Susan Buice and Arin Crumley‘s Four Eyed Monsters has won the 2006 Sundance Audience Award for the eight-month long indieWIRE: Undiscovered Gems Film Series. The series’ co-presenters The New York Times and New York-based digital cinema network Emerging Pictures (co-founded by IFP Board Member Ira Deutchman), in association with the California Film Institute and The Sundance Channel, made the announcement last night. Winning the prize gives the movie the opportunity for a theatrical release through Emerging Pictures and a TV premiere on Sundance Channel. The award is valued at $100,000. The Undiscovered Gems Series is based on indieWIRE‘s annual list […]
Below is the list of feature film projects accepted to the annual Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab. The Lab, which has grown to become as prominent in the indie world as the Festival, has an impressive list of past projects including Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Requiem For A Dream and Raising Victor Vargas. And in January recent projects from the Lab like Four Sheets To The Wind, Red Road and Year of the Fish will have their moment to shine as they all will be playing at the Festival. The projects selected for the 2007 January Screenwriters Lab are: THE […]
The Golden Globes were announced today and the big news are the duel nominations given out to Clint Eastwood for Best Director (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima) and Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor (Drama) (The Departed, Blood Diamond). As always it would have been nice to see The Hollywood Foreign Press think outside the box and give nominations to say Ryan Gosling for Best Actor or Pedro Almodovar for Best Director instead of taking the safe route but I guess that would be asking too much. The Globes will take place on January 15 on NBC. And […]
Screenwriter Annie Nocenti (she wrote Patriotville, directed by Talmage Cooley, which is currently in post-production) just returned from Baluchistan where she shot a documentary with partner Wendelin Johnson. She’s written a piece for The Brooklyn Rail discussing her trip which is a fascinating portrait of a “modern Sitting Bull”: the Khan of Kalat, Mir Suleiman Daud (pictured). A “chief of chiefs” in Baluchistan, one of Pakistan’s tribal provinces which also borders Iran and Afghanistan, Khan Suleiman is a Gucci shade-wearing, Hummer-driving statesman trying to unify the tribes towards an independent Baluchistan so that his people can stave off a “slow-motion […]
When it comes to year-end lists, I tend to skip over all the critics lists and concentrate on those that summarize categories of filmmaking I don’t pay enough attention to. Music video, for example. So, here’s Pitchfork’s Top 25 Music Videos of 2006, with links to the clips. Check out work by Sophie Muller, Patrick Daughters, Chris Cunningham and others.
From an interview by Fox News commentator Cal Thomas of departing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the differences between public support of World War 2 and public support of war in Iraq. One differing factor? The movies. Here’s Rumsfeld from the interview: Furthermore, the movie industry was mobilized to support the war. They (filmmakers) wanted us to win, which was an important factor. The situationtoday, the success that has been achieved in not having another attack onthis country in the last five years, has allowed the perception of a threatto diminish, even though the threat has clearly not diminished and, […]
When we started Filmmaker, one of the key lines in our mission statement was that we were “demystifying” the process of feature film production. It’s still a key tenet of the magazine and the philosophy behind it has remained unchanged: by giving filmmakers the information on how films are financed, produced, sold and distributed, we’re helping enable newcomers to enter the filmmaking process and realize their visions. But is it really necessary for first-time filmmakers to know all about these things? By that I mean, isn’t a healthy amount of denial and willful ignorance essential to the process of getting […]
As part of its Oscar campaign for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Paramount is streaming online EPK material on the making of the film, including interviews with its production designer, d.p., sound team and more.
The Raw Word is a monthly New York screenplay reading series in which up-and-coming actors perform 10 pages of scripts by up-and-coming screenwriters. Sponsored by the IFP, the series features an industry host and is a networking opportunity for writers, actors and development folk. The December event just passed, but you can submit “your most dynamic 10 pages in Microsoft Word or PDF format” for future readings by emailing them to: rawwordreadings@yahoo.com.
Over at her journal, author Susie Bright eulogizes Gary Graver, the d.p., director, and colleague of Orson Welles in his later years, by noting the breadth of his overlooked biography. In addition to crewing films like A Woman Under the Influence, working extensively with Roger Corman, directing many low-budget horror films, and even shooting Ron Howard’s first feature, Grand Theft Auto, Graver, pictured here with Welles, directed many adult movies which, while included on iMDB, have been omitted from his various industry obits. Here’s Bright: Graver was memorialized everywhere, acclaimed in every paper from New York to L.A. But nowhere […]