Here’s the fifth of our catch-ups with previous “25 New Faces” filmmakers. If you’ve been on the list and haven’t sent us an update, you can still email one to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com. Don Handfield, writer/director, 2005: Life for me has changed dramatically for me since 2005, no pun intended. I am married now – to a beautiful woman named Tressa, and we had our first baby – a little girl – Robinson Dawn Handfield – just two weeks ago. She came in on the day of the recent earthquake and has been making her presence known with more little […]
An interesting conversation is developing over at Anne Thompson’s blog, in which she writes about some of the recent executive departures. Of course, the big news this week was Paula Wagner’s leaving UA, and in a piece about that development Thompson references Bill Horberg’s stepping down as head of production at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. SKE has recently downsized after producing several films, including Charlie Kaufman’s ambitious and out-there Synechdoche, New York, which cost, reportedly, north of $20 million and, according to Thompson, was bought “for a song” by Sony Classics. She characterizes both Wagner and Horberg as being “ill equipped […]
The Long Now Foundation was established twelve years ago to “creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” One of its founding board members is Brian Eno, and he submitted a fascinating post to the site’s blog recounting the experience he had watching a theater piece in Oberammergau, in Upper Bavaria. From the post: In the early seventeenth century, as plague raced across Europe, the people of this small town made a deal with God: spare us and we’ll perform a Passion play every ten years. All of us. The whole town. True to […]
As the neo-cons attempt to return to the glory days of the Cold War, we’ll probably find fewer of them online blogging about the significance of Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight. If you read my post below, Batman Fights the Neo-Cons, there’s been a back-and-forth in the blogosphere about the ideological underpinnings of the massive box-office hit. For some people, this is all just silly — Batman is nothing more than a character in a rubber suit. Some of the rest of us, though, get off on such cultural theory wonkery. So, if you are not a regular reader of […]
Just a couple of posts below I mentioned Mike Figgis’s blog on the FilmInFocus site. Over at his Movie City Indie, Ray Pride gets inspired by Figgis quotes on character and narrative in today’s filmmaking. From Figgis: I guess I’m in a period of thinking about film and filmmaking. I made a feature last year, it’s called Love Live Long but everything about [it] was far removed from the what cinema has become… I have read lots of scripts and written a couple for other people. The ones I read were not interesting and the ones I wrote all ended […]
The New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting’s new permit rules for filmmakers go into effect today. From the press release: The rules, which were published today in the City Record and will go into effect thirty days after publication on August 13, will require a permit if filmmakers use vehicles or equipment, or, in certain situations, assert exclusive use of City property. Permits will not be required for casual photographers, tourists, credentialed members of the media, or other members of the public who do not use vehicles or equipment or assert exclusive use of City property. […]
Director Mike Figgis has been posting excellent blog entries at FilmInFocus. Here’s a piece of his latest, in which he talks about great books, the magical expression of writing, and Mad Men. A few months back I watched an episode of MAD MEN, the American TV series that is based around the advertising industry in NY in the 60’s. I was quite taken by the episode I watched, it seemed to demonstrate my feeling that the best filmmaking and writing in mainstream cinema right now is coming out of US TV. I’ve guest directed one episode of THE SOPRANOS and […]
William Patry, an attorney and author specializing in intellectual property, has been keepin a blog that covers copyright issues, but, last week, he decided to shut it down. He cited two reasons. First, since transitioning to a position as Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, he’s had a hard time expressing in the blog his own personal views without them being attributed elsewhere to him in his official capacity at the search giant. But the other reason is that he is depressed. From his post: This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the […]
I just caught up with Nicholas Carr’s thoughtful and resonant “Is Google Making Us Stupid” in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. His initial description of a new kind of malady will strike a chord with many who spend a good deal of time on the ‘net: Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly […]
Filmmakers Amy Seimetz and Kelly Parker have created a short video for the nonprofit organization Veterans in Transition. Here’s an email we received from Amy, and the video is embedded below. Kelly Parker and I made a video for a nonprofit called The VET Foundation. It is an organization that helps soldiers returning from the war transition back into civilian life. Whether you are for the war or against it, the fact is their are men and women coming back either injured physically, suffering from a traumatic brain injury and/or coping with PTSD. The government does not have and effective […]