production | Filmmaker Magazine

PARAMOUNT GOES DIGITAL WITH tallhotblond

Several days after Paramount surprised the indie world with the announcement of a new division aimed at producing $100,000 micro-budget films, the studio’s Paramount Digital Entertainment (PDE) arm announced the pick-up of Barbara Schroeder’s indie doc, tallhotblond, Best Doc winner at the Seattle Film Festival. The film was repped by New York-based Submarine Entertainment and, reports Jeremy Kay in Screen Daily, the deal “is the first of its kind for the division.” He continues, PDE “will make the film available through download-to-own digital distributors including iTunes and Amazon following the broadcast premiere on MSNBC on December 13.” More: “talhotblond is […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 13, 2009

PARAMOUNT TO START MICRO-BUDGET ARM

Is the sky no longer falling? Off the huge success of the low-budget Paranormal Activity, Paramount has decided to launch a division dedicated to movies budgeted at less than $100,000. According to the Los Angeles Times the studio plans to finance as many as 20 micro-budget movies annually starting in 2010. The division will not acquire films at film festivals or markets and its $2 million annual budget will be taken from Paramount’s existing production budget. Though studios have tried and failed at doing boutique arms in the past, Paramount says not all of the projects in this division will […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Dec 10, 2009

Lee Toland Krieger, The Vicious Kind

Opening with a blistering, misogynistic monologue by Caleb (a terrific Adam Scott), a newly unemployed construction worker who’s recent breakup has left him with an unquenchable hate for all things feminine, The Vicious Kind seems to announce its intentions very quickly: dramatizing the bitterness of a young, damaged man and the toll his misanthropy exacts on his small, middle class New England family over one long holiday weekend as his virginal brother (Peter Frost) and his gothy, bright eyed girlfriend (Brittany Snow) also return for Thanksgiving. However, as it slowly unwinds, The Vicious Kind reveals a family torn apart by […]

by Brandon Harris on Dec 9, 2009

So You Didn’t Get Into Sundance…

So you didn’t get into Sundance…. I’m sorry. Trust me, I feel your pain. As a producer I’ve received both the acceptance calls as well as the rejection ones. (Actually, the rejection call is sometimes not even a call, but a form email or letter.) In some cases, I’ve known that the film probably didn’t have much of a shot, although in others, the rejection came as a shock — one that threw our director and production team into a quandary over the film’s future direction. So, what do you do if your film didn’t get into Sundance? The first […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2009

John Hillcoat, The Road

In life and art, John Hillcoat takes the road less traveled. Born in Queensland, Australia and raised in the United States, Hillcoat got a crash course in mid-sixties American music and culture from his parents, who took him to folk festivals where Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and old-time blues musicians left a distinct impression. “As a young kid, I was thrown into the sixties in America, which was an unbelievable period, and my parents were very swept up in the civil rights movement,” he recalls. “I remember going on marches and seeing the profound upheaval of that time.” […]

by Damon Smith on Nov 24, 2009

GIVING AWAY NORTH BY NORTHWEST

Ask me my favorite Hitchcock film and I’ll shoot you back the obvious answer: Vertigo, the director’s cinematic and fetishistic embodiment of romantic obsession. Ask me the film I’d be most likely to pop into my DVD player and re-watch for fun and I’ve another obvious answer: North by Northwest, his smart and stylish paranoid thriller, which he made the following year. And while Vertigo inspired a whole rash of erotic thrillers in the ’90s — Basic Instinct and all its imitators — North by Northwest‘s sly take on the American security stake feels perfectly of the moment. The good […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 24, 2009

COLUMBIA ANNOUNCES NEW FOCUS IN CREATIVE PRODUCING

A few weeks ago I attended a reception at Ira Deutchman’s house in which Columbia University‘s new Focus in Creative Producing was announced, and I’ve been remiss in posting here about what is a really promising and, in these times, necessary course of study up on Morningside Heights. From the press release: Building upon a strong record of faculty and alumni recognition at the Oscars, Sundance and other film festivals, Columbia University School of the Arts is expanding its master of fine arts film program. Film: Creative Producing, a newly introduced course of study, will train the next generation of […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 22, 2009

READY TO RECord

The Sundance Institute announced today the 13 artists selected for the New Frontier section at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. These works will be shown at New Frontier on Main, open to the public Thursday, January 21 through Saturday, January 30, 2010. (The full list of artists are below.) One of the artists chosen this year is actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt (pictured), who we discovered last year has an interest in the new media/digital artists on the Web as he’s created the site hitRECord.org. In the Spring 2009 issue we talked to him about the site, which at the time was […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Nov 18, 2009

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Filmmaker

I’m at the Edinburgh Film Festival, jetlagged bad, and I’m asked for emerging filmmaker advice by some kid. He says, in particular, he wants to know about making art films and being a writer/director. Oh boy. I try to find something to say, but it’s disingenuous and the kid knows it. I go back to the hotel room and roll around in the bed, can’t sleep. The only thing on the T.V. is Michael Jackson’s body bag. I go to the window and look at the ancient castle and the ancient fog and I think about what I would tell […]

by Noah Buschel on Nov 17, 2009

ARE YOU OBJECTIFIED?

2ND UPDATE: We have our winners. Thanks, all! UPDATE: To win a digital copy of Objectified, answer the question below and email editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com. Almost three years ago I decided to check out what seemed to be an obscure little documentary about graphic design at SXSW and was surprised to find the line to get in stretching all the way down the length of the convention hall. As the editor of a magazine, the subject matter of Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica — an examination of the historical, communicative and ideological meanings of that ubiquitous typeface — interested me. I hadn’t […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 6, 2009

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