| Filmmaker Magazine

PHILOSOPHIZING MEIRELLES

Focus Films co-president James Schamus began his remarks Monday night at the New York premiere of Fernando Meirelles’s fantastic new film, The Constant Gardener, by quoting that “great American philosopher and epistemologist Donald Rumsfeld,” who, in March, 2003, assessed the limits of our knowledge of the situation in Iraq. “There are known knowns,” Rumsfeld said back then. “These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” Schamus then went […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 10, 2005

PETER JENNINGS, 1938-2005

I was never much of an evening news watcher, but when I did turn to one of the major networks for news coverage, it was always to Peter Jennings. There were some great tributes to the late anchor last night on ABC and also CNN, and Jennings’ interest in world news and international reporting was justly lauded. But let me say something here about the unique tone and presence Jennings brought to the news, a reporting style I can’t see duplicated in today’s media. Jenning always brought a cool and respectful point of view to his coverage. He resisted the […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 8, 2005

“STORY” SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD

In the interests of brevity, the headline writers at The Guardian apparently flubbed the Elton John reference with this weekend’s John Patterson piece, “Story is the Hardest Word,” an otherwise recommendable article occasioned on the U.K. release of the Slaughterhouse Five DVD. Patterson discusses various successes and failures involving directors who have brought “unfilmmable” novels to the screen: “The results are only occasionally successful as movies. One that works very well is released this week on DVD: George Roy Hill’s marvellous adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which switches back and forth from the bombing of Dresden, a German POW camp, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 8, 2005

‘A SMALL INDEPENDENT FILM’

As I paged through this piece in the L.A. Times Steven Klein’s 58-page Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie spread in W Magazine, I thought about the movies. In a world where so many movies just don’t deliver, sometimes you have to find cinematic pleasures elsewhere — in music, in a videogame, or in a fashion magazine. And while I wouldn’t have thought to compare the pages to “a small independent film” (“It wasn’t a photography shoot. It wasn’t a celebrity shoot,” Klein said. “We looked at it like a small, independent film, an investigation into the breakdown of a family”), I did […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 2, 2005

PENN JILLETTE’S LONG CON

Over at his Hollywood Elsewhere (scroll down to his “Wired” section), Jeffrey Welles links to this conspiracy theory at the Slumbering Lungfish blog concerning the film The Aristocrats. Blogger Lore Sjoberg hypothesizes that the vaudeville-era dirty joke that is the sole content of the film is actually an invention of Penn Jillette: “My theory: this joke didn’t exist before circa 2001. The actual joke, really, is that they’re making up this dirty joke, having a hundred comedians tell it, and billing it as a documentary with historical significance.” I don’t know — it’s a fun theory, but Waxy.org provides a […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 2, 2005

IT’S HARD OUT HERE FOR A PIMP

I don’t do much Monday-morning box-offiice opinion on this blog because too many others do it far better and far more obsessively than I’d ever be able to. That said, I’m pretty surprised that in its second week Hustle and Flow, which is our cover story this month in Filmmaker, fell out of the top ten with an estimated 50% drop to $4 million from its only okay opening of $8 million last weekend. Honestly, I had Hustle pegged as a crossover mainstream hit, and when I hung out a couple weeks ago with a studio exec friend, we made […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 1, 2005

THE PUPPET MASTER

A few years ago I had the good fortune to be offered an amazing trip by the Italian Trade Commission. A half a dozen producers were invited to tour the Umbria region of Italy as well as Rome over the course of a week. There were great sights, great food, great hotels, great people. At one stop we were interviewed by a local paper who wanted to know our thoughts on Italian film. I riffed off my (somewhat obvious) favorites: Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, Argento and Leone. The latter two caused the journalist to laugh at my low-brow tastes. I was […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2005

TWO WEEKS NOTICE?

In the Telegraph’s profile of Nicole Kidman, in which she talks about many things, including her involvement in Steve Shainberg’s currently lensing Fur, one paragraph stands out: “When she finishes Fur she has scheduled two weeks’ work on the drama The Lady from Shanghai in Hong Kong and has nothing else planned except a vague commitment to do a film with Crowe and Australian director Baz Luhrmann sometime in the not-too-near future.” Two weeks work on a Wong Kar Wai film? Um… I wouldn’t lay odds on it. Of the film and Kidman, the director has said, “Normally I will […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2005

FINCHER’S DAY AT THE OFFICE

David Fincher’s music video for Nine Inch Nail’s “Only,” which features effects by Digital Domain, is online here.

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 28, 2005

DEEP PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

In an age in which every last Jess Franco movie is the subject of some scholarly essay or post-modern reverie, it’s refreshing to read J.R. Taylor’s interview with ’70s/’80s grindhouse icon Roberta Findlay in this week’s New York Press. And while Taylor starts with a bit of romantic nostalgia for trash-film viewing on the Forty Deuce, Findlay quickly throws some cold water on it all: “‘People who like those old movies seem to have deep psychological problems,’ she explains. ‘Under the best of circumstances, I wouldn’t call any of them art. My first budget was $5,000. That was the deal. […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 21, 2005

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