Reflections
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Battles Won and Lost
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 […]
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I Saw That at Cannes!
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 […]
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Words with Friends: On Writing Accountability Partnerships
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 […]
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Kiss Me Before You Wake Up: An Excerpt From Michael Almereyda’s Book, Tesla: All My Dreams Are True
Tesla: All My Dreams Are True, forthcoming from OR Books, is a jigsawed account of my attempts at conjuring a movie about Nikola Tesla over the past 40 years, tracking questions and clues about the elusive inventor’s life and legacy. The following excerpt is one of the least self-effacing of the 25 chapters, in which the author shamelessly confides early experiences as a screenwriter and director while Tesla’s name is hardly mentioned. This is in keeping with one of the book’s epigraphs, an injunction from Derek Jarman: “As the film falls apart, gather up your mistakes and treasure them.” See shadow puppet plays and imagine […]
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2020-22: Cinema Year Zero or, My COVID “Movie Journal” (So Far)
Inspired by L.M. Kit Carson’s “Intros” from the Noonday paperback screenplay of David Holzman’s Diary (1967), a film by Jim McBride. 0. I don’t mind the sun sometimes the images it shows —Butthole Surfers, “Pepper” 1. Anthology Film Archives cancels the final screening of Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995) in Jon Dieringer and Screen Slate’s “1995: The Year The Internet Broke” series. Opening title card: Second Decade of the 21st Century. Corporations Rule. The World Is Threatened by a New Plague: NAS Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, Fatal, Epidemic, Its Cause and Cure Unknown… 2. Ken Jacobs premieres a new work, Movie […]
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Everything Old is New Again
While independent films have struggled to thrive in our long COVID marketplace, there is one silver lining in the digital distribution universe: Indie films, both familiar and obscure, from five, 10 and even 20 years ago are flourishing with an uptick in video-on-demand sales. “It’s no secret that library titles have been performing very well across the board,” says IFC Films President Arianna Bocco, “and that’s directly a result of the pandemic.” Across the entire entertainment industry, spending on library titles has been “notably strong,” according to an August 2021 report from home entertainment trade association DEG (Digital Entertainment Group), […]
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The Gigging Economy: Laura Parnes on Her Tour Without End
For more than 25 years, Laura Parnes’s multiplatform films, video installations and photographs have provoked and charmed audiences with genre-bending satirical narratives about teenage rites of passage gone terribly awry. From County Down, an episodic series about an epidemic of adult psychosis that coincides with a girl’s invention of a designer drug, to Blood and Guts in High School, which reimagines punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s titular book against the backdrop of early 1980s televised disasters, Parnes fuses comedy with pathos to probe social and political trauma. Her newest feature-length work, Tour Without End, has the feeling of an epic—think a […]
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The Wind is Your Enemy
Countless books, essays and stories have been written about legendary German director Werner Herzog—his various earthly escapades, his endless search for the ecstatic truth and, of course, his always entertaining meme-ability—which mostly make heavy-handed attempts at understanding that which is simply impossible to understand: What makes Herzog so unique? Even after spending two weeks alongside the man on the island of Lanzarote, I will not attempt to explain the unexplainable. I shot an interview with Herzog at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago in 2019. As someone described the video to him, he slowly turned toward me and extended his […]
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My Job During a Pandemic: Launching a Film Publishing House
We’d been planning the launch of the publishing house for two years before the pandemic made a joke of all timelines and schedules. Our original idea was to inaugurate Fireflies Press in 2020 with the art book Memoria, a chronicle of the making of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film that exemplifies the creative forms of commentary we’re interested in exploring with the press. What better launching pad, we thought, than the film’s much-anticipated premiere at Cannes in May? On February 27, 2020, our designer and art director James Geoffrey Nunn flew to Berlin for what was supposed to be the start […]
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North Star: Nina Lorez Collins on Her Mother Kathleen Collins’s Life and Legacy
“It is all about an urge, a powerful and overwhelming urge, to fulfill myself, to fulfill this life that is inside me, to fulfill it in every way, leaving nothing untapped. That is what it is all about: the excesses, the anxiety, the restlessness, the pain, carrying around in me this irrepressible need to fulfill myself in every way possible.”—Kathleen Collins If I were to attempt to choose one word to sum up Kathleen Collins’s work it would be interiority. The idea of leaving nothing untapped or laying it all bare is prevalent across her plays, screenplays, short stories and […]
