| Filmmaker Magazine

OSCAR WINNERS LIVE LONGER… WITH ONE EXCEPTION

From an interesting article in Forbes.com: “Later [today], when Clint Eastwood faces off against Martin Scorsese in the battle for the Academy Award for best director, they could be fighting over much more than a gold statue. Life itself could be at stake. A study by a University of Toronto physician suggests that winning an Oscar can extend a director’s life-span dramatically. In fact, Oscar-winning directors live about two years longer than those who were just nominated, the result of a 24% decrease in the risk of death over their lifetimes. Those with multiple wins saw their average risk of […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2005

SPIRITS GO SIDEWAYS

The 2005 Independent Spirit Awards were announced this afternoon at the IFP Los Angeles’s annual ceremony on the beach in Santa Monica. For the major awards, it was a virtual sweep by Sideways — Alexander Payne’s smart comedy won six prizes. Other winners, listed below, include Garden State, The Motorcycle Diaries, Mean Creek, the filmmaker Jem Cohen, the producer Gina Kwon, and doc filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman. Here are the winners: Best PictureSideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures) Producer: Michael London Best Director Alexander Payne Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures) Best Screenplay Alexander Payne & Jim TaylorSideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures) Best […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 26, 2005

ONE SMALL STEP…

I attend the Rotterdam Film Festival every year, and I’ve taken that step many times… up a few inches from the street to the plaza that the Pathe theater complex is on. And now this architectural fillip is celebrated at MOMA and reviewed in the New York Times. From the review by Nicolai Ouroussoff of the exhibition “Groundswell,” an architectural survey of “two decades of landscape design”: “…the most innovative may be the Schouwburgplein (1996) in Rotterdam, a plaza by West 8 Urban Design and Landscape that draws inspiration from the eeriness of the city’s industrial waterfront. The plaza’s surface, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2005

“ROSEBUD WORKS!”

The folks at Cinemaminima pointed to this fascinating clip on Errol Morris’s website. It’s from one of Morris’s “aborted projects,” series or films that for whatever reason didn’t make it off the ground. In the Quicktime stream, Donald Trump discusses Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, riffing on the lessons the film has to impart on wealth, accumulation and happiness. As Morris does, Trump becomes a poignant, contradictory and very human ambassador from the director’s now readily identifiable universe of oddball dreamers and schemers. Check out the clip for some fascinating viewing, and click back to the page in the future. Morris […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2005

A SCANNER DARKLY IMAGES AND NEWS…

If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning, you’ll know that I’m really looking forward to Rick Linklater’s adaptation of one of Philip K. Dick’s best books, A Scanner Darkly. The folks at Ain’t It Cool News (which, frankly, kicked all of our asses when it comes to online coverage of Sundance) have some exclusive pics from the movie up, and now ifilm has posted a seriously cool trailer as well. To top it off, a simple Google search revealed this interesting “making of” A Scanner Darkly blog which seems to contain posts from various people involved in the […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 22, 2005

MONDAY MORNING WITH KENT JONES

It’s Monday morning and I’ll allow myself one posting based on the a.m.’s quick scan of what’s out there on the web. The choices? Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile pager records and phone book… or perhaps, this engaging interview with our friend, the author, critic and programmer Kent Jones. appearing in Gothamist. From the piece: “I mean, I really, really hate TV — the commercials, the ‘hand-held’ camera, the music, the personalities of the newscasters. I’ve given things like Six Feet Under and The Sopranos a try, and I see their merits but they seem like canned art to me — stuff […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 21, 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

RETURN TO SENDER

Making its way through the blogosphere (through sites like Moviecity News) is this link to a website run by an anonymous “Manager Guy” who posts the strangest, wackiest or lamest query letters he receives online for everyone to laugh at or, hopefully, learn from. As a producer myself, I could forward Manager Guy a bunch of doozies I’ve received, but it’s not like he’s short of content. Check out his site to read pitches like this one: “‘Marriage is a great cover. Emmanuelle can’t hold a job. She is chosen to become a mail order bride to infiltrate a spy […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2005

GET OUT OF THE VECTOR!

From an email from filmmaker Garrett Scott, who premiered his smart, sometimes surreal but always penetrating doc on a U.S. Army unit deployed in Fallujah, Occupation: Dreamland (pictured) in Rotterdam, where I got snagged in my hotel room with the Sundance flu for a couple of days: “It is widely believed that the deadly global Influenza epidemic of 1918 spread across the U.S. so rapidly because of mass troop mobilization for the First World War. No one realized what sort of by product would arise from moving all those bodies into closely compressed camps. Then, move them by train to […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 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

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