investigators, podcast hosts and a self-described “walking lie detector” to an almost entirely white, female audience that preferred to avoid sunburns, instead spending time in windowless lecture halls interpreting stippling patterns and keyhole-shaped entry wounds. […]
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Editor’s Letter
As I type this editor’s note, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which I’ve had on YouTube in the background, has just ended. As many of you already know, the flagship announcement this year had to do with AI. Apple has dubbed its use of artificial intelligence “Apple Intelligence,” which refers to its systemwide integration across Apple operating systems and apps, use of in-house tools and privatized cloud servers. Its rebranding of the term “AI,” which didn’t even require them to change the initials, is a clever marketing move, as it elides the fact that Apple has shunned the use of […]
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How to Ace a Film School Admissions Interview
I turned in this column way late this quarter. My excuse? Admissions. Like film faculty across the country, my colleagues and I in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California are reading dozens of applications for a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate filmmaking, screenwriting and media arts programs, and sorting through personal statements, work samples, grades, letters of recommendation and more, trying to sense who might be best for our program and how our program might best suit potential applicants. There are more applications than ever, even though recent analyses suggest that students consider the […]
