Issues
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Super 8
Devin Townsend Project Vancouver-based metal maestro Devin Townsend returns to the “Devin Townsend Project” moniker on the heels of his wildly ambitious—and stylistically varied—quadrilogy of albums with the release of Epicloud. In contrast to the prog-metal chaos of his previous Deconstruction, Townsend’s latest album can be summed up via lyrics of the track “Liberation”—“the time has come to forget all the bullshit and rock!” Spectacle Among the growing number of movie theaters in Williamsburg, Spectacle is undoubtedly the most unique and least known. A 20-seat, community-based theater run entirely by volunteers, Spectacle features an eclectic program of films ranging from […]
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Wrapping Independent Film Week
Memorable movie moments may be made out of triumph — the winning of the big game, the getting of the girl — but a career in film rarely reaches its triumphant third act in 90 minutes. Even the most successful filmmakers spend years on their journey, and it is for them — those waiting and hustling for their breaks — that Independent Film Week exists. Founded in 1979 by IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker, Independent Film Week has mushroomed over the past 33 years into a one-of-a-kind event that connects emerging and established artists with the producers, financiers and executives that […]
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Bay Area Boom
When Ted Hope moved from New York to the Bay Area in September to take over as executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, he was stepping into an organization that, with the recent success of its vibrant and generous Filmmaker360 program, had already been making a substantial impact in the independent film world. In 2008, the late Graham Leggat, then the SFFS’s executive director, identified the need to reevaluate the organization’s ailing Film Arts Foundation, which had been in existence for more than 30 years but, despite having a robust fiscal sponsorship program, had dwindled in importance because […]
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Debate Club
On a recent Saturday when I had nothing to do, I put out a call to see who was around for a last-minute dinner party. Result: nine random guests including several journalists, an art critic, one poet, my 22-year-old cousin from Nashville and two game designers. As will happen when game designers are in the room, we ended up playing. I’ve mentioned Colleen Macklin and Eric Zimmerman on these pages before. Their work continues to inspire me, and I need to tell you about this game they brought over to my house. It’s called The Metagame, and it comes from […]
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Goodbye, New York
Ten years ago this summer, Good Machine, the film company responsible for helping launch the careers of such American auteurs as Nicole Holofcener, Ang Lee, Todd Field, Todd Solondz and many, many others, was absorbed by Universal Studios, effectively marking the end of an era in indie film. Good Machine co-president James Schamus would start Focus Features, the Universal subsidiary that he still oversees today (one of the last specialty distributors based in New York), while Ted Hope, the other co-president, started his own production company, This is That. But the company closed its doors in 2010 and now, Hope, […]
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Culture Hacker: Is Story Simply a Utility?
Ext: Night – Suburban Cul-De-Sac – In the not-so-distant future Welcome to the quintessential suburban neighborhood — manicured lawns, two cars in each driveway and a bluish hue flickering from each window. Inside, families watch screens in a state of entertainment bliss, enjoying vast catalogs of content as they shop to their hearts content inspired by what they see onscreen. For well over a decade, this has been the dream of cable, telcos and satellite companies. The promise of merging the best of what the Internet and TV have to offer has been attempted by players big and small — as […]
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The App Revolution
There is a saying I once heard: “Once you change the method of distribution, the product has to change.” This itself is a take on the idea that distribution defines the product. You see this around every day in the products you buy. Cars are influenced by the dealership networks that sell them. Phones by the mobile network operators and the choice of computer you use at work by whatever the IT department or value-added reseller prefers to work with. Mass-market restaurants offer what can be sold by wholesalers — typically frozen, long shelf-life staples. Almost every product category is shaped more by […]
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Investing in Audience
There’s something we should have learned in the last five years, which is the most important lesson we can carry into the next 20 years: ignore audience at your own peril. For a while now, indie film’s m.o. has been, “Build it and they will come.” Well, audiences have stopped coming. A few years ago, if you asked a young indie filmmaker who his or her audience was, you heard “everyone.” Nowadays, ask an indie filmmaker about audience and most likely you get “I don’t know,” or perhaps just panicked silence. But we keep making thousands of indie films a […]
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Editing Life of Pi
At the start of my interview with Tim Squyres, the editor of most of Ang Lee’s films, including his latest, Life of Pi, I tell him how much I like the movie. I say that I know I like it because its images, its ingeniously affecting conclusion, and, most of all, the headspace it created for me have lingered for days. Upon waking each morning, scenes have come flooding back. And the subtleties of the film’s ending, which contains a rich meditation on the role stories play in our lives, have resonated in my mind in unexpected ways. “I get […]
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Troubled Assets
With the 2008 post-crash Presidential election as ironic backdrop, Andrew Dominik’s violent crime, Killing Them Softly, bitterly regards our crumbling American dream. Brandon Harris interviews the Australian writer/director.
