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It’s late at night in Europe, and I’m not quite sure what to make of this article I’ve just read in Variey by William Triplett entitled “IRS strips indie film tax breaks.” The thrust of the article: the IRS has ennacted onerous restrictions on the film financing tax break contained in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. This tax break has incentivized private investors to invest in independent film by allowing them to deduct the full amount of their investment in the first year rather than amortizing it over multiple years. According to the Variety article, the IRS is […]
Mike Mohan, who some of you may know from his work at the Sundance Institute, is also a director, and he’s just launched a new web series at Atom Films called “Casual Encounters.” It’s a sort of mockumentary spoof on the whole phenomenon of finding a one night stand on internet sites like Craig’s List. Two episodes are already posted, with more promised for the coming weeks. Here’s episode one (and it’s, as they say, NSFW — “not safe for work”).
Over at his Wild Diner Films blog, Sujewa Ekanayake is asking what should be more than a rhetorical question: “So, self-distribution in 2006: how did it go?” He’s requesting that DIY distributing filmmakers share some of their experiences and to start it off, he’s posted the numbers on his own Date Number One.
I’m in Paris for a few days, and there are posters up everywhere for Jonathan Liebesman’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning., but the director’s name can’t be seen on the poster. There is, however, an outside-the-billing-block “Un production de” credit for producer Michael Bay, whose powerful film brand is now validated by this most auteur-centric of film cultures. As recognition, here (via Defamer) is “Bay’s Touch,” a totally nuts tribute to Bay (and be sure to click on the link for the lyrics).
For those who thought the Internet’s grasp on the creative side of filmmaking ended with the nosedive Snakes on a Plane took, think again. Variety reported yesterday about MySpace Movie MashUp, a competition to choose the director of a movie the site has teamed up to finance with U.K. based Film 4 and Vertigo Films. According to the Variety story, the film is set to begin shooting in October and has a $1.96 million budget. Vertigo will release the film theatrically while MySpace handles the online release and Film 4 will show it on their video-on-demand service. Beginning Wednesday, any […]
Two issues ago Chris Campion profiled for Filmmaker the Dutch director Cyrus Frisch, who was in post on his latest feature at the time. Now, that film, Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me it Would Become this Bad in Afghanistan?, has premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and Campion has written another piece on Frisch, this time in The Observer. The film, shot entirely with a mobile phone, is a first-person POV movie about a Dutch soldier returning from Afghanistan who finds his own daily life inflected with the violence he witnessed there. From Campion’s piece: A huge plume of black […]
One of the coolest and most original indies of the last year gets its theatrical debut this Friday in Seattle at the Northwest Film Forum. Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake runs for a week in Seattle before moving on to Portland where it opens at the Hollywood Theater on February 17. Rohal, who will attend every screening along with producer Megan Griffiths, has organized a series of special events to go along with the screenings. There will be live performances by composer David Wingo (whose new album, recorded under the name Ola Podrida, is released on Plug Research) and Kimya […]
Steve Loff and Prichard Smith, the filmmakers behind Mr. Fascination, a doc in post-production, have launched a MySpace page full of clips and info about their film, which tells the story of a man obsessed with a vintage boardwalk game. Here’s what they say about it: Mr. Fascination, a feature-length doc currently in post-production, tells the story of Randy Senna, a man obsessed with a dying boardwalk game called Fascination. The film follows him over the course of his 2006 season at Flipper’s Fascination in Wildwood, NJ, as he looks for new ways to make the game more appealing to […]
Ann Hornaday has a long overdue mainstream media piece on the aesthetic virtues of short-form web video in The Washington Post. It’s a must read as she quite thoughtfully provides some words of wisdom — “Your limitions are your strength,” “You’ve made us laugh, you’ve made us link, now make us think” are two examples — for aspiring web filmmakers. And, among her examples, Jamie Stuart’s White Plastic Flower, his impressionistic reportage from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what she had to say about his podcast: But a foreshortened, small-box format doesn’t have to limit cinematographic ambition. In White […]
Ann Thompson is reporting that Fox Searchlight has bought Sundance audience fave Once. The no-budget Irish musical (it was made for a reported $100,000) features members of the band The Frames, which director John Carney played bass in in the early ’90s. From a Gregg Goldstein interview with Carney contained within Thompson’s piece: Carney, meanwhile, had music junkies in mind when he made his film Once. “I wanted to create a visual album, something you could watch over and over again,” he said. In the process, the filmmaker created one of the most unique musicals in recent memory, telling the […]