The Times of London runs a sobering story from a Hollywood producer who can’t get a film made. In “Will I Ever Eat Lunch in This Town Again?” “Mr. X” discusses the travails of producing movies within the system. Here’s how he begins: Ostensibly, I produce movies for a living. The most recent movie I had a hand in producing won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. The reality, though, is slightly less fulfilling. We shot that film two years ago and, since then, I’ve produced nothing. Zilch. Not a frame of film, a […]
After earning the ire of both the MPAA and alarmed motorists with its unapproved billboard campaign for the upcoming Elisha Cuthbert torture pic Captivity, After Dark Releasing is preparing to court further controversy with its campaign for Wristcutters, a very good film that deals, in part, with suicide. Here’s Gregg Goldstein in The Hollywood Reporter: Fifteen suicide prevention groups are dead set against After Dark Films’ proposed campaign for the comedy Wristcutters: A Love Story, which is set to bill itself with signs showing people killing themselves. After Dark Films co-owner Courtney Solomon said late Friday that while the film’s […]
Below, Nick Dawson tells us about 11 new Grindhouse clips online. While he was posting that, I was reading some of the early word on the film. Jeffrey Wells is mixed on the Rodriguez, but he really digs the Tarantino: Take away the car-chase finale and the Tarantino flick is almost all sublime, groovy-chick dialogue. This is Tarantino amblin’ country, all right — a place where very cool people (i.e., ’70s “street” archetypes) talk and talk and say it just right while sipping a Corona or smoking a Red Apple cigarette or eating a Big Kahuna burger. And yet Death […]
Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, a sci-fi epic starring Cillian Murphy and scripted by novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach) doesn’t open here until the fall, but it premieres in the U.K. on April 7 and the early press has me really excited. Here’s Mark Kermode in The Guardian: Shot not in Hollywood but in the 3 Mills studios in London’s East End, Sunshine boasts extraordinary computer graphic imagery so luminescent you feel you could get sunburn just watching the film. As a sensory experience, it’s overwhelming. But perhaps more importantly, Sunshine also harks back to a time when sci-fi turned […]
JOHN MALKOVICH AS IMPOSTER ALAN CONWAY IN BRIAN COOK’S COLOR ME KUBRICK. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Color Me Kubrick: A True…ish Story is the fascinating story of English conman Alan Conway (flamboyantly portrayed by John Malkovich) who made his career out of impersonating Stanley Kubrick. Conway found out that hardly anyone actually knew what Kubrick looked like, a discovery which led him to take his deception to extravagant, and often ridiculous, extremes. He used his borrowed identity to obtain huge amounts of money and seduce the young and impressionable, and got so immersed in the activities of his affluent alter ego […]
At his CinemaTech blog, Scott Kirsner reports on the speakers at yesterday’s Future of Film Conference in L.A. Along with various business types discussing new media platforms like Joost, the speakers included a director, Jason Kohn, who discussed his Sundance hit, Manda Bala: He wants to shoot movies on film, and have them seen in theaters. With his documentary, which focuses on corruption and kidnapping in Brazil, “I was reacting against the future of film. The future of film at the time was video, and I thought the future sucked. So I decided to change the future.” He said he […]
Hey, check out this article in Bookforum I just came across profiling an old friend, Ira Silverberg. I first met Ira years ago when I was the Programming Director of The Kitchen. At various times a literary publicist, head of Grove Press and agent (now at Donadio and Olson), Ira would pitch — and I would program — readings by people like Mary Gaitskill, Kathy Acker and Joel Rose. After a few of these I suggested he cut out the middleman (me) and become the curator of a new Kitchen literary series, a program he directed for several years. Elizabeth […]
Finally… this blog has an RSS feed. That little symbol next to our logo above… use it to click through to an RSS page. Or search for Filmmaker magazine on your RSS reader. Or simply cut and paste this code — https://filmmakermagazine.com/blog/sitefeed/atom.xml — and receive this blog on your RSS delivery system of choice.
There’s an interesting thread going on over at Jeffrey Welles’s Hollywood Elsewhere. Welles has been talking up Mike Binder’s upcoming Adam Sandler-9/11 pic Reign on Me, and a recent posting linking to Anthony Lane’s positive review has turned into a war between the talkbackers (one, Scooterzzz, in particular), and director Binder, who is replying on the site. Binder has challenged Scooterzzz to post his real name and to email Binder his address so Binder can refund him his admission; Scooterzzz says it was a press screening and that it’s impossible to compensate him for the lost two hours of his […]
Since I posted about the political ad mash-up that composites Hilary Clinton into Ridley Scott’s celebrated “1984” Apple Macintosh ad on March 5, the YouTube clip has gone from hundreds of views to hundreds of thousands of views, becoming a media sensation in the process. Keith Olberman has devoted a couple of spots to it, and various pundits have attempted to figure out the identity of the creator. Today, on the Huffington Post, the author of the work reveals himself. Here’s Arianna on the whole affair,”, and here’s Phil de Vellis, aka ParkRidge47, the originator of the spot. An excerpt […]