As the clock winds down, members of the New York City film production community are lobbying hard for the continuation of the Empire State Film Production Tax Credit, which has supported a boom in film and television production in New York. Once financing is in place, film production companies can start on a dime, quickly crewing up and supporting local vendors, restaurants, hotels and other businesses. They often attract investment capital from outside the state and even outside the country, and they are swift tools of job creation. Furthermore, when it comes to television production, these jobs stay within the […]
Kudos to Noah Harlan for braving the tape-recorded audio wilds of the breakfast conversation I took part in at SXSW this past week. At the festival CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner gathered myself, Ted Hope, Lance Weiler, Brian Chirls, Liz Rosenthal, Brett Gaylor and Caitlin Boyle for a morning roundtable in which he asked us what had been on our mind while attending the festival. Each of us spoke for a few minutes and then there was a group discussion. As Harlan notes, the audio quality is poor, and I think an edited version, which I hope one of us can put […]
One of the best received narrative films at SXSW this past week was David Lowery’s St. Nick, his subtle tale of two children making their way through their world mysteriously on their own. Alicia Van Couvering interviewed Lowery for Filmmaker here, and David Hudson rounds up reaction from the blogosphere here, but over at his own blog, Drifting, the writer/director posts the screenplay as a PDF download. Writes Lowery: A few weeks ago, I read over the film’s final shooting script for the first time since production, and was surprised to find it even more exiguous than I remembered. It […]
Director Spike Jonze has returned to music videos with a clip for UNKLE entitled “Heaven.” It’s a gorgeously shot slo-mo return to Jonze’s skateboarding days that crescendos with… well, I won’t spoil it any more than the below statement from UNKLE’s MySpace page (and the screen grab) already does. “Heaven” was used in the acclaimed skate film Fully Flared directed by Spike Jonze and Ty Evans. The collaboration inspired the directors to take footage and re-edit a sequence of shots that shows the Lakai skateboarding team demonstrating their considerable skills as they navigate through and around various exploding obstacles. With […]
Casey and Van Neistat, who Filmmaker picked as part of our 2006 “25 New Faces” selections of up-and-coming talent, have had their independently produced autobiographical series bought by HBO. According to Variety, which reported the story, the series is exec produced by Tom Scott, founder of the Nantucket Nectars juice company as well as the Plum TV network. In the Filmmaker piece, Matt Ross detailed the brothers’ early career, the full text of which can be found at the link: The Neistats began making films in 2000 with the purchase of two iMac DVs, and their early projects involved reworking […]
Arms locked together, smiles frozen in place awaiting the digital flash — we all have these photos on our cameras and phones when we return from a film festival. These moments sure look like happy ones now that a festival premiere has spackled over all the fractures that production wrought. At SXSW this year, however, one group tried to summon up smiles that were a bit more sincere in intent. Operation Smile is a non-profit organization that provides cleft-lip and palate repair to children and young adults around the world, many in developing countries. Reps from the organization manned a […]
ICONIC FASHION DESIGNER VALENTINO GARAVANI (CENTER) IN DIRECTOR MATT TYRNAUER’S VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR. COURTESY ACOLYTE FILMS. Having demonstrated significant talent as a print journalist, Matt Tyrnauer has shifted his focus and brought his great observational skills to bear on the big screen. Born in the late 1960s in Los Angeles, Tyrnauer grew up with entertainment all around him. His father was a TV writer on shows like The Virginian, Columbo and Murder, She Wrote (which he also produced), Tyrnauer was a regular visitor to LA’s favorite rep houses such as the Nuart and the New Beverley, and he was […]
A couple of weeks before the festival, Filmmaker reached out to directors with films in the festival to offer them space to recount the making and mission of their movies. Below is a response we received from Keith Maitland, whose documentary, The Eyes of Me, premieres at the festival today. How do they see the movie, if they can’t see at all? The Eyes of Me follows four blind teens over the course of one dynamic year at the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, TX. I didn’t know much about blind people before I decided to dive into […]
There is an actual college Creative Nonfiction class in Lena Dunham’s Creative Nonfiction, which premieres in the Emerging Visions section at SXSW this week. There is also the actual Dunham, who plays both Ella, a college student trying to get a grip on an ambiguous non-starter romance, as well as the heroine in the 16mm-filmed representation of the John Waters/fairy-tale screenplay Ella is writing. Dunham wrote the script, about her own real-life ill fated dorm-room non-romance when she couldn’t concentrate on her own fairy tale/John Waters script, which she was completing for writing class. In Creative Nonfiction we meet this […]
Long Tail author and Wired editor Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, isn’t out until June, but SXSW attendees got a taste at Anderson’s closing keynote at this year’s interactive conference. By now, many are familiar with the gist of Anderson’s argument, which is that the internet drives the marginal cost of digital goods to zero, which means that the price of these goods also is driven down to zero. “Free is the animal force of digital economics,” Anderson said. Furthermore, he said, “If you have not made your product free, piracy will do it for you.” However, that doesn’t mean […]