production | Filmmaker Magazine

HELP “BRUNO”

NYU film student and short filmmaker Sam Goetz worked for a bit in my production office, and I got to watch his odd and original comedy shorts. He’s now working on his final film at NYU, Bruno, the story of a asthmatic, nihillstic bicyclist, Derke, and his polar opposite cousin Bruno, a gentle pianist. Goetz says he’s not sure if the piece is a comedy or a drama because it “changes constantly and radically.” To realize his vision, Goetz is raising money via the web. Check out his website for more about him and his films and for his rather […]

by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2005

THE BASEMENT TAPES

Jake Brooks provides the first media coverage of the IFP’s Producer’s Group, a gathering of some 50+ Gotham producers gathered last year to discuss the high costs of indie shooting in New York. With IATSE hiking pension and welfare benefits to over $100 per day per IA crew member, a group of producers, spearheaded by Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, and Gretchen McGowan of Open City and HDNet and including such folks as John Penotti and Tim Williams of GreeneStreet, Ted Hope and Anthony Bregman of This is That, and John Sloss of Cinetic Media, met to discuss ways in which […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2005

AFRICAN ODYSSEY

Documentaries about kids triumphing (or sometimes not) within educational endeavors have been big hits recently, from Spellbound to the current festival favorite Mad Hot Ballroom. With its SXSW Special Jury Award, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s doc The Boys of Baraka should deservedly achieve the same level of recognition. Original, visually elegant and with an uncommonly ambitious narrative sweep, The Boys of Baraka was shot over a two-year period and makes a real investment in its subjects, an investment that pays off for the filmmakers. I met Ewing and Grady, who together run the New York production company Loki Films, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2005

DANGER AFTER DARK… THE SNEAK PREVIEW v.2

Our friend Travis Crawford, who appears often in our pages, drops from view in the late winter and early spring when, as associate director of programming for the Philadelphia Film Festival he puts together his Danger After Dark program. And now, in what has become an annual tradition, he re-emerges with an e-mail in which he sneaks his program to his friends a few days in advance of the official announcement. If you are a devotee of outre genre films — and even if you don’t plan to attend the festival — check out Crawford’s program, below. His wonderfully descriptive […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 9, 2005

THE BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL, PART ONE

A few years after its move to Potsdamer Platz, the old dead zone between East and West Berlin that’s now a somber (at least in rainy February) pedestrian mall lit by the logos of its surrounding corporate spires, the Berlin Film Festival represents a shrewdly intelligent answer to the questions surrounding film production, exhibition and distribution today. Whereas the success of most festivals boils down to the cruel calculus of distribution deals and premiering masterpieces, the Berlin Film Festival, through its accompanying Talent Campus and its various retrospective programs, embraces a kind of “film festival as film school” model. By […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2005

EMERGING PARTICIPATES WITH PARTICIPANT

From a press release we received today: “Emerging Pictures announced today that it will launch its Digital Cinema Network with an investment by Los Angeles-based Participant Productions. This digital cinema initiative will establish a nationwide network for the distribution and exhibition of specialty films in such venues as prestigious museums, performing arts centers, science & technology institutions, and restored movie palaces. These venues will screen independent and international films, both dramatic and nonfiction, as well as alternate content such as film festivals, dramatic performances, concerts, and other mission-appropriate programming. “Participant Productions, founded in 2004 by eBay pioneer and philanthropist, Jeff […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 7, 2005

THE LONG ARM OF LONG TAIL

Checked out the Cyan Pictures site and discovered several new postings, the most interesting of which is the announcement of Long Tail Releasing, the Manhattan-based production company’s new distribution arm. Long Tail plans to release from 15 to 25 films in its first year and gear up to the release of an astounding 250 films annually, all by economizing and compacting the costs of distribution. Writes Cyan’s Josh Newman: “Long Tail started from a simple question: what costs make up that $250,000 [the initial releasing costs of a low-budget arthouse film], and how can we drastically reduce, share or eliminate […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 7, 2005

INDIE PRAXIS

Filmmaker readers should check out two essential articles in the Village Voice this week by friends and colleagues Anthony Kaufman and Ted Hope. Both deal with the relationship between our current political climate and the state of indie filmmaking today. Kaufman, who gives up his “NY Scene” column in our magazine this month due to his move to Chicago, asks the question, “Reagan-era callousness sparked an indie film renaissance. Will Bush 2 inspire another?” Kaufman’s piece winds its way through discussions with Christine Vachon, James Schamus and Jeff Levy-Hinte before concluding with a trenchant inquiry by HBO’s Colin Callendar: “Whether […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 12, 2005

THE NEW INDIE SCENE… THE GAMING SCENE, THAT IS

One topic Graham Leggat’s Game Engine column in Filmmaker regularly returns to is the rise of “independent gaming” in the videogame world. Just as independent filmmakers reacted against studio monoliths in the ’80s to start a new wave of indie production, there is now a slowly emerging groundswell of developers doing something similar in the world of videogaming. From the Guardian‘s gaming weblog comes this beginning-of-the-year piece, “Nine Foolish Videogame Predictions for 2005.” One of these predictions is “The Rise of the Indie Scene”: “The dominance of EA doesn’t necessarily mean the death of smallscale videogame production. Far from it. […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 8, 2005

EIGHT IS ENOUGH

Via press release we learned of producer Effie T. Brown’s ambitious new production and development slate — eight pictures ranging from a horror movie with a black cast to a couple of period dramas. She also announced that her production company, Duly Noted, has a first-look deal with HBO’s Original Programming Department. Brown, who received the IFP Producing Spirit Award three years ago, has been a producer on several HBO movies, including Real Women Have Curves, and The Stranger Inside, and she was also Executive Producer of Jane Campion’s hugely underrated In the Cut, which is on cable a lot […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 5, 2005

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