| Filmmaker Magazine

STANISLAW LEM, 1921 – 2006

One of my favorite science fiction writers, Stanislaw Lem, died yesterday of a heart ailment. The Polish writer’s work incorporated everything from Kafkaesque humor to political allegory to phiosophical inquiry in novels such as The Futurological Congress, Cyberiad, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and Solaris, the latter of which was made into films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. (All of the above are highly recommended.) Those who feel they’ve gotten their Lem through one of the two filmed versions of Solaris should pick up the late author’s novel, which is much less a romantic fable and much more a […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 28, 2006

GUARDED FILMMAKER

Over at Sujewa Ekanayake’s Indie Features 06, the group blog where he’s invited filmmakers premiering their films this year to post, director Deborah Scranton has joined the mix. Her doc, The War Tapes, premieres at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival. Click on the film’s link to go to Scranton’s own site, where she’s posted clips of the film and maintains a running blog in which her own writing is complemented by others involved with her film. And here’s how she introduced herself at Indie Features 06: I’m a film director, single mom, former competitive ski racer, New England farm girl, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 26, 2006

PARALYZED BY FILM

In The Observer, director Julien Temple describes his nervous breakdown to Simon Garfield when he felt “paralyzed by film” while making a documentary on the Glastonbury Film Festival. After shooting 250 hours of footage at the 2002 edition, Temple realized that there was so much more about the festival’s history that he wanted to capture. So, he put out a call to anyone who had any footage of any one of the Glastonbury festivals, and the envelopes starting pouring in: ‘These padded envelopes kept arriving and you thought, “Oh my God,”‘ Temple recalls in his converted editing barn near Bridgwater, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 26, 2006

VIDEOTEQUE DEBUTS

The guys who run the new music/MP3 blog Good Weather for Air Strikes have launched a new blog devoted solely to music video downloads called Videoteque. Named in homage to Radiohead, the site features no streaming video, just downloads, many in iPod-ready MP4 format. First up, yes, a bunch of Radiohead clips by such directors as Michel Gondry and Jamie Thraves.

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 26, 2006

MORE FILMS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND ARCHITECTURE

Over at Movie City Indie,, Ray Pride posts all manner of thoughts and links regarding contemporary cinema. But over at Shark Forum, the Chicaco artists online group, he posts more personal stuff that might not make the general-interest cut of his other sites. Like here’s a collection of photos Pride took following his various director interviews. He writes, “I consistently blank on any memory of shaking hands in greeting. After each of the interviews, usually at a luxury hotel on Michigan Avenue or River North, I’ve grabbed the first bold image to clear my head from a half hour or […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2006

CONSERVATIVE VALUES IN THE MULTIPLEX

Nerve has just put up their new film issue, and a centerpiece is Justin Clark’s portrait of businessman Philip Anschutz, the conservative theater chain owner and film financier (The Chronicles of Narnia, Ray). The article is an interesting look at Anschutz’s various business interests and how some of them intertwine with his conservative politics. Of the latter, Clark writes: A heavy contributor to the Republican Party for decades, Anschutz helped fund Amendment 2, a ballot initiative to overturn a state law protecting gay rights, and helped stop another initiative promoting medical marijuana. More recently, he helped fund the Discovery Institute, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2006

VAL KILMER RETURNS TO GOTHAM CITY

The Gothamist does some investigation into an urban mystery: the preponderance of Val Kilmer grafitti-heads plastered on buildings and billboards around town. Gothamist links to Fox News, which goes so far as to inquire with Kilmer’s reps as to whether the heads are part of a publicity campaign for the actor: “‘Val is against the defacement of any public property,’ said his publicist Michael Yanni, adding that while Kilmer won’t comment directly on the peculiar postings, he is aware of them and ‘definitely intrigued. He is wondering about the why and who of it all.’” The why and who of […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2006

THE GAYEST SUPERHERO?

Screenwriter and critic Larry Gross offers a deep reading of V for Vendettain Movie City News in which he claims that not only is the film’s masked figure “the gayest superhero of all time,” but that the film’s narrative uses “the gay political agenda” as a narrative force against a more generalized repressive order: In any case, V for Vendetta forwards the gay political agenda far more vigorously, unapologetically and, one might say, passionately than Brokeback ever did. But I wonder if the gay community wants this kind of almost apocalyptic gesture any more than the Democratic party wants Feingold […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 24, 2006

A WEB TEASE

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles has a reaction/review to the upcoming The Notorious Betty Page, Mary Harron’s bio-pic on the ’50s pinup and fetish queen. He’s in love with the film, writing, “The flick has an innocence and a joy for life that you just don’t see in many films. Especially films about an ‘exploitive’ lifestyle.” Knowles goes on to link to a clip from the film, Harron’s light-hearted recreation of one of filmmaker Irving Klaw’s soft-core bondage films starring Page, who is played in the film by Gretchen Mol. The Quicktime version of the clip can […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2006

HOW TO FIX TIME WARNER

I linked to Erick Schonfeld in the post below and now just see on Anne Thompson’s blog this link to a new piece of his, “5 Ways to Fix Time Warner.” It’s a very interesting piece with ideas that should be considered by anyone distributing media today. For example, Schonfeld advocates a move away from the blockbuster to the “nichebuster”: Once the businesses are organized around audience niches, creating blockbusters becomes less necessary. Instead, media businesses that are focused on narrow audiences will naturally give rise to the more cost-effective “nichebuster.” A nichebuster is any kind of content that becomes […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2006

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