If your favorite films don’t show idiosyncratic tastes, you’re not alive. It means you’re just in a bubble of the culture and your own anxieties about what you think is real and not real. Whereas if you were to be honest about what’s important to you, it would have to be the things that actually make your heart sing, which is why I’m always suspicious of people who do a 10-best list that doesn’t have at least two titles from childhood. Was it really that bad? Isn’t wonder the whole point of the fucking thing? Why haven’t those films gone […]
Noah Cowan, who died in January at the age of 55 of glioblastoma multiforme (a form of brain cancer), was a passionate and erudite multihyphenate in the world of international cinema. A programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival who went on to become its co-director, as well as inaugural artistic director for the festival organization’s year-round theatre, the Bell Lightbox, he was also a distributor (Cowboy Pictures), nonprofit leader (the Global Film Initiative and SFFILM) and a business consultant and strategist. He was also a writer and critic. For much of this magazine’s first decade, Noah was a contributing […]
Filmmaking is a magnificent creative act, one that unites a group of passionate individuals toward the realization of an extraordinary artistic vision. Or, viewed another way, it is simply the effective aggregation and well-planned administration of various creative outputs and intellectual properties. And while there are plenty of books that purport to inspire you toward the former definition, there’s one in particular devoted to the latter that’s recommendable to any producer, whatever their experience level. Clearance and Copyright, first published in 1996 by entertainment attorney Michael C. Donaldson, has been the best single book for navigating readers through the thickets […]
In this new series of articles, Filmmaker poses two questions to producers, directors and other filmmakers. One question is directed toward the nuts and bolts of filmmaking—questions having to do with terms, practices, legal issues, technology and so on. The second question deals with topics that are softer or more amorphous—questions that necessarily can’t have right or wrong answers and whose replies are based on the personalities and practices of the individual participants. This issue, we directed our questions to producers, both fiction and doc, and asked them: What are points, or backend, and how do they work? What’s your […]
I teach documentary studies and production at the Skidmore College MDOCS program and run the MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute. When non-tenure track faculty recently organized to form a union, MDOCS curated a series of labor-related films to add to the conversation around labor organizing on campus. What should have been a fun project became increasingly frustrating because all the documentaries we found centered strikes—the most conflict-oriented, high-stakes and visible side of unionization. What we wanted to feature were the less-visible processes of labor organizing: meetings, conversations, collaborations and negotiations. We ended up screening two excellent films about striking workers, and although the screening generated […]
When Penelope Green, an obituary writer for The New York Times, called to speak with me about Benita Raphan in April 2021, I was still in a place between sadness and disbelief. Benita, who was one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Indie Film” in 1998, had made more than a dozen films across her career (and was in the process of creating a new one), when she died by suicide three months earlier on January 10, 2021. Benita’s decades-long struggle with depression and anxiety, magnified by the isolation and solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic—combined with the loss of her […]
A decade ago, director Treva Wurmfeld appeared in our 25 New Faces while her feature debut, Shepard & Dark, was in post-production. The film is an intimate capturing of an often epistolary friendship between Sam Shepard and his friend, archivist and writer Johnny Dark, that is also a surprisingly wide-ranging and personal portrait of the celebrated playwright himself. Now, five years after Shepard’s passing, Wurmfeld has revisited her film’s outtakes and published the results in Tangents: From the Making of Shepard & Dark, forthcoming this fall from Oscilloscope Laboratories. As she writes in the book’s introduction, “In these dialogues, […]
In 2015, Tom Secker’s website SpyCulture.com published 1,669 pages of documents from the US Marine Corps Entertainment Liaison Office obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Spanning 2008 to 2015, these internal reports from a variety of entertainment projects covering requests for support from the Marines have become freshly relevant with the success of Top Gun: Maverick and renewed scrutiny of American military involvement with film productions. Below, a selection of highlights. ** NOTICE: This report contains information on the development and progress of TV programs, feature films, and other entertainment-oriented media projects. This information is shared with the Marine […]
My producer and friend Rebecca Lamond had decided a few months ago to make her first trip to Cannes, primarily for business meetings to pitch our next feature film. I’d also never been, and initially I didn’t see the point of joining her given the cost of flights and everything else. But when changed circumstances meant I was going to be in France in May and Rebecca said she had a sofa I could sleep on, it seemed logical to go. After all, there are other reasons to go to Cannes: the films, obviously, and the people that make, program […]
When I was in college, my best friend and closest collaborator, Brandon Colvin, told me that most writer-directors make their first feature between the ages of 24 and 36, and that if he didn’t make one before then, he would off himself. Harsh as it is to say, when we were 22 that felt like a world away, and I didn’t fret for him. Brandon has since made three microbudgeted features, all willed into existence with student loans, credit card debt, crowdfunds and a few incredible friends and family angels. Two years ago, I turned 34. While I didn’t take […]