Via Indiewire the very sad news that New Yorker Films, the storied art-film distribution company that released the films of Godard, Tarkovsky, Bertolucci, Resnais, Wenders, among others, shut its doors today. From an email sent by New Yorker’s Jose Lopez to filmmakers that was then forwarded to Indiewire: I have sad news.The parent company of New Yorker Films has defaulted on a loan. The assets of New Yorker were used as security on the loan. The lender has informed us that it intends to foreclose on these assets. New Yorker stopped doing business yesterday…We are in total shock that after […]
Unavailable for at least two decades, Eagle Pennell‘s landmark film has been lost in the conversation of influential American independent films. But with its low-budget filming, engaging yet hapless characters and Pennell’s semi-doc handheld shooting of Central Texas, The Whole Shootin’ Match is a precursor to almost any indie made today. The film, shot on B&W 16mm, follows two slacker cowboys who spend their time chasing women and getting drunk while trying to cook up get-rich-quick schemes. Legend has it when Pennell screened the film at the U.S. Film Festival in 1978, where it won the Audience Award, Robert Redford […]
Film Independent‘s Spirit Awards just concluded in Santa Monica with Darren Aronofsky‘s The Wrestler walking away with Best Feature, Cinematography and Best Male Lead for Mickey Rourke, who did not disappoint when accepting the award (hopefully he kept some material for tomorrow night). Milk won Best Supporting Male (James Franco) and Best First Screenplay (Dustin Lance Black), Frozen River took home the Producer Award (Heather Rae) and Female Lead (Melissa Leo), Vicky Cristina Barcelona also took home two awards (Best Supporting Female for Penélope Cruz and Best Screenplay for Woody Allen) while Tom McCarthy received Best Director for The Visitor. […]
MORGAN DEWS’ SECRET FAMILY HISTORY IS REVEALED IN THE DIRECTOR’S MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH. COURTESY GIGANTIC RELEASING. Good things can always be salvaged from even the worst of circumstances, and that has seldom been more true than in the case of documentarian Morgan Dews. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1968 after his mother had run away from a troubled family situation to get married. He grew up oblivious to the difficult circumstances from which his mother had escaped, and then attended Rutgers University, where he studied History, graduating in 1990. Subsequently, he decamped to Spain where […]
Our friends at Vice alerted us to this five-part series on Vice’s VBS.tv about the great doc filmmaker Albert Maysles. Check it out at the link, and the first episode is embedded below.
Taking note of the increasing number of our friends and fans on Twitter as well as the recent (and, I’m sure, orchestrated) barrage of mainstream coverage of the service, I set up a Filmmaker mag Twitter account (the Twitter ID is FilmmakerMag). Initially I thought I’d simply import the blog stream into the Twitter feed so followers would get a tweet with the URL every time the blog was updated. But then I started reading around and it seems that this kind of usage is a faux pas in the Twitter world. I’m of course well aware that numerous companies […]
Director Michel Gondry and singer-songrwiter David Ford have announced the winners of of the first ever Babelgum Music Video Awards. Babelgum viewers from over 100 countries participated, for the first time simultaneously from the Web and from Mobile phones. The 10 finalists rated highest by the public online were then viewed by Gondry and Ford, for their final selection of the overall winner. From the release: The Babelgum Music Video “Grand Prize” (a record development deal with Universal Music UK) went to Quio (Germany) for her “So Dazed”, produced by Christine Lang (Director) and Maria Schöpe (Production design). “I liked […]
I posted below about the change in Facebook’s Terms of Service and the uproar it has caused online. From reading the various articles and postings, it seems like there are two groups of people discussing this. First, there are the regular Facebook users who employ the service to keep up with the friends, swap links, and occasionally post personal photos that are never intended to have a commercial use. Some of these people are disturbed by Facebook’s policies because they don’t want their daughter to grow up and become the next Angelina Jolie and then find all of her high-school […]
If you are in New York tonight and are interested in the independent film blogosphere, you might want to attend the world premiere of Sujewa Ekanayake’s Indie Film Blogger Road Trip. It screens at the Anthology at 8:00pm, and it features interviews with a whole host of online film journalists, including Filmmaker contributors Anthony Kaufman and Brandon Harris. Ekanayake and several of the bloggers from the film will be present for a Q&A after the screening.