Steve James’ Hoop Dreams, Darnell Martin’s first feature, I Like it Like That, experimental filmmaker Eric Saks, and a report on non-linear editing, which was new at the time — those were all in our Fall, 1994 edition. But our big story was our cover — Hal Hartley’s interview of Jean-Luc Godard. Godard was in town for an exhibition of his work, including his new “self-portrait,” JLG BY JLG. Hartley met with Godard at 9:00AM in his suite at the Essex Hotel, and d.p. and photographer Gabor Szitanyi snapped the smoky shot of Godard we ran. Nothing from this issue […]
When did the New York Times’ videos become embeddable? Here’s another of A.O. Scott’s movie appreciations, this time of one of my favorite documentaries of all time, Errol Morris’s Fast Cheap and Out of Control.
As a general net neutrality supporter, I find the “read between the lines” nature of this latest news from Google/Verizon fairly ominous. The story, in which the two companies discuss setting up extra-internet wireless services, just broke, though, so I’ll be looking forward to reading the ensuing commentary and details. From the New York Times about their proposal: The proposal also excludes other online services [from net neutrality regulations] that broadband providers might create in the future. These new online services could include services for entertainment or healthcare monitoring, the companies said. Google and Verizon said that such new online […]
Here’s the latest camera shootout — the Canon 7D vs. the Barbie Video Girl. (Via No Film School.) Canon 7D vs. Barbie Video Girl from Brandon Bloch on Vimeo.
“Don’t make your festival premiere your first test screening,” I always say to the filmmakers who take the IFP Narrative Lab. It’s sounds basic, but you’d be surprised at how many filmmakers I’ve come across who never properly screen their cuts with an audience before taking them out into the world. In this final episode of The New Breed‘s series on filmmakers and their creative process shot at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Marwencol director Jeff Malmberg and producer Ted Hope discuss their late-edit screening processes. Thanks to Zak Forsman and Kevin Shah of Sabi Pictures and to the Workbook […]
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction was our Summer, 1994 cover. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. I didn’t go to Cannes and saw the film with only a few other people a couple of weeks later at the Magno screening room. I completely loved it, wanted it for the cover, but, for reasons I can’t remember, we couldn’t get an interview with Quentin. Nor could we get good original art. So, we commissioned a cover from Mark Zingarelli , interviewed the producers (Lawrence Bender and Stacy […]
I normally try to post my links-fests on Sundays, but here’s a one-day late compendium of articles in my Instapaper. If you read our newsletter, you’ll have seen my link to novelist Stacy D’Erasmo’s essay on the writer’s life, “The Long Haul,” over at The Rumpus. For any artist struggling to figure out not how to make work, but how to live a life that involves the perpetual making of work, including films, this is an essential read. In its clarity and wisdom I found it inspiring. An excerpt: Over the long haul, whether you ever intended to or not, […]
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Spring, 1994. The first ticking clock…. Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner’s Go Fish was our cover story, Spring, 1994, and I think may have been our first original piece of cover photography. Holly Willis’s story was a comprehensive account of the film’s production and sales process, charting the film’s beginnings as a no-budget feature begun alone by Troche and Turner to one produced by Christine Vachon and Tom Kalin and sold by famed producers’ rep John Pierson to Goldwyn in […]
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Winter, 1994. Today, most of our Filmmaker covers are original photography, but back in the day, we didn’t have the budget and were forced to work with supplied art from distributors. Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who went on to The Deep End, Bee Season, and, most recently, Uncertainty, made their debut with Suture, a formally challenging meta-thriller with a wobbly poster that produced for us a somewhat inscrutable cover. We took their key art, cropped it, colorized it yellow […]
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