The ever-whimsical and inventive Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) might have worked with some of the best names in the business, putting his personal stamp on everything from music videos to comedies, TV series, romantic fantasies, and soon, a Seth Rogen–penned reboot of ’60s serial The Green Hornet, but his latest film hews much closer to the heart. An affectionate and emotionally probing portrait of Gondry’s Aunt Suzette, a schoolteacher in rural France for 34 years, The Thorn in the Heart is a personal documentary in the purest sense of the term, a […]
In a surprising Hollywood Reporter article, Eriq Gardner discovers a new indie film monetization scheme. He quotes Jeffrey Weaver of the D.C.-based U.S. Copyright Group who says of his company’s work, “We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel.” Like many others in the indie community, Weaver’s efforts involve torrents. In his case, however, the company is not using torrent sites as a no-cost means of cultivating an audience but rather as objects of prosecution. From Gardner’s piece: In what may be a sign of things to come, more than 20,000 individual movie torrent […]
In my post below about “Scarface School Play” I injected a healthy note of skepticism that any school would sanction a school play in which mounds of popcorn stood in for Tony Montana’s cocaine. Now, TMZ is reporting that the video was indeed a fake. According to the site: Instead, it’s the work of director Marc Klasfeld and Rockhard Films who did the videos for Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface” and Adam Lambert’s “For Your Entertainment.” It was produced in L.A. within the last few weeks and the audience members were a mix of cast family members, colleagues and friends. As Travis […]
The Tribeca Film Festival has announced that Freaknomics will serve as the closing gala of the festival on April 30. Freaknomics is a documentary that was based on the bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Exposes the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. It melds pop culture with economics, and examines economics in such diverse subject matter as legalized abotion, drug dealing, education, and naming children. The film is directed by an array of critically acclaimed documentary filmmakers: Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Rachel Grady and Heidi […]
In a press release sent out today, the IFP has announced that they’ve expanded their Independent Filmmaker Labs to include distribution. In collaboration with Ted Hope and Jon Reiss, the Distribution Lab will take 20 projects (10 docs, 10 narratives) and gives them a year-long fellowship to assist the filmmakers with marketing and distributing their films. Filmmakers will receive, among other things, year-round access to IFP staff and Lab leaders, one-on-one mentorship with working producers and a five-day Completion Lab. To learn more about the Lab and its benefits read the full release below. Also on the IFP front, the […]
If you thought you were crazy about American Idol, imagine if you grew up in an area of the world where singing and dancing were forbidden. Well, that’s what director Havana Marking highlights in her moving documentary which follows four contestants competing in the wildly popular TV show Afghan Star. Since 1995 the Taliban have made it illegal to sing or dance in Afghanistan. But recently with the Taliban fleeing the country a freedom of expression has surfaced that’s unlike anything the country has seen in a brutal, war-torn 30 years. Starting in 2005 the TV network, Tolo TV, in […]
I don’t post a lot of amateur video on the site… but I’m making an exception. Real school play or performance art prank? America’s Funniest Home Video or an homage to George Kuchar? A tribute to the imagination of today’s youth or a disturbing wake-up call about the next generation? The video claims to be posted by Bartonville, IL homemaker Cindy S., who lists her favorite movie as The Passion of the Christ, her favorite book as Going Rogue, and who may have filmed her son Jaydon in his school play doing… Scarface.
Last week when I intro’d a piece on Don Hahn and Peter Schneider’s Waking Sleeping Beauty, I wrote that every mid-career filmmaker must desire at some point a better record of his or her early days. In that vein, I came across on Ted Hope’s blog this little excerpt of a TV profile on his production company with James Schamus, Good Machine. It’s a great blast from the past, especially watching Good Machine staffers bustle through their office, stacked with papers and scripts and lined with posters, on West 25th. Needless to say, while this may be almost two decades […]
Here’s how writer/director/producer Dustin Guy Defa describes his new film, Bad Fever: Bad Fever is a film about loneliness. It’s about being alone and hating being alone and then finding somebody to be with but hating that too because it doesn’t feel any different or at least any less lonely. Do you ever feel shitty and wonder why everyone thinks you’re okay, and then when you do finally feel good about yourself everyone else starts to ask what’s wrong with you? It’s about that too. It’s about Eddie, who lives with his mother, and it’s about all of his hopeless […]
One basic rule of film directing that any beginner is taught is to “not cross the line.” I’m referring to what is sometimes called “the director’s line,” the imaginary boundary that demarcates where the camera can be in a given scene. Simply put, when shooting a scene the camera should be somewhere within180 degrees of a line bisecting the space being shot. If the camera stays on one side of the line, editing continuity is preserved. Actors stay on the same side of the screen as opposed to jumping all over the place with every edit, and the audience is […]