Reflections
Featured 1/4
Going Up: Knoxville’s Elev8or Pitch Competition
Catacombs
There’s a familiar ritual when you arrive at a film festival: check into your hotel, AirbnB or friend’s couch, pick up your lanyard and head to the opening night event. Most often, that event is an out-of-competition, relentlessly inoffensive opening… Read more
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From Shadows: What It Means to Love David Lynch
With David Lynch’s passing comes a reminder that, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, the “things that we love tell us what we are.” How simple, how direct, how naturally right this sounds on its face—yet scratch the surface and, whoa, you may find a huddle of rapacious black beetles tearing the hell out of each other. Explain that as a “thing that you love” to your grandmother—which I did, or tried to, during the summer break of my junior year at college, and would have had she not said almost to herself, during the Frank-ritualistically-raping-Dorothy scene, “I don’t know […]
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Out Ahead: The Anti-Convention of David Lynch’s Screenwriting
When I’ve taught screenwriting workshops I’ve been fond of reminding beginning screenwriters that Warner Brothers put David Lynch’s screenplay for Blue Velvet into turnaround in a day by with the terse comment, “The worst script ever submitted to us.” Presumably, the script was read by professionals. What had so offended them? What was so insufferable? Well, I tell my students, according to Robert McKee’s rules about a “well-made” object, the reader’s report was correct: The script is incompetent if you evaluate a script on how carefully and cleverly it adheres to how people expect stories to be told, or how much it adheres to the laudable values of plausibility, recognizability and […]
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City of Moods: David Lynch and Los Angeles
My initial encounter with David Lynch was in the form of Maxell T-120 videocassettes, hand-labeled with my mother’s impeccable penmanship to indicate which episodes of Twin Peaks were contained. I was five when the pilot of Lynch’s series premiered on ABC, and it was canceled before I finished first grade. I never had the nerve to pop one of those tapes in the VCR, and so, filed in faux woodgrain VHS cabinets next to other recorded-from-television fare, these tapes remained untouched. I grew up in the long shadow cast by downtown Los Angeles, and trips into the city were infrequent: […]
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Necessary Filmmaking: An Excerpt from Jake Mahaffy’s Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling
A Filmmaker 25 New Face from 2005, Jake Mahaffy has been making microbudget films for two decades and has now distilled his creative and production philosophies in a new book, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means, published April 2025 from Routledge. In the excerpt below, Mahaffy outlines several foundational concepts microbudget filmmakers should embrace.—Scott Macaulay Ownership, Intelligent Design and Creative Control Limitations imposed upon you are called “restrictive,” but limitations you impose on yourself are “creative choices.” Professionals set their own rules all the time. Regardless of budget, directors will force themselves to […]
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Black Smoke: David Lynch, L. Frank Baum and California
On day two of January’s Los Angeles fires, I took a picture looking east from the hills where I live. The zoomed-in, abstracted shape in the frame resembles a reverse hourglass; the dark plume rising from the center, Altadena, seems drawn up from the ashen ground to fully conceal the sky. The color of that central plume isn’t the rusty brown of wildfire smoke but an artificial black, like burning tires or the “SURRENDER DOROTHY” message the Wicked Witch writes across the sky with her broom—one of the great practical effects in The Wizard of Oz. I’ve read that David […]
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Stepping Inside: How David Lynch Tapped Into the Unconscious
David Lynch’s death was a big personal loss of a friend, confidant and mentor, but it’s been astonishing to me how many people who knew him only through his art have been affected. He got inside our heads so effectively; like Kafka, he had remarkable access to his unconscious. He seemed as though he could dream while awake, and being on a set with him, not only were you entering his dream, but everybody there was having a collective dream. I saw Eraserhead when I was in high school; friends took me to a midnight showing at the University of […]
