Reflections
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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 […]
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Weird Life Events: Universal Language Director Matthew Rankin’s Awards Season Diary
30 August 2024. Montreal. Our movie has been named as Canada’s Official Supplication to the Academy Awards. Lord, please increase my bewilderment! So crazy. I think it’s the first Winnipeg movie to enter this horserace since Richard Condie’s La Salla in 1996. We are told that months of campaigning await! We are not competitive people, but Pirouz Nemati came over and led the whole team in a 12-minute group hug, and we started practicing our back-slapping and glad-handing techniques. David Lynch says, “Look ‘em in the eye and speak from the heart.” FOOTNOTE: My Hater has started an ambitious letter-writing […]
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Passing Through the Black Lodge: David Lynch and Native Culture
There’s an episode in David Lynch’s memoir Room to Dream that I think of often, from his cross-country journey from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to begin his time as a student at the American Film Institute, where he would go on to create Eraserhead. At the end of the drive’s second day, David, his brother John and future collaborator Jack Fisk pulled over to the side of the road in the New Mexican desert: It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and […]
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Access Against Common Sense
“Just because we are in the same room does not mean that we belong to the room or to each other.”—Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 10 “We come to this place for magic.”—Nicole Kidman, “AMC Theatres: We Make Movies Better,” 2021 I recently began reading New York Film Festival co-founder Amos Vogel’s 1974 book, Film as a Subversive Art, because my film An All-Around Feel Good was premiering at this year’s festival. I had seen several people on social media urging filmmakers to boycott the event for its entanglements with sponsors complicit with Israel’s genocidal siege […]
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Talking About the Movies: Sigrid Nunez at the Cinema
When author Sigrid Nunez tells people that two of her recent novels, The Friend and What Are You Going Through, have been adapted into films, she’s amused by their inevitable reactions. “They say very somberly, ‘Are they faithful to the book? Have [you] been insulted?’” “It’s charming because it’s so naive,” she laughs. “You’d never want a transcription!” For a novelist who’s been publishing since 1995, that two strong adaptations suddenly exist—both auteurist affairs retaining their novels’ concerns and essential architecture—is quite remarkable. Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend is a warm, witty adaptation of Nunez’s 2018 National Book […]
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Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film
Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person. Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not […]
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Play by Play: The Making of Hoop Dreams
In 1986, two recent college graduates in film from Southern Illinois University, Steve James and Fred (later Frederick) Marx, walked in the door. To them, Kartemquin was mecca. At the new, student-run Big Muddy Film Festival, Jerry Blumenthal had been an early presenter and judge alongside experimental filmmaker James Benning and Jim Jarmusch. He had shown Taylor Chain II and The Last Pullman Car. “I remember watching The Last Pullman Car and feeling, ‘Wow, this is really good!’” recalled James. “It lodged in my mind that Kartemquin was really interesting. And Jerry was very impressive—classic Jerry, thoughtful and funny and […]
