6579 Results for “production”
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A Crisis of Faith: Have Funders Lost Faith that Art Films Can Make an Impact?
In April, the collapse of Participant Media sent shockwaves through the film industry. How could a 20-year-old company—with box office hits such as An Inconvenient Truth and The Help and 21 Oscars, including two Best Picture winners (Spotlight, Green Book)—close its doors without warning? But earlier that same month, another nearly two-decade-old indie film company made a surprising move that offers potential answers to what happened, how the film industry is changing and how well-meaning financiers are reacting to it. Cinereach, a longstanding nonprofit that has supported hundreds of indie films through grants, financing and mentorship, announced a major shift […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jun 27, 2024 -
True Crime Schedules and Teams
The Alliance of Documentary Editors published scheduling guidelines that suggest one month per ten minutes of finished content as a reasonable editing timeline for the “average” documentary, with adjustments based on quantity of footage, team members’ experience levels and so on. For a single episode of a miniseries, the guide recommends “20 to 24 weeks for a full hour (60 min)” as a starting point. (I am a member of the organization but had no involvement in this paper.) True crime editors report that, increasingly, edits are falling well short of those benchmarks, for reasons that are complex and reflect […]
by Daniel Garber on Jun 27, 2024 -
Internal Lives: Annie Baker on Janet Planet
For a playwright, making their feature directorial debut comes with a certain degree of anticipatory hype, and the results are evaluated with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they aren’t too “wordy” or “stagey.” As with David Mamet’s House of Games, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano or Celine Song’s Past Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s Janet Planet should put any fears to rest as to how the director would take to creating specifically for the screen. Not that there should have been any doubt: Her interests have long been steeped […]
by Erik Luers on Jun 27, 2024 -
Over the Horizon Line: Looking for a New Climate Cinema
Everyone who welcomes the seriousness of the climate crisis into their lives does it in a different way, but there are common patterns. For me, it was precipitated by a weeks-long period of research into climate science for work, creating a new intensity that physically manifested as a panic attack, my first time experiencing this. There are a few representations of such realizations/radicalizations in recent films. In First Reformed, there are scenes of Reverend Toller, his face lit by the computer screen at night, researching climate change, looking at many different websites and reports on his computer. In How to […]
by Deniz Tortum on Jun 27, 2024 -
The Cold Realities: Producer Kurt Ravenwood on Hundreds of Beavers
Visit the website of Emmy-winning Milwaukee-based advertising and marketing company SRH, and you’ll be presented with a graphic extolling the firm’s concept of “empirical marketing.” In return for a mailing list signup, a free ebook download promises to teach you how to “burn fat & grow muscle” and to “trim flabby, underperforming campaigns.” And while many of the clients listed on its site hail from the health and wellness space, the lean, low-fat philosophy suggested by the company’s branding can extend to film as well, as Kurt Ravenwood—the “R” in SRH—has proven with the independent adventure comedy hit Hundreds of […]
by Doug Dillaman on Jun 27, 2024 -
Late in Life: Jonathan Lethem in Conversation with Between the Temples‘s Nathan Silver
Our Summer issue cover story, Between the Temples filmmaker Nathan Silver interviewed by novelist Jonathan Lethem, is being brought out from our paywall today as the film arrives in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. — Editor In Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman, looking suddenly on the verge of middle age, and with a disconcerting new depth to his eyes, plays a cantor unable to find his singing voice. “The cantor who can’t” might be the hook for any number of lively (or annoying) comedies set in a synagogue, but Nathan Silver has delivered not only the version I’d actually want, […]
by Jonathan Lethem on Jun 27, 2024 -
Can’t Look Away: How True Crime Series are Edited
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the number of cadavers I saw—the four-day cruise was, after all, never about the destination (Cozumel?) and entirely about the journey, hundreds of miles through legally murky international waters with the promise of a lethal formula: “Hot sun. Cold cases. Unforgettable vacation.” A marine offshoot of the hugely successful CrimeCon, the 2023 CrimeCruise promised lectures from famous crime scene investigators, podcast hosts and a self-described “walking lie detector” to an almost entirely white, female audience that preferred to avoid sunburns, instead spending time in windowless lecture halls interpreting stippling patterns and keyhole-shaped entry wounds. […]
by Daniel Garber on Jun 27, 2024 -
Editor’s Letter
As I type this editor’s note, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which I’ve had on YouTube in the background, has just ended. As many of you already know, the flagship announcement this year had to do with AI. Apple has dubbed its use of artificial intelligence “Apple Intelligence,” which refers to its systemwide integration across Apple operating systems and apps, use of in-house tools and privatized cloud servers. Its rebranding of the term “AI,” which didn’t even require them to change the initials, is a clever marketing move, as it elides the fact that Apple has shunned the use of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2024 -
“It Is Like a Palette Cleanser, In a Way…”: Yorgos Lanthimos on Following Poor Things with the Sardonic Portmanteau Film, Kinds of Kindness
The organizing principles of portmanteau films are often quite simplistic. A group of directors tackling a particular genre, for example, or films united by geography. An example of the latter is the straightforwardly-titled New York Stories, of which only Martin Scorsese’s “Life Lessons” is remembered much these days. Jim Jarmusch has made a few united around theme and setting — Coffee and Cigarettes, where famous actors sit down over a brew and a smoke; Night on Earth, where famous actors take cab rides in production-friendly cities around the world; and Mystery Train, where the stories are linked by a setting […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2024 -
Holding the Chicken: DP Rob Hardy on Civil War
In Civil War, the United States has splintered into four clashing factions, but if you’re expecting a treatise on the country’s ideological divide from British writer-director Alex Garland, this is not that movie. America’s dysfunction is secondary to examining the toll on the journalists covering the conflict. The story follows a quartet of correspondents (including jaded photographer Kirsten Dunst and green Cailee Spaeny) as they travel to the war’s front in Washington D.C. in hopes of landing an interview with the embattled president (Nick Offerman). Cinematographer Rob Hardy, who’s lensed all of Garland’s projects since the novelist/screenwriter turned to the […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jun 21, 2024
