| Filmmaker Magazine

HURRY UP AND WAIT

The Guardian has a good piece up written by director Whit Stillman in which he discusses his eight-year absence from the director’s chair. It’s a fascinating and all too recognizable tale of stillborn projects, grand plans, and moments of serendipity. Stillman is headed to Cannes this week at which he’ll pitch a new project, but before we meet him there, he wants us to know what he’s been doing the last decade. In doing so, he offers some wisdom that should not be forgotten as we scan the trades this week: Silence is one of the greatest and least used […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 15, 2006

GREENWALD v. WAL-MART, LIEBERMAN

Ray Pride scopes out Marc Lee’s piece on activist director Robert Greenwald and his WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price in U.K.’s The Telegraph. Here’s the excerpt Pride quoted: And it is not a model to make money. We had 750,000 people at 8,000 screenings, but they didn’t pay nine or 10 dollars each to see the film: a church bought one copy and showed it to 300 people, a student dorm bought one copy and had 50 people see it. However, from the point of view of reaching people, it is absolutely great. Would I have preferred to […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 15, 2006

A TIME BEFORE SWAG

Over at Zoom In Online, Reid Rosefelt remembers an earlier, more innocent time in New York indie film when budding publicists were intimidated by the cool of “downtown super-dudes” like budding director Jim Jarmusch. In the context of remembering his experiences working on the marketing of Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, he jots a snapshot of the early ’80s downtown film scene, tracing quick backstories to players like Jarmusch, Sara Driver, John Lurie, Richard Edson, Eszter Balint and others. At the end of the piece, he describes taking the film’s three stars out to lunch to discuss some of his and […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 15, 2006

GIULIANI REVISITED

Newsweek has a good interview up with director Kevin Keating, whose documentary Giuliani Time opens in theaters this week. I saw the doc in Rotterdam a couple of years ago, and it’s a straightforward and worthwhile pic that tries to throw some balance on the public’s reckoning of Rudy Giuliani. Before 9/11, Giuliani was suffering a severe case of second-term lethargy, forgoing any sense of mayoral ambition and instead initiating regressive policies targeting welfare recipients and the homeless, among others. (For those who wonder how Giuliani cleaned up N.Y.’s “homeless problem,” this film tells you how, and it’s not pretty.) […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 13, 2006

A TECHNOLOGICAL BUBBLE?

Boing Boing transcribes an interview science-fiction author William Gibson gave to Open Source Radio about the current NSA wiretapping scandal. Here’s the entirety of their quote: I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some… The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don’t think species know what they’re about. I don’t think humanity knows why […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 13, 2006

DATE NUMBER ONE PREMIERE

Sujewa Ekanayake, who blogs over at his DIY Filmmaker site, is a regular commenter at these and other blogs, and this Saturday he’s premiering his new movie in Washington, D.C. A comedy about several first dates, Date Number One will screen at the Goethe Institute, 812 Seventh St., N.W., at 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. in a benefit for We are Family. This screening is the kick-off to a series of DIY screenings he’ll have over the next year. For more info on the film see Wilddiner.com.

by Scott Macaulay on May 9, 2006

PTAK FIRES UP ARSENAL

Gabriel Snyder in Variety has the big news that CAA agent John Ptak is leaving the agency to head up Arsenal with partner Philip Elway. Ptak is one of the smartest guys around when it comes to structuring innovative foreign and equity-based financing arrangements, and the new company “will advise producers, distrib companies and private equity funds.” From the article: Arsenal’s initial client list will include Exception-Wild Bunch, Endgame Entertainment, Spitfire Pictures, Kadokawa Pictures USA and Davis Films. Shingle plans to be up and running just after this year’s edition of the Cannes fest closes. In a statement, Ptak said […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2006

7’08"

Okay, he didn’t make it to his goal of nine minutes, but hats off to David Blaine for the culmination of another incredible piece of public theater. I was having drinks with a friend on the Upper West Side on Saturday night and walked down to Lincoln Center at 2:30 in the a.m. and there was a line a half hour long to see him underwater in his glass sphere. Tonight I watched the ABC special and found the seven-minutes-plus he held his breath impressive enough. But, most of all, I like that Blaine’s stunts, like Houdini’s almost a century […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2006

SCORSESE, CBS RESPOND TO FCC, U.S. STORY EDITOR

William Triplett in Variety reports on a truly alarming development: the levying of fines by the FCC to broadcasters whose program content they deem not justified by story needs. The background: the FCC has issued $3.5 million in fines to 100 CBS stations for their airing of an episode of Without a Trace that included “two brief scenes suggesting a teen sex party, which the commission said was ‘unnecessary’ to the story.” CBS has filed a complaint, arguing “that this is a new assertion of authority that constitutes a ‘deep intrusion into the editorial process.’” The article continues: For the […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2006

I AM CURIOUS, "YELLOW"

Via Coolhunting comes the latest in Adidas’s short-film series, Yellow, directed by Neill Blomkamp. The shorts have all been commissioned by the sneaker company to introduce new colors in its line, and, I have to confess, I find the shorts kind of confusing in their strange lack of relationship to the product coupled with their general inability to stand on their own as short films. A while back I linked to the first in the series, a mixture of animation and Jenna Jameson. (Thanks, Jenna, for spiking our traffic by linking to us from your MySpace page!) This new film […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 7, 2006

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Cookie	Duration	Description
cfmrk_cic		Used by Cloudflare to route user traffic for this Site.
sparrow_id		Installed by Cloudflare. Used to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It does not store any personal identifiable information.

Cookie	Duration	Description
OAGEO		Installed by the Revive Ad Server. Used to cache geolocation (session, deleted when closing the browser)
OAID		Installed by the Revive Ad Server to distinguish users.

17727 Results for “”