| Filmmaker Magazine

DISTRESSED ASSETS

The New York Times Sunday business section has an article on Cinetic Media’s new digital rights division. Here’s the painful lede by Brooks Barnes: MORE than 3,600 independent features were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival this year, a record driven by inexpensive digital equipment and an abundance of film financing. But only a couple hundred of those movies will ever be distributed in theaters. Does that mean that almost 90 percent of indies have zero value?

by Scott Macaulay on May 25, 2008

Parvez Sharma, A Jihad For Love

GAY MUSLIM REFUGEES MEET IN DIRECTOR PARVEZ SHARMA’S A JIHAD FOR LOVE. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES. After a distinguished career as a print and television journalist, Parvez Sharma has made a notable transition to documentary filmmaker. Born and raised in India, Sharma studied English at the University of Calcutta before gaining three film and journalism related masters degrees at universities in India, Britain and the U.S. He spent the nineties as a newspaper reporter in India and then moved on to working for his country’s premier news network, Star News Channel, using his position to draw attention to human rights […]

by Nick Dawson on May 21, 2008

Moral Burdens

Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven is a fierce, generous melodrama of boundaries and passions, of blood and yearning, the second of a trilogy about émigré culture patterned after Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy” (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, Veronika Voss) of post World War II German history. His fiery prior feature, Head-On, is the “love” component, with Edge comprising “death” (with “evil” on the way). Comparisons can be drawn to other work by the late German director, especially with his inclusion of Fassbinder stalwart Hanna Schygulla in a major, moving role. Akin seems to have found his métier […]

by Jason Guerrasio on May 21, 2008

PRONOUNCING "SYNECDOCHE"

Variety’s Mike Jones has posted this funny video about the pronunciation of Charlie Kaufman’s latest, due to screen in Cannes on Friday. For the record, and from Wikipedia: Synecdoche (pronounced /s??n?kd?k?/) is a figure of speech in which:a term denoting a part of something is used to refer to the whole thing, ora term denoting a thing (a “whole”) is used to refer to part of it, ora term denoting a specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, ora term denoting a general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 21, 2008

THE FUTURE IN YOUR LIVING ROOM

Saul Hansell in The New York Times explains “Why the Roku Netflix Player is the First Shot of the Revolution.” An excerpt: The future of video is Internet streaming to the television. This is a bold statement, but I think the Netflix Player proves all the essential concepts. If a TV, with a handful of extra chips, can provide an experience as satisfying as the Netflix Player can, why do we need any other form of video distribution?

by Scott Macaulay on May 20, 2008

PREVIEWING SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, doesn’t premiere in Cannes until Friday, but there are some clips online that I think make it look very promising. Check them out. Synecdoche, New York sur Comme Au Cinema Flashback: Here’s my interview with Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman about Being John Malkovich from 1999.

by Scott Macaulay on May 20, 2008

VACHON AND SLOSS TALK BUSINESS

The best film news podcast, KCRW’s The Business, hosted by Claude Brodesser-Akner, has as its guests this week Killer Films president and producer Christine Vachon and Cinetic Media founder and sales rep John Sloss. The program is titled “Indie Film Shake-Up,”, and in it the two discuss the indie market in the wake of Rainbow Media’s purchase of the Sundance Channel and the shuttering of Picturehouse and Warner Independent by Warner Brothers. Among the discussions are Vachon’s looking back at how successful indie films like Poison and Go Fish seemed to her when they grossed over $1 million. Now, the […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 20, 2008

CANNES ON DECAF

In the U.S. the prosperity of your local Starbucks has been viewed as an economic indicator, so why not at Cannes? Producer Noah Harlan of 2.1 Films sent the following email answering the question of whether or not there are fewer people on the Croissette this year. Everyone is talking about how quiet it is this year. Sales are slow according to most of the sellers I’ve met with but the best arbiter of whether the crowds are down was relayed to me by a sales agent with a stand in the market. He said he was having a coffee […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 20, 2008

EVEN HEDGE FUND MANAGERS STARTED SMALL

Brooks Barnes has a funny article in The New York Times about Sanjay Sanghoee, a novelist, hedge-fund employee, and would-be writer/director/producer, who is out there in the wilds of film finance trying to make an adaptation of his book Merger. Let’s just say that a rolodex full of multi-millionaire contacts can’t buy happiness — or an independent feature. An excerpt recounting Sanhoee’s arrival in L.A. to pitch his movie: Mr. Sanghoee landed in a boomtown. More than $12 billion was in the midst of flowing into 150 movies, according to trade estimates. Hedge funds, awash in cash, were eager to […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 19, 2008

LOOKING BACK ON SPIELBERG’S MOVIE FUTURE

Film Detail has a truly exhaustive list of links about not only Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but all the other Indiana Jones movies as well as other Spielberg-related stuff. One great find: this YouTube excerpt of Wim Wenders’s Chambre 666, 1982 film in which the director asked a group of colleagues, including Spielberg and, also in this clip, Antonioni, to comment on the future of cinema while sitting in a Cannes hotel room. Spielberg’s there with E.T., and, remembered today, his thoughts about budgets, schedules, the money people and the future of cinema seem almost […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 18, 2008

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