It’s nice to end the week on some good news. From an email I received from the New York State Governor’s Office of Film and Television: New York State’s Film Production Tax Credit Program has been extended and expanded to provide multi-year support of $420 million per year. New York State also introduces its first free standing post production credit. New York State’s 2010-2011 Executive Budget includes a multi-year agreement to extend and expand New York State’s Film Production Tax Credit Program, sustaining the state’s 30 percent Film Production Credit program for another five years. In addition, a new incentive […]
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Fall, 1993. Peter Bowen interviewed Derek Jarman about his Wittgenstein for our Fall, 1993 cover. Holly Willis interviewed D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about their doc on the Clinton Presidential campaign, The War Room. And there is still some useful advice in this article by Daniel Einfeld, a producer of the indie hit My LIfe’s in Turnaround, on bartering and production placement. (In the Filmmaker office, this article is kind of infamous for having what is perhaps our worst article […]
Here’s the latest of our videos by Sabi Pictures in collaboration with the Workbook Project on L.A. Film Festival filmmakers and their creative processes. This installment: “The Integrity of Story.” The final episode in this series will be up Monday, so if you haven’t caught up with the others yet, check out the links below. NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 6 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Summer, 1993. Summer, 1993 is another issue whose content didn’t make it over to WordPress. Our cover story was Alison Maclean’s Crush. Sande Zeig interviewed Sally Potter about her Orlando, which was just reissued by Sony Pictures Classics. John Woo, John Greyson, and Ross McElwee were all in the book along with an article tracking the development status of several beloved cult novels’ film adaptations. We also ran a great how-to by Strand Releasing’s Marcus Hu on guerilla marketing your […]
Marianna Palka’s Sundance Competition feature Good Dick has just premiered on Hulu. When he interviewed Palka for Filmmaker in 2008, Nick Dawson wrote: The intrepid Palka makes her big screen debut as writer, director and producer with Good Dick, an unusual and surprising film in which she also stars opposite Ritter. The pair play the movie’s lonely, unnamed protagonists, a sweet-natured, hapless video store clerk and an awkward, reclusive young woman who rents pornographic videos from him. Smitten, he forces himself into her life, determined make her love him despite her seeming ambivalence. The decidedly unconventional (non)relationship between these two […]
One of my favorite short films of the last few years is Moon Molson’s Pop Foul. I loved it so much I put Moon in our “25 New Faces” list of 2007. Wrote Brandon Harris, “Short films are rarely as devastating as Pop Foul, the lyrically mounted, subtly acted debut of Columbia University’s Moon Molson. The film tells the tale of a confused young boy who struggles with his reaction to a beating his father endures at the hands of a local thug following a Little League baseball game. Pop Foul stingingly depicts the emotional violence that follows the physical […]
When officials at the state-controlled Film Bureau levelled a five-year filmmaking ban on Chinese writer-director Lou Ye (Purple Butterfly) in 2006—a harsh reprimand for unveiling his politically charged drama Summer Palace at Cannes that year without their approval—he did what any determined artist would under the circumstances: he went home and made another feature, right under the nose of the censors. It was a brave and headstrong move, considering Lou’s previous encounters with the bureau. His debut feature, Weekend Lover (1995), was banned for two years, and Suzhou River (2000), a moody, Shanghai-set twist on Vertigo that won top honors […]
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Spring, 1993. For whatever reason, nothing from our third issue — Spring, 1993 — made it over when we ported to WordPress. Ted Hope had a lot of material in this issue: an interview with producer-turned-NYC film commissioner Richard Brick; a profile of up-and-coming d.p.’s; and a tutorial on how to break down a script. Also in this issue was Peter Bowen with our cover story on Nick Broomfield’s doc, Aileen Wuornos, a story that in its dramatic retelling would […]
Here’s a funny video satirizing the conversations going on between d.p.’s and producers around the subject of DSLR cinematography. While in the video the producer talks about how DSLR cinematography needs no grading and pretty much offers a perfect image out-of-the-box, that’s, of course, not true. In fact, this video gives me a good reason to link to something from our current issue that word-for-word is perhaps the most useful article in the book: an article on how Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture was shot by d.p. Jody Lee Lipes on the Canon 7D.
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Below is Winter, 1993. In our second issue of Filmmaker, attorney Robert Siegel interviewed Steven Starr, former head of the motion picture department at William Morris who left the agency to produce Tom DeCillo’s Johnny Suede (the first motion picture to star Brad Pitt) and direct his first feature, Joey Breaker. (Subsequently, Starr launched the web video site Revver and produced the documentary FLOW.) Peter Broderick interviewed Alex Cox, and I wrote the cover story on Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, interviewing Ferrara, […]