6583 Results for “production”
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Ted Hope Offers 17 Facts About the Film Business
At his Hope for Film blog, producer and San Francisco Film Society executive director identifies and speculates on 17 current conditions of the film business, prompting us to consider how we’ll consequently evolve our own practices to take them into account. The post accompanies the launch of the SFFS’s A2E (Artist 2 Entrepreneur) program, a new pilot program “designed to give filmmakers the necessary entrepreneurial skills to achieve a sustainable creative life amidst this changing paradigm.” (It was this weekend, but you can read the schedule here.) I’m particularly interested in Hope’s point number four, below, in which he writes […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2013 -
The Kids from Kids, Savages, the Internet, Screenwriting, Soderbergh, Mellow Pages and More: Sunday Links
For Narratively, Carolyn Rothstein revisits the kids from Kids, 20 years later, in “Legends Never Die.” Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson are stars, Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter have passed away, and the others are living their lives in diverse and at times unexpected ways. As her interviewees tell it, Kids was not just about people but a city: The kids say the film was accurate, except for the most fantastical stuff. There’s no denying they weren’t sober during filming. Even the scene with Javier Nunez, at fourteen, by far the youngest of the skate crew, and three other little […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2013 -
Jared Moshe on Dead Man’s Burden
Sumptuous and evocative, Jared Moshe’s Dead Man’s Burden is the rarest of species in specialty film, a Western. More importantly, it is a fine addition to the genre, a complex meditation on the wages of sin and the burdens of family, a chamber drama with more than a hint of noir. Set during the years after the Civil War in and around a rural New Mexican ranch, the film initially focuses on a young couple, Martha (Clare Bowen) and Heck (David Call). They plan to sell the ranch after the death of her father, a struggling farmer, and use the money […]
by Brandon Harris on May 3, 2013 -
“Twilight’s Fine, But It’s for Children:” Xan Cassavetes on Kiss of the Damned
Could John Cassavetes’ children, all of whom have grabbed his passed torch, be any more different? Son Nick has dabbled in gritty crime fare (Alpha Dog) and mainstream melodrama (The Notebook), daughter Zoe helmed Broken English and has ties to the fashion biz, and now eldest daughter Alexandra — or “Xan,” for short — has carried on the tradition, making her own distinct narrative directorial debut with the vampire romance Kiss of the Damned after previously making the cinephilic doc Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Adamantly stylized, worldly, and nostalgic, Kiss of the Damned, which Xan also wrote, joins Neil […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on May 3, 2013 -
Talking with Michael Di Jiacomo and John Turturro about 1-900-Tonight
One of the most frustrating things about covering film festivals is making discoveries that few movie lovers will ever see. Filmmaking is an industry after all, and as such, artistry will always play second fiddle to marketability. Even so, I was quite surprised to learn that one of my favorite films from the 2011 edition of the prestigious Karlovy Vary International Film Festival never found U.S. theatrical distribution. Surely someone could have figured a way to sell a John Turturro-starring, NYC-set story about two lost souls on opposite ends of an adult chat line? (Especially considering Turturro last year appeared […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 3, 2013 -
Beyond: Two Souls at the Tribeca Film Festival
The distance between video games and cinema has been shrinking for years. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the presentation of Beyond: Two Souls last Saturday during the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend, an event billed as the first time a video game has ever been shown in a film festival. Certainly in the packed SVA theater, past the red carpet for actors like Elliot Page and after the enthusiastic introduction by Tribeca’s Chief Creative Officer Geoffrey Gilmore, it felt like a convergence of the two media that we haven’t seen before. This isn’t a game based on a […]
by Randy Astle on May 2, 2013 -
Five Questions for Unmade in China Directors Gil Kofman and Tanner King Barklow
Screenwriter George Richards wrote Case Sensitive as “an American thriller with American actors for an American audience.” Director Gil Kofman (The Memory Thief) brought the script to producer Seth Scher, who had connections to a Chinese investor who was making films for the Chinese market. The film was greenlit and Kofman, who does not speak Chinese, traveled to Xiamen, China, to direct his second narrative feature. Soon afterward his friend, documentary filmmaker Tanner King Barklow, joined him and began documenting Kofman’s travails as he tried to navigate a colossal language barrier, bureaucracy, corruption, and cultural differences. Early in the documentary […]
by David Licata on May 1, 2013 -
Phie Ambo on Free the Mind
Phie Ambo’s Free the Mind was one of my favorite flicks at this past International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, so I was thrilled to learn it would finally reach these American shores via a premiere at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC on May 3rd. (And hopefully roll out nationwide if the filmmakers’ Indiegogo financing effort – which includes a photo op with the Dalai Lama as a reward – goes according to plan.) And I was even more excited to have the chance to speak with the Danish documentarian herself, whose film about University of Wisconsin professor Richard […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 1, 2013 -
Scorsese, De Niro, Lewis and Bernhard Recall The King of Comedy
“Look at this world we’re living in,” a videotaped Sandra Bernhard said Sunday at the Borough of Manhattan Community Center Theater. “It’s a shit show! Whatever we presented in The King of Comedy went so far beyond our wildest expectations that [the movie] seems almost homespun.” The occasion was the closing night of the 12th Tribeca Film Festival and its screening of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, restored in luscious 4K and attended by the director, star (and Tribeca co-founder) Robert De Niro, and, in a surprise appearance, Jerry Lewis, who plays the film’s aggrieved and assaulted late-night talk […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 1, 2013 -
Letters from Blocked Filmmakers: Drew Whitmire
Independent films get made, often miraculously, and we cover those films here at Filmmaker. But what about all those other projects that never, despite the best of intentions, make it through production, much less hit theaters? In this new series, “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” we’ll be hearing from directors who have struggled for years to realize their films only to come up short. Is the system to blame? Bad luck? Themselves? I’ll let the filmmakers answer these questions in their own words. I’m happy to be opening this series with this letter from Drew Whitmire, who has been attempting to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 30, 2013
