There are a few ways to subscribe to Filmmaker. You can click here from now until December 26 and enter the promo code FMWIN08 and take part in our special holiday promotion: four issues for $9, a 50% savings. Or, you can click here and pay $9 and receive four issues digitally plus all of our back issues through 2005. Or, you can become an IFP Interactive member, pay $35, and still get four issues for a year. Why would you decide to get the magazine by joining the IFP’s new Interactive Membership? Well, because in addition to Filmmaker you […]
That’s really the question. Should we be adapting our distribution and content to new ways in which our audiences will be watching our work, or is all this new media talk just a wild goose chase? CineVegas’s Roger Trinch has some thoughts in a thoughtful blog post that launches into ’09. An excerpt: Short form content is online kingDuh, right? Then why are companies still trying to push for feature film distribution through widgets and the like? Who wants to watch a two hour movie on a 2-inch by 2-inch size player? Go to what’s this year’s success story, Hulu, […]
I’m back from the Dubai Film Festival (expect my coverage early next week) and am now rushing to get the next issue of the magazine together, so that’s why there hasn’t been as much material up on the blog. But I had to quickly post this quote from David Mament that appeared in Variety regarding Jeremy Piven, who has left the Broadway production of Speed the Plow due to a “high mercury count.” Piven has informed the producers that he hasn’t been feeling well and that the condition is attributable to a high mercury count. The show’s producers weren’t returning […]
ALAN ALDA, KATE BECKINSALE AND MATT DILON IN DIRECTOR ROD LURIE’S NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. COURTESY YARI FILM GROUP. Rod Lurie has had remarkable success as a writer-director by focusing on his preoccupations with the worlds of politics and journalism. Born in Israel, but raised in Hawaii and Connecticut, Lurie is the son of esteemed syndicated political cartoonist turned foreign policy expert Ranan Lurie, and grew up with politics as a staple of everyday life. After attending West Point, Lurie served four years in Germany in the U.S. Army and then became a film critic, entertainment reporter and radio talk […]
Over at Variety‘s The Circuit, Mike Jones recaps the latest indie casualties, as last week indie companies First Look, Peace Arch and Yari Film Group reported layoffs (and lawsuits).
Apologies for the dearth of posting — I’m in Dubai at the festival, about which I’ll be writing later. For the moment, though, one hot-off-the-servers link for those of you following Todd Sklar and Range Life’s quartet of traveling indie films: the latest in their series of video tour diaries. View it below.
THE “PINK MUMMY” IN DIRECTOR NACHO VIGALONDO’S TIMECRIMES. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Nacho Vigalondo is part of an exciting new generation of Spanish filmmakers who are reinvigorating genre filmmaking with their creativity and invention. Born and raised in the insular town of Cabezón de la Sal, he grew up on 80s studio movies before discovering the work of cult directors like David Lynch and Peter Jackson, whose idiosyncratic visions inspired the teenage Vigalondo to eventually become a director himself. He studied Visual Communication at the University of the Basque Country, where he began making a series of playful and distinctive shorts […]
IFC begins their Roadshow edition of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che tonight in NYC and L.A. Tonight at New York’s Ziegfield Theater Soderbergh will be in attendance to do a Q&A. A special program will also be given out. If you haven’t read our piece on Che‘s Red camera workflow, you may want to check it out if you’re going tonight. You’ll find a new appreciation for the gorgeous images you’ll see on screen. I also chatted with Soderbergh in the Fall issue (which you can read right now by subscribing to our digital issue).
Another piece on the demise of our favorite art form, this time titled “The Death of Indie Film as a Business Model” and found at Mike Curtis’s HD for Indies blog. It’s all there — the Gill speech, overcrowded theaters, uninspiring films, the high cost of marketing, piracy, the high cost of film school, the Darwinian acquisitions environment. Curtis’s piece is already generating a nice comments thread with the first poster, sean90291, offering some reasons why he’d rather pay $5 to see Ballast at home than see it at a theater where the screen is “the size of my plasma […]
Daily Routines is an inspiring little blog that reports on the daily routines of various artists, writers, thinkers and public figures. The site culls its short entries from biographies, interviews and printed sources. Here’s the daily routine of writer Haruki Murakami: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day […]