Okay, I guess it’s official now. As Deadline Hollywood is reporting, the Producer’s Guild of America has officially created a new category for the “transmedia producer.” From Nikki Finke’s piece: I’ve learned that a significant All-Boards meeting for the Producers Guild of America took place tonight. Sources tell me that the members voted on a series of amendments that qualify individuals as professional producers. More importantly, for the first time in the guild’s history, they voted on and ratified a new credit — that of the Transmedia Producer — which had been shepherded by such Hollywood names as Mark Gordon, […]
Remember our serial killer pal Mike and his 70-minute takeout of George Lucas’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace? Well, he’s back. Red Letter Media has posted his equally epic sequel — another long consideration, this time of Episode Two: Attack of the Clones. Part one below.
The Sundance Institute have announced the projects chosen to be a part of the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in East Africa. The Lab will take place July 9-29 on the island of Manda off the coast of Kenya. The Lab will provide these projects with guidance in their creative development towards the end product. Styled from the Sundance Institute Theatre Labs, Sundance Institute East Africa is an exchange and development program, and participants will receive training and mentoring from American and African Creative Advisors. The projects included this year are Cut Off My Tongue by Sitawa Namwalie, The Book of […]
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Okay, it’s the weekend, so I’m allowing myself a frivolous but funny post. Filmmaker was invited to the set of this film just a few weeks ago. We weren’t able to send anybody but I just came across this entirely safe-for-work trailer of the porn parody of The Big Lebowski starring Tom Byron as “The Dude,” Peter, um O’Tool eerily accurate in the John Goodman role, and Kimberly Kane channeling Julianne Moore’s performance artiste. Porn parodies have come a long way. Some of these set-ups compare to the original pretty well. From the press release we received: New Sensations, the […]
The first round of Apple iPad reviews has hit the ‘net. David Pogue of the New York Times split his somewhat muted review into two points-of-view: the tech geek and everyone else. He begins both by writing, “The Apple iPad is basically a giant iPod Touch.’ The tech geek POV review is mixed; the “everyone else” pretty positive. Edward Baig in USA Today is less equivocal: The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon’s Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very […]
You could say that Bill Gunn was a man who came before his time, but that leaves you working under the flimsy assumption that a time more hospitable to this man of undeniable talents and mercurial preoccupations would some day come. If you don’t already know this is a weak proposition, you’re not paying attention to the tenor of the times we live in. One can be forgiven for being unable to relate to the struggles of an unorthodox black artist to find proper patrons and an appreciative audience I suppose. Still, it is better to say that Bill Gunn, […]
The ever-whimsical and inventive Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) might have worked with some of the best names in the business, putting his personal stamp on everything from music videos to comedies, TV series, romantic fantasies, and soon, a Seth Rogen–penned reboot of ’60s serial The Green Hornet, but his latest film hews much closer to the heart. An affectionate and emotionally probing portrait of Gondry’s Aunt Suzette, a schoolteacher in rural France for 34 years, The Thorn in the Heart is a personal documentary in the purest sense of the term, a […]
In a surprising Hollywood Reporter article, Eriq Gardner discovers a new indie film monetization scheme. He quotes Jeffrey Weaver of the D.C.-based U.S. Copyright Group who says of his company’s work, “We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel.” Like many others in the indie community, Weaver’s efforts involve torrents. In his case, however, the company is not using torrent sites as a no-cost means of cultivating an audience but rather as objects of prosecution. From Gardner’s piece: In what may be a sign of things to come, more than 20,000 individual movie torrent […]
In my post below about “Scarface School Play” I injected a healthy note of skepticism that any school would sanction a school play in which mounds of popcorn stood in for Tony Montana’s cocaine. Now, TMZ is reporting that the video was indeed a fake. According to the site: Instead, it’s the work of director Marc Klasfeld and Rockhard Films who did the videos for Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface” and Adam Lambert’s “For Your Entertainment.” It was produced in L.A. within the last few weeks and the audience members were a mix of cast family members, colleagues and friends. As Travis […]