Open | Filmmaker Magazine

THE BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL, PART ONE

A few years after its move to Potsdamer Platz, the old dead zone between East and West Berlin that’s now a somber (at least in rainy February) pedestrian mall lit by the logos of its surrounding corporate spires, the Berlin Film Festival represents a shrewdly intelligent answer to the questions surrounding film production, exhibition and distribution today. Whereas the success of most festivals boils down to the cruel calculus of distribution deals and premiering masterpieces, the Berlin Film Festival, through its accompanying Talent Campus and its various retrospective programs, embraces a kind of “film festival as film school” model. By […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2005

AT SUNDANCE: SINGLE ROOM OCCUPANCIES

Saw back to back screenings in the Sundance “experimental” Frontier section to kick off my festival moviewatching this year. Frequently ignored by most industry, the Frontier section always contains a few real discoveries by filmmakers the fest tags as “experimental” but who will go on to make the mark in the indie scene. A few years ago J.T. Petty debuted his chillingly simple near-silent ghost story Soft for Digging in the section and last year Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation screened there as well. This year the Frontier “filmmaker to watch” may be Kyle Henry, whose Room is an excellently directed and […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2005

MURAKAMI MOVIE

A little over a year ago Filmmaker ran a feature entitled “Who Inspires Us?” [Summer 2004] in which we asked filmmakers to list current inspirations on their own work. Manito director Eric Eason cited the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who was actually a recommendation to him from our own Managing Editor Matt Ross. Anyway, I hadn’t read any of Murakami’s work but the citing stuck in my head and I wound up buying his The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle this fall at a time when I particularly needed something great to read. 600-plus pages later I’m a die-hard Murakami fan, and […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2005

THE BEST-FINANCED INDEPENDENT FILM COMPANY IN NEW YORK

Well done piece by Eddie Borges in the New York Observer about Blueprint, the new New York-based collaboration between Initial Entertainment’s Graham King and former Miramax exec Rick Schwartz, famous for his supporting role in Project Greenlight. Writes Borges, “And so, earlier this year, Blueprint opened its sparsely furnished offices in a second-story loft overlooking Mercer Street in Soho, marking the arrival of a new big fish in the small pond of Manhattan’s film world. For, despite the apparent frugality of its offices, as a subsidiary of Mr. King’s Santa Monica-based film sales company, Initial Entertainment Group, which just secured […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 13, 2005

INDIE PRAXIS

Filmmaker readers should check out two essential articles in the Village Voice this week by friends and colleagues Anthony Kaufman and Ted Hope. Both deal with the relationship between our current political climate and the state of indie filmmaking today. Kaufman, who gives up his “NY Scene” column in our magazine this month due to his move to Chicago, asks the question, “Reagan-era callousness sparked an indie film renaissance. Will Bush 2 inspire another?” Kaufman’s piece winds its way through discussions with Christine Vachon, James Schamus and Jeff Levy-Hinte before concluding with a trenchant inquiry by HBO’s Colin Callendar: “Whether […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 12, 2005

Artist and Filmmaker Gretchen Bender Dies at 53

I learned over the holidays that artist Gretchen Bender, whose intelligent, visually seductive work crossed lines between visual art and film, sculpture and video, died in New York on Sunday, December 18 of cancer. She was 53. Bender, who, early in her career exhibited at the East Village Nature Morte Gallery and later Metro Pictures, created conceptually concise and elegant work that often critiqued mainstream media and the power imbalances contained within its representations. And while many artists at this time were working with appropriation and engaging in similar sorts of critique, Bender’s work always cunningly embodied within itself a […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 3, 2005

TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE

“Adam and Eve” files, darknets, curries, topsites — no, I’m not referring to some kinky download website but rather the topics discussed in Wired Magazine’s essential January cover story by Jeff Howe referred to in the post below, which has just been posted online. It’s a look at how pirated material winds up on the web and for those who imagine it’s via teenagers sharing files with their friends, think again. The pirate internet distribution system is as rigidly controlled and hierarchical as the studio system except it boasts an entirely different group of players competing not for dollars but […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 30, 2004

SUNDANCE PREMIERES, SPECTRUM, MIDNIGHT & FRONTIER

The Sundance Institute today announced the Opening Night film and complete lineup of feature films screening in the Premieres, American Spectrum, Frontier, Park City at Midnight, Special Screenings, and Sundance Collection categories of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. According to a press release received today, “The Film Festival opens on January 20 in Park City with the World Premiere of Happy Endings, written and directed by Don Roos and starring Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Tom Arnold. ‘A discussion of American values is at the forefront of many of the films this year, and the humor and compassion with which […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Dec 1, 2004

CELLUAR ENTERTAINMENT

Via Variety comes this interesting subscription-only piece announcing a new spin-off for Fox’s espionage TV series 24 which reachers viewers via cell-phone. Writes Josef Adalian, “In a first-of-its-kind deal for a U.S. TV studio, 20th Century Fox TV has greenlit production of a live-action 24 spinoff skein that will be produced exclusively for cell phone users. Dubbed 24: Conspiracy, the show — featuring original characters separate from the Fox TV skein — will unfold over 24 roughly one-minute episodes; one seg will be downloaded to subscribers’ phones every week.” Premiering in the U.K., where cell phone use and 3G technology […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 10, 2004

A-LIST SANCTUARY

If you work in the film industry, there’s a point every year in which you scan through your Palm Pilot or Treo or old-fashioned rolodex and realize that so many of your colleagues have left the business. Some of them you know their whereabouts; you’ve gotten a cheery card announcing their latest endeavors. But so many others just fade away. Someone who hasn’t faded away is former Time Warner chief Gerald Levin according to Maria Bartiromo, whose “Closing Bell” piece on Levin and his new venture I caught while channel surfing today. Several years after the murder of his son, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 5, 2004

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