Issues
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Venice, Paris, Brazil…: Load & Play
Don’t Look Now Asked by Time to name the sexiest sex scene of all time, three female writers and producers of Showtime’s Masters of Sex came to immediate agreement: Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s memorable coupling in Nicolas Roeg’s otherwise entirely scary Don’t Look Now. Simultaneously encompassing lust, despair and forgiveness, the scene shows the married couple passionately overcoming grief and mutual recriminations in their new Venice flat following the drowning death of their young daughter back in England. The scene sparked rumors neither actor was acting — an allegation Roeg has denied — but what makes the scene so […]
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2014: The Year of 4K
At the end of 2013 I wrote: 2013 wasn’t so much the year of 4K, as the year of “do we need 4K?” For most of the year I was a skeptic, but now I’m starting to think that 2014 will bethe year of 4K. And here we are at the end of 2014 and I look back and think, “I really hit that one out of the park!” Not that it took a lot of genius to read the tea leaves or see the writing on the wall: 2014 was definitely the year of 4K. Whether it was the F5/F55 […]
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How to Find a Producer for Your Independent Film
“How do I find a producer?” It’s a question asked by many first-time independent writer/directors, and there’s good reason this seemingly simple query is so vexing. Screenwriters selling commercial screenplays and directors seeking employment on Hollywood pictures are guided by standard, usually market-based protocols. But it’s not so easy for budding independent auteurs — those without agents, managers or box-office track records. For them, partnering with a producer is as much about building a personal relationship as scoring a business transaction. At least, that’s what a number of producers interviewed here likened it to. Mary Jane Skalski (Very Good Girls, […]
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“I’m at a Precarious Age. I Don’t Know How Much Longer I’ll Get to Have This Life”: Cécile Tollu-Polonowski on Multitasking in the Berlin Film Industry
I am at Tempelhofer Park on a cold Saturday morning in Berlin. An airport reconstructed by the Nazi government in the 1930s, Tempelhof today is an epicenter of kite flying, urban farming, summer barbequing, and most impressively, unrestricted dog romping. My mother is a dog-walking regular at several public parks in Ohio and has witnessed a good many leashed vs. unleashed dog controversies over the years. As I take in the expansive landscape of Tempelhof, I’m subliminally considering the transformation from Third Reich austerity. I’m distracted by the notion that these Berlin canines are experiencing a freedom that American pooches […]
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“You Have to Learn Fast if You Want to Stand Out”: Lorna-Lee Sagebiel on Film Sales
I’m on my terrace watching what will probably be my last New York sunrise before I move to Berlin. Later, I learn that my early morning insomnia coincided with not just any sunrise, but a total lunar eclipse, which is technically called syzygy — when the sun, earth, and moon are aligned to form an almost or exact straight line. I couldn’t have contrived an experience more poetic — my final New York sunrise, my first and probably last syzygy. Like all perfect New York moments, this feels like the most perfect New York moment, which is another way of […]
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“Be Patient and Try Not to Hold Grudges”: Marjon Javadi on Acquisitions and Production
I am at Mystic Journey Bookstore in Venice during my very first trip to Los Angeles, feeling appropriately like a Lost Angel. My close friend Marjon has fled New York, not for beachy weekends but for a career opportunity. With our trendy Intelligentsia coffees in tow, we pore over astrological renderings on the back sofas of Mystic Journey, and conversation takes a familiar turn. The Sheryl Sandbergs and Sophia Amorusos of the world may be providing smart macro-level discourse on workplace age, sex, and gender politics, but there’s an equally vital conversation, I am discovering, happening between young women confronting […]
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Goodbye to 3-D Rules
To a degree, the content of Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language will be familiar to viewers who have kept up with the director’s latter-day work: aphorisms and quotations by the score, obdurately unidentified characters whose relationship to each other is unclear, snatches of disparate music cued and cut off with disorienting abruptness. It’s not for everyone, but Godard’s first three-dimensional film is so visually astonishing that a lack of comprehension isn’t a barrier. Outdoors, sea and land stretch out into a receding horizon deeper than anything you’ve seen. Inside, there are more knockout distortions transforming even the most banal objects: […]
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Filmmaking in Pairs: The Benefits of Directing Movies with Another Person (or Other People)
Filmmakers don’t get to be moody loners. If you’re a painter or a writer, you have the option to go it alone. Sit in your room, bang out that first draft. Or, lock the door, stretch the canvas and go to it. Film is different: It’s rarely a solo pursuit, especially at the feature level. As filmmakers, we’re forced out of isolation and compelled to rely on others: producers, editors, sound people, lawyers, distributors. We’re team players, whether we like it or not. Paradoxically, though, at the end of the day we have an “auteur-biased” rewards system. With many films […]
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Graphic Design: Jon Reiss and Joaquin Baldwin on Bomb It 2
Director Jon Reiss’s sequel to the street art doc Bomb It, Bomb It 2 finds innovative graffiti styles all across the globe, from cities like Tel Aviv to Jakarta. The film’s graphics playfully underscore the themes of the film while orienting viewers to its geography. Jon Reiss, director: We wanted to give a sense of the global scope and far-flung cities that we visited, while also taking Shepard Fairey’s amazing iconic Bomb It image and having it come to life. So I came up with the idea of old-school planes flying around the globe and targeting the cities we went […]
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Load & Play
Portrait of Jason Milestone Films — November 11 One-man show, fueled by one scotch bottle, in Shirley Clarke’s living room, one tough night only: Portrait of Jason is a spontaneous monologue delivered by hustler/aspirant cabaret artist Jason Holliday. Prompted and interrogated by a sometimes-exasperated crew, Jason is sharp on race and sex and self-deluding about himself. If his bravado is a necessary survival skill for survival as a queer black man in mid-20th-century America, there’s still a queasy charge in experiencing repeated whiplash as a viewer pinging back and forth between empathy and revulsion. This second volume in Milestone’s restorations […]
