Blast! director Paul Devlin on the IRS’s battle with documentary filmmakers.
For Evan Glodell, surviving a bad breakup by making a movie wasn’t enough — he also built the camera it was shot on and the car featured in its story. Dubbed the mad scientist of this year’s Sundance, he takes Septien director Michael tully through the apocalyptic fever dream that is BELLFLOWER. Photograph by Henny Garfunkel
Since Aesop the fable has been told of the snake or scorpion whose life is being saved by a farmer, turtle, or frog, and who then turns around and inflicts a mortal bite or sting upon its benefactor, perforce sealing its own fate too. The point of the fable is not that snakes or scorpions are evil, but that we each possess an essential nature that drives our behavior, and that others ignore our essential nature at their peril. Hold on to that thought. We’ll come back to it. Since posting my initial notes on FCP X, FIRST MUSINGS, […]
Last summer, at about the same time I was shooting Orphaned, Columbia Pictures was shooting second-unit/chase scenes for Salt here in Albany, NY. Apparently we have a really dope set of off-ramps and bridges that made it necessary to shoot one scene in Upstate New York. They brought in all their own people and all their own gear. Many of the actors that worked on Orphaned got day-play extra roles and stand-in gigs, and downtown was a mess for a week. The film community of Albany was pissed and ecstatic all at the same time, and the experience acted as […]
Before completing Dirty White Boy, his screenplay about the last days of rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard and his relationship with VH1 p.a.-turned-manager Jarred Weisfeld, Brent Hoff had 24 partially written scripts on his hard drive. “One of them was over 200 pages long,” he says. “I came up with lots of ideas, but I never completed them.” But when Hoff heard that producer Todd Hagopian had bought Weisfeld’s life rights along with those of ODB’s mother, he knew that he was the guy to write — and finish — that story. “I worked at VH1,” says Hoff, “and I met […]
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now. Damon Russell is a filmmaker whose work lives right on that line. The Atlanta, Georgia native, who shuttles between Atlanta and New York as projects come and go, made a short film that was partially shot in the notorious western Atlanta ghetto, “The Bluff.” After seeing Russell’s film, a Bluff resident named Curtis Snow, whose livelihood revolves around armed robbery and drug pushing, sought out Russell to make a film about his life. Snow on Tha Bluff, which world premiered at this year’s […]
If you listen to the radio, then you may have seen the short documentary essay films of the New York collaborative, Everynone. For the last two years, the three filmmakers — Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante and Julius Metoyer III — have been creating witty and allusive short films to accompany the popular WNYC radio program Radiolab, heard on more than 300 public radio stations around the country. Radiolab explores science and philosophy in the guise of radio theater, mixing music and sound effects into presentations that thrillingly veer from the pedagogical to the personal. And if you listen to Radiolab […]
Laura Israel cut her teeth editing experimental works, commercials and music videos while still a film student at NYU. She shifted her focus from directing to editing, and from cinema to video. By the time she graduated she had formed her own New York City company, Assemblage. Her client list reads like a hipper-than-hip door list: John Lurie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Sonic Youth, New Order, Ed Lachman and especially over the last two decades, her good friend Robert Frank with whom she has been archiving and preserving his film and video work over the past two years. […]
Yance Ford was a sophomore at Hamilton College 19 years ago when her brother was murdered. “My brother’s death picked up my life and put it down somewhere else,” Ford says. “I had an image of myself in my mind as a working artist, and when he died, all of that changed.” By her senior year, Ford, who made images as a photographer, decided she wanted to make a film about her brother’s death. She moved back to her hometown New York, worked as a p.a. and took a Third World Newsreel production workshop. Then in 2002 she became series […]