Variety has the surprising news that Mark Gill is leaving his post as president of Warner Independent Pictures. According to the trade paper, Warner exec v.p. of production Polly Cohen is in talks to run the division while Gill is reported to be segueing into a production deal.
Anne Thompson has written a long post reporting on her weekend at the LAT Festival of Books. I’m grateful for her write-up because I was naturally intrigued by the idea of the “Pushing the Envelope” panel, which paired transgressive pioneers Karen Finley, Dennis Cooper, and Susie Bright with TV’s Craig Ferguson. (It was moderated by author Diana Wagman.) I had heard that Finley and Ferguson dusted it up but didn’t really know what about. Here, Thompson explains: With George and Martha, Finley said, she included illustrations showing George W. Bush and Martha Stewart having sex. “For me it’s powerful to […]
The Duplass Brothers have launched a website for their new movie, The Puffy Chair, which was one of the films spotlighted at the DIY distribution panel I moderated a couple of weeks ago. Their film will be out this summer in a unique deal in which Netflix partnered with the filmmakers and Roadside Attractions. The film’s trailer is below.
Over at The Hot Button,, David Poland, while discussing Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, throws out some industry analysis that feels pretty dead on and which is the kind of thinking that a lot of first-time filmmakers I encounter don’t really understand when they talk about the value of their film: The new small distributors are trying a new model. 12-16 movies a year. Nothing too big. $15 million is the top. Nothing too small. A $1 million or $2 million pick-up is possible… but only if the film looks like $8 million or more. Cover most of the money […]
Neil Young’s new album.
The Tribeca Film Festival is throwing NYC’s normally dense exhibition signal-to-noise ratio way out of whack this week, but one film you should definitely not miss that’s opening today is Robinson Devor’s Police Beat. It was one of our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award nominees last year, and it was also a critical highlight of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Distilling influences ranging from Alain Resnais to Rick Linklater to Jim Jarmusch, Police Beat is an utterly gorgeous portrait of lovesickness set against the psychic turmoil that is post 9/11 American life. A Muslim-American […]
For those of you who are members of Filmmaker‘s MySpace page, click over to your in-boxes. I’ve just posted a bulletin with invites to a free MySpace Tribeca secret screening of two films. One I’ve seen and it’s really great, and the other is a doc on a subject that can’t go wrong.
Mary Jordan’s Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, which premiered Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a real triumph — a great doc on an artist that manages to encapsulate the spirit and values of its subject while situating his work historically and testifying to his influence on the generations that followed him. Jack Smith was an artist, photographer, filmmaker and performance artist who achieved a blast of notoriety in the early ’60s when his experimental film Flaming Creatures was dubbed obscene and banned in various states and countries. But as Jordan details in her film, Smith […]
Over at his blog, Anthony Kaufman is blogging about developments in Net Neutrality:: Yesterday, a Republican-dominated House committee shot down an amendment put forth by a Massachusetts Democrat that would have prohibited broadband providers (such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) from blocking or degrading Internet connections to websites that they may deem as competitors. “Net Neutrality” has suffered a major setback… If you don’t think this affects your livelihood and freedom as artists, consider this similar to the Showtime/Smithsonian deal: It’s all about privatizing and monetizing institutions and archives (be they physical or digital) that should be free and equal […]
For those worried about the announcement a few weeks back that New York ran out of money for its successful film tax rebate program, here’s an email from Pat Kaufman that arrived in my inbox this morning: The legislature has approved the Governor’s recommended expansion of the film credit!! We are pleased to confirm that funding for the NY State’s Production tax credit has been expanded and extended through 2011. New York State will continue to offer a fully refundable tax credit of 10% of the below the line budget of qualified feature films, episodic television and pilots. The city […]