Open | Filmmaker Magazine

THE RULE OF THE MOB

Despite the subject matter, it was always going to be a little dicey premiering Sofia Coppola’s deliberately stylish, English-language, Yank-directed and anachronistically scored Marie Antoinette in Competition at Cannes, where, even on a normal day, audiences can resemble an angry lynch mob. And, from a business point-of-view, distributor Pathe’s opening of the film in France simultaneous with the Cannes premiere creates an interesting situation for U.S. distrib Sony Pictures who will have to either springboard off the film’s European performance or else actively ignore it when it debuts the film here in the fall. This morning the Drudge Report linked […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 24, 2006

BOX OFFICE REPORTING

In a very droll post, Caveh Zahedi puts the whole “decline of the theatrical box-office” brouhaha in perspective. He posts the results of I am a Sex Addict‘s opening in Corvallis, Oregon: The film opened in Corvallis, Oregon, this week. It made $5 on Friday, $5 on Saturday, and $9 on Sunday because of word of mouth. In the comments section, Josh Boelter is concerned: Do you mean five dollars or five thousand dollars? If it’s five dollars, what is that; one ticket? Caveh’s reply: I’m imagining that’s one senior citizen ticket.

by Scott Macaulay on May 18, 2006

GIULIANI REVISITED

Newsweek has a good interview up with director Kevin Keating, whose documentary Giuliani Time opens in theaters this week. I saw the doc in Rotterdam a couple of years ago, and it’s a straightforward and worthwhile pic that tries to throw some balance on the public’s reckoning of Rudy Giuliani. Before 9/11, Giuliani was suffering a severe case of second-term lethargy, forgoing any sense of mayoral ambition and instead initiating regressive policies targeting welfare recipients and the homeless, among others. (For those who wonder how Giuliani cleaned up N.Y.’s “homeless problem,” this film tells you how, and it’s not pretty.) […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 13, 2006

A TECHNOLOGICAL BUBBLE?

Boing Boing transcribes an interview science-fiction author William Gibson gave to Open Source Radio about the current NSA wiretapping scandal. Here’s the entirety of their quote: I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some… The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don’t think species know what they’re about. I don’t think humanity knows why […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 13, 2006

SPIRITS RISING

In his weekend report, Len Klady over at Movie City News cites the solid box-office performance of Courtney Solomon’s An American Haunting this weekend: The frame’s other national freshmen targeted horror and family fans to varying effect. An American Haunting, based on the historic Bell Witch incident, ranked fourth with good response that should pave the way for very good ancillary exploitation. Depending on who you quote, the film grossed between $5.9 and $6.4 million this weekend, and it opened against Mission Impossible 3. What’s really interesting, though, is that An American Haunting isn’t a studio release but an independent […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 7, 2006

FERGUSON’S BRIGHT SPOTLIGHT

I hate to do this because I quite like Craig Ferguson’s The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. The guy’s very intimate with the camera, generally charms the guests, and, instead of a monologue, spins out every night a piece of performance storytelling that is far cleverer and more multi-layered than anything the competing late night hosts come up with. That said, Karen Finley, Dennis Cooper and Susie Bright are cultural icons who have paid their dues. So then, I’m linking here to Bright’s open letter to Ferguson following what was apparently his condescending and clueless appearance at the LAT […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 3, 2006

THE HARD NUMBERS

Over at The Hot Button,, David Poland, while discussing Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, throws out some industry analysis that feels pretty dead on and which is the kind of thinking that a lot of first-time filmmakers I encounter don’t really understand when they talk about the value of their film: The new small distributors are trying a new model. 12-16 movies a year. Nothing too big. $15 million is the top. Nothing too small. A $1 million or $2 million pick-up is possible… but only if the film looks like $8 million or more. Cover most of the money […]

by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2006

IF YOU’RE IN NEW YORK, GO SEE THIS MOVIE!

The Tribeca Film Festival is throwing NYC’s normally dense exhibition signal-to-noise ratio way out of whack this week, but one film you should definitely not miss that’s opening today is Robinson Devor’s Police Beat. It was one of our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award nominees last year, and it was also a critical highlight of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Distilling influences ranging from Alain Resnais to Rick Linklater to Jim Jarmusch, Police Beat is an utterly gorgeous portrait of lovesickness set against the psychic turmoil that is post 9/11 American life. A Muslim-American […]

by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2006

MISSED CONNECTIONS

Over at his blog, Anthony Kaufman is blogging about developments in Net Neutrality:: Yesterday, a Republican-dominated House committee shot down an amendment put forth by a Massachusetts Democrat that would have prohibited broadband providers (such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) from blocking or degrading Internet connections to websites that they may deem as competitors. “Net Neutrality” has suffered a major setback… If you don’t think this affects your livelihood and freedom as artists, consider this similar to the Showtime/Smithsonian deal: It’s all about privatizing and monetizing institutions and archives (be they physical or digital) that should be free and equal […]

by Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2006

SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES JUNE LAB PROJECTS

Indiewire has posted the writers and directors participating in the Sundance June Labs. Here’s the list and the descriptions of the projects: “A Breath Away”/Kit Hui (writer/director), U.S.A./ChinaAs a typhoon approaches Hong Kong, the residents of a high-rise apartment explore their need for human connection, family, and cultural identity in their increasingly isolated worlds.Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kit Hui immigrated to the United States at age 16. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program. Her short film “Missing” screened at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and she was recently […]

by Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2006

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