Indiewire has created a tribute page to Jim Lyons with contributions from John Cameron MItchell, Tom Gilroy, Esther Robinson, Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente, Amy Taubin and Marcus Hu. Please click over there and read these very personal and heartfelt remembrances of Jim.
Jim Lyons died on Thursday in New York. If you didn’t know Jim personally and just recognize his name from movie credits, then you most probably remember him as an editor. His credits include four films by Todd Haynes – Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine and Far from Heaven – as well as Spring Forward, The Virgin Suicides, and Silver Lake Life. Most recently, he was the co-editor of A Walk into the Sea: The Danny Williams Story. The latter, a documentary by Esther Robinson about her uncle’s relationship with Andy Warhol and The Factory, won the Teddy at Berlin this […]
A couple of years ago I worked on a new program with the Independent Feature Project: the Rough Cut Labs. The idea came, in part, from my realization that much of maintaining a filmmaking career involves making a series of mistakes and then remembering not to make them on the next film you do. But if you’re making your first film, what if somebody could tell you beforehand what mistakes you might be likely to make? Or, forget mistakes, what if people who have been through the trenches could let you know what to expect as your film moves from […]
We’ve added two new RSS feeds to the site. One feed brings you our various web exclusives which, right now, include a rough-cut scene from John Sayles’s Honeydripper and Ray Pride’s feature on Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, and the other feed brings you Nick Dawson’s weekly “Director Interviews,” which this week features Year of the Dog‘s Mike White. Click on the RSS symbols, search for them, or cut and paste the code above into your feed reader.
Here is a first look at John Sayles’ newest film Honeydripper; due out by Emerging Pictures in 2008. The film stars Danny Glover as the owner of a failing juke joint in 1950s Alabama who hires a young electric guitarist in hopes to keep from closing down.
MOLLY SHANNON (AND PENCIL) IN MIKE WHITE’S YEAR OF THE DOG. COURTESY PARAMOUNT VANTAGE. Chuck and Buck (2000), an incendiary examination of male sexuality, announced the film’s writer and star, Mike White, as an unusually daring and original talent. His next foray as a screenwriter, The Good Girl (2002), was another subversive take on American life, and all the more refreshing in that it was a studio movie which dared to ask difficult questions and featured a raft of indie stalwarts (plus star Jennifer Aniston). Though White’s subsequent films, Orange County, School of Rock and Nacho Libre (all starring Jack […]
For those who bookmark this blog, check out an exclusive clip from John Sayles’ upcoming film Honeydripper now on our main page. The film stars Danny Glover as the owner of a failing juke joint in 1950s Alabama who hires a young electric guitarist in hopes to keep from closing down.
Andrea Arnold’s beautifully crafted first feature, Red Road, the follow-up to her Oscar-winning short film, Wasp, was shot on digital video and exploits a fresh, bold palette in telling the story of Jackie (Kate Dickie), an alienated Glasgow policewoman whose job is to watch Glasgow’s banks on surveillance monitors. One day, she notices a man behaving unusually and, becoming fixated on him, crosses a line. Stepping out from behind her monitors, she follows him towards the dangerous housing project called Red Road… Why is she so obsessed with this figure, a man she first glimpses as a shadow, almost a […]
In the issue of Filmmaker we just sent to the printer today (which explains the slacking on the blog), Steve Gallagher interviews Mary Jordan, director of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. The doc portrait of artist and filmmaker Jack Smith opens in New York tomorrow at the Film Forum, and I highly recommend it. Here’s an excerpt from Steve’s piece: Filmmaker: Were you surprised to discover that Jack Smith’s work is so political? Jordan: I’m a human rights person. I was a social activist myself before I got interested in Jack. So, for me, this documentary is a […]
Dave McNary reports in Variety the exciting news that Bingham Ray, former head of October Films and United Artists, will head up a new theatrical distribution arm at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. The piece is short on details, but the coupling of Ray, the distributor behind the U.S. releases of films by Mike Leigh, Todd Solondz and Lars von Trier, among others, with the production company behind such films as United 93 is very promising right off the bat. More to follow…