As an actress, Helen Hunt has thrived in the entertainment industry for over four decades. She’s won an Oscar, Golden Globe Awards and Primetime Emmys. She has succeeded on a large scale as both a film and a television actress, which is no small feat considering that, until recently, film and television actors have been largely kept in distinct and relatively immutable categories. Hunt has been directing for years, too, from episodes of Mad About You to her first feature film in 2007, Then She Found Me. But not until her latest effort, Ride, has she taken it upon herself […]
In the mid-1980s, actor and comedian Robert Townsend had scored supporting roles in films like A Soldier’s Story and Streets of Fire, but was still limited in the opportunities available to him as a black performer. Frustrated by the lack of roles, Townsend created one for himself – and directed a landmark in American independent cinema in the process – by helming Hollywood Shuffle, a self-financed comedy about a young actor whose experiences mirrored Townsend’s own. Bobby Taylor (Townsend) is an aspiring thespian who dreams of playing superheroes and Shakespearean kings but mostly finds himself auditioning to play pimps and […]
Have you heard? The United Nations designated 2015 the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies,” and cinematography made the cut. But is IYL 2015 finally the year in which the dam burst of innovation subsides, and new digital cameras and techniques no longer threaten to drown us? Surveying the latest advances in large-sensor digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker’s fifth annual round-up — written, as always, on the eve of NAB — gives me pause to consider how far we’ve come in the five years since Sony’s F3 and FS100 were cutting-edge… since Panasonic’s AF100 stirred passions, ARRI’s Alexa represented a bold choice, and RED’s hand-assembled Epic-M […]
Best Seller An old-school scribe who never met a genre he couldn’t work in, Larry Cohen honed his craft as a writer on ’50s and ’60s television before graduating to features via assignments like Return of the Seven and a series of unproduced treatments for Alfred Hitchcock (one of which would resurface decades later as the Colin Farrell vehicle Phone Booth). Cohen promoted himself to director in 1972 with Bone, a wickedly funny class satire in which a white couple’s repressed tensions are brought to the surface by an encounter with a black man who wanders onto their property. Shot, […]
Okay, you’ve spent seven years making your indie opus, another two years playing the festival circuit, and somewhere along the way you even managed to sell your film and get distribution. Hooray, you’re done and the party’s over! Your goal by this point is undoubtedly to move on and start working on the next film. But, wait a second, just because you’ve “sold” your film and you “got” distribution doesn’t mean your job as a filmmaker is “done” (or that you need to stop using “air quotes”). On the contrary, you’re still staring at a 20-to-life sentence for your film. […]
In a sure sign that the U.S. economy is improving, Wal-Mart employees and union actors in low-budget movies received an approximate 25 percent wage hike earlier this year. Across the country, companies like McDonald’s and many U.S. states are also raising workers’ pay. Such positive economic indicators should be cause for celebration, but for low-budget filmmakers, they signal a more expensive world in which to do business. As prolific producer Jay Van Hoy (The Witch) says, “It’s inflation, you know.” While inflationary expenses won’t severely impact medium-budgeted independent films, rising costs could imperil the vast number of micro-budget productions, which […]
The Copa Shot: It’s one of the few shots in the history of cinema readily identifiable by name, instantly conjuring the image of Goodfellas gangster Ray Liotta leading Lorraine Bracco – and by extension the audience – through the back entrance of New York’s legendary Copacabana nightclub, as Steadicam operator Larry McConkey glides along behind them. How long did one of film’s most famed tracking shots take to pull off? It was in the can before lunch — which isn’t to say it was easy. With a 25th Anniversary screening of Goodfellas set to close the Tribeca Film Festival on April […]
If you’re a fan of Victorian anthropomorphic tableaux then Walter Potter needs no introduction. For those not in the know (and in NYC), head over to this year’s Tribeca Film Festival where Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens screens starting April 18th. This fascinating documentary short is the brainchild of Brooklyn filmmaker (and connoisseur of the strange) Ronni Thomas, who tackles his titular subject – an English taxidermist who died nearly a century ago after founding a museum dedicated to his whimsical and unsettling dioramas – via five modern-day Potter enthusiasts. From taxidermied cats having a tea and croquet […]
Alma Har’el’s 2011 Bombay Beach is one of the most striking feature debuts of any sort, fiction or doc, in recent years. In writing about the film and Har’el for our 25 New Faces of 2011, I called it “not only a loving, deeply empathetic portrait of the diverse characters who make up the town” (a small burg in the Salton Sea) “but also a beautifully poetic cinematic essay on the power — and necessity — of play and self-invention.” Bombay Beach, shot largely by Har’el herself on a handheld, $600 Canon consumer video camera, had style to burn, and […]
The following report on five pioneering immersive media projects — a report detailing their viewership, audience engagement and creators’ best practices — appears on Filmmaker courtesy of StoryCode, where it is crossposted. Anyone creating immersive media has run into a similar challenge: people outside of the creators’ bubble are not exactly sure what you mean by “immersive”, “interactive”, or “transmedia” experiences. Producers of this new form of media often get questions like: Where is the business model? What are the audience numbers like? How engaged are users/what is the impact? Doesn’t this just distract us from good storytelling? This article […]