6576 Results for “production”
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From BTL to ATL: How I Went from Art Department Coordinator to Director
The production designer Kelly McGehee called me one afternoon. I had been a production PA on a film we had both worked on. She told me she was starting a new movie and asked if I knew any art department coordinators. I didn’t — in fact, I didn’t even know what one was. But like any ambitious young person I did what you do in that situation: I said, “I can do it.” Not knowing what Google was yet, I hung up and did what you used to do when facing questions such as this one: call an actual human […]
by Melissa Miller Costanzo on Apr 14, 2017 -
Incoherent Cinema
In his 1986 book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, film theorist Robin Wood explored, in a chapter entitled “The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the ’70s,” just how and why so many seminal films of that era were — ideologically — incoherent, unable to maintain a sustained and coherent vision of their protagonists as well as their fictive worlds. Wood did not mean incoherent in a pejorative sense; he wasn’t referring to movies that “failed” or that were poorly made. And he wasn’t talking about films that were deliberately chaotic or incoherent, but rather films that subconsciously reflected and distorted larger […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Apr 13, 2017 -
The Trump Effect
When Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, writer-director Barry Jenkins and his team weren’t the only ones celebrating. For many filmmakers, the Moonlight triumph was both a victory for indies but also a rebuke against the racism, sexism and prejudice of Trump’s America. It was, perhaps, the entertainment industry’s biggest embrace of “the Resistance” yet. But the Trump regime isn’t just affecting awards shows and celebrity Twitter accounts. Financiers and producers speak about an uncertain marketplace, fueled by the wild vacillations of the Trump presidency, which has the ability to both hinder and bolster independent films. Yellow Bear […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Apr 13, 2017 -
Fest Circuit: Sundance, Berlin, Borscht and True/False
SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL By Ashley Clark At this year’s ceaselessly snow-pummelled Sundance Film Festival (Jan. 19-29), I hardly expected to experience my first slice of knockout formal invention while languishing at my laptop in my hotel room. But these are strange times and, having landed in Park City on Jan. 20, hours after the surreal presidential inauguration of a bit player from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, I found immediate succor in scrolling through my Twitter feed. It had been colonized by a panoply of speedily crafted user videos depicting white supremacist goon and Trump supporter Richard Spencer […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 13, 2017 -
Surveying Inner Landscapes
In the current climate of conglomerate studio entertainment, the Holy Grail is no longer the summer tentpole or the once fabled franchise. It is now the “shared universe,” a property capable of infinite expansion across an ever-enlarging landscape of consumption platforms. No outfit has embraced this new paradigm more than Marvel, whose television and film empire spans multiple networks and studios. As a product of FX and Marvel Television, Legion belongs to that universe, yet the new series from Fargo creator Noah Hawley feels like its own creature — not an offshoot or a spinoff or a cog in a […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Apr 13, 2017 -
Safeguarding the Vision
The role of the digital imaging technician has become perhaps the most controversial and least understood in modern filmmaking. Some directors of photography refuse to work without a DIT, while others wave the DIT off as an extravagance. Many producers understand the DIT to be an efficient and cost-reducing asset, but some refuse to approve even a single day of prep for an entire season of network television (or cut them loose after the pilot is in the can). What’s going on here? Nobody gets this worked up about the best-boy grip. The DIT position emerged during the painful Great […]
by Keith Putnam on Apr 13, 2017 -
Posthumous Experimentation
For many years I have kept in my nightstand drawer a rectangular electronic address book from the early 1990s. About the size of a flattened wallet, the device is matte black, slim and opens up to reveal a narrow screen and tiny keyboard on which I could type in and retrieve phone numbers and addresses. Or I could when the battery worked. I have saved this little booklet for so many years not because it reminds me of my petty pleasure-flaunting vanguard technology but for another reason: It contains Derek Jarman’s phone number. Then, the sequence of digits signaled a […]
by Holly Willis on Apr 13, 2017 -
Cosmic Mash-Up: James Gunn Talks Making Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 With Bobcat Goldthwait
Sheer, unbridled glee — it’s not an emotion one would associate with today’s increasingly portentous blockbusters, their apocalyptic grimness ineffectively untempered by their series of rote one-liners. Indeed, while there is certainly a place for the adult-themed superhero movies following in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and a certain fascination to the interlocking narratives of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too often in superhero movies one hopes for more of the out-there, the bizarre and, even, the childlike. All those qualities were what fueled the unexpected success of Marvel’s 2014 picture Guardians of the Galaxy, in which a misfit […]
by Bobcat Goldthwait on Apr 13, 2017 -
The F Word: Five Reasons Film Is Still Relevant in a Digital World
I’ll be honest. I’d all but written film off, except for the few rolls that live in my Pen-F and my Mamiya RB67. In the days of the original RED, the Viper and VariCam, sure, video was a compromise. Those Kodak ads made sense. But now shooting a movie or a commercial on an ALEXA Mini shooting in ARRIRAW — I don’t feel that way anymore. The images are great. Better than great — they’re hard to break, and they grade well. And as film has faded from the independent-moviemaking scene, I can’t emphatically say I feel like I’ve lost something […]
by Sean Porter on Apr 13, 2017 -
The World Below
The Lost City of Z, James Gray’s latest writing-directing effort, adapted from David Gann’s 2009 award-winning nonfiction work of the same name, tells the story of an Edwardian-era British military officer, Percy Fawcett, sent on a map-making expedition to the jungles of Brazil. There, he becomes obsessed with finding proof of a “lost” civilization whose existence would challenge all Euro-centric models of history. Lost City has many rich elements woven together: It’s a traditional heroic adventure where men affirm their solidarity against the arbitrary violence of nature at its most unpredictable and murderous. It’s a meticulous allegory of British imperialism […]
by Larry Gross on Apr 13, 2017
