The production community is stunned by the sudden passing this weekend of well respected Montana Artists senior feature and television agent Jon Furie. A memorial service will be held Thursday, July 23, at 3:00pm at the Large Chapel at the Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles. In lieu of flowers or gifts, his family is asking that donations be made to Good Beginnings at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
The 8th Berlinale Talent Campus will take place Feb. 13-18, 2010 under the theme “Cinema Needs Talent: Looking for the Right People.” Application deadline is Oct. 7. Producers, directors, actors, cinematographers, screenwriters, editors, production designers, film composers, sound designers, film journalists and visual artists from all over the world are invited to apple at, www.berlinale-talentcampus.de. Here’s more from the release: For many filmmakers, teaming up with the right people to inspire and support them and to create a collective vision is the essential element of successful filmmaking. The upcoming Berlinale Talent Campus will tap into these thoughts and ask how […]
I was at a dinner with a number of filmmakers last night and had a long discussion with a fellow producer that verged into all of the things people in the film business discuss today. Namely: how can the distribution platforms that currently exist today (theatrical, video, VOD, etc.) be somehow combined, re-ordered, reconstituted in a way that will enable a more financially beneficial base for independent film production? It is a tough question. I will admit that I’m in the camp that believes that there are potential rewards for the filmmakers willing to put the sweat equity into the […]
Hands down one of my favorite films of 2007 is this funny yet poignant documentary about a driven San Francisco Pentecostal minister who wants to make films. Though I will admit I was a little late on the One bandwagon (I didn’t see the film until we started screening titles to consider for that year’s Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You for the Gotham Awards, which unfortunately, because of the talented crop of titles that year, wasn’t nominated for the award), Michael Jacobs’s film found a lot of success on the festival circuit, winning awards at SXSW, […]
Directors Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden highlight the life and work of jazz great Anita O’Day in this beautifully packaged 2-disc DVD release spotlighting one of the last living female greats from the golden era of jazz. Known as “The Jezebel of Jazz”, Day died at 87 soon after the production of this documentary was complete. But as in her prime, Day comes off as a feisty lover of life in the doc, not shy to speak her mind and unapologetic of the mistakes she’s made in the past. Self-described as “not a singer, but a song stylist”, Day, who […]
We continue with our series of posts from the Sundance Labs, this time with producer Thomas Woodrow, who is attending the Sundance Creative Producing Lab. For some reason, when I think of the role of the producer, I am always reminded of the role George Martin is characterized as having played for the Beatles in a documentary I saw years ago. It’s not exactly the same in music as in film, obviously, but in that documentary, Martin was ever-present: encouraging, discouraging, masterminding, playing politician, literally writing orchestration at times (for Sgt. Pepper) and at all times moving the process toward […]
POSTER ARTIST ROB JONES IN DIRECTOR EILEEN YAGHOOBIAN’S DIED YOUNG, STAYED PRETTY. COURTESY NOROTOMO PRODUCTIONS INC. Eileen Yaghoobian, as she puts it, loves making pictures, and over the years, the Iranian-born, Canadian-based artist and filmmaker has put her energies into doing that in a number of different ways. She first discovered her creative impulse as a fresh-faced teenager when she saw Antonioni’s Blow Up and was inspired to take up photography. She then earned an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she gained experience in filmmaking, 3D animation and theatre as well as […]
Over the next few days we’ll have blogs from participants of both the Sundance Documentary and Creative Producing Labs. Up first is producer Mynette Louie. Hello! I’ll try my best to sound coherent here… I’m kinda going nuts right now because I’m packing for the Lab (I leave for it in a few days), prepping for a short film shoot in August, prepping for a feature film shoot starting in October, shepherding a feature through the film festival circuit (and trying to figure out distribution for it), doing post-production duties on another feature, and developing three other features, including my […]
I took note of Anthony Kaufman’s most recent blog post, “How to Survive the Recession?” for a number of reasons. First, Anthony writes our “Industry Beat” column, which is a place every issue where we survey the broader trends affecting this industry. He’s one of the few writers in our independent sphere who equally understands art and business issues, and he knows how to communicate both in concise and clear prose. But Anthony only does four columns a year for us, and if he’s finding the freelance world in general too forbidding at the moment, that’s awfully sad. He writes: […]
Filmmaker Julian Grant, who is a tenure-track film professor at Columbia College, Chicago, is making a “fiercely independent” ultra-low-budget, dialogue-less horror film entitled The Defiled, and he’s reporting a very detailed blow-by-blow of its production on his blog. He describes the film as ” a story of love and survival against a horror that is cataclysmic and…entirely possible.” Grant is shooting on the Canon HV20 with a cine-adapter and Nikon 50mm lens. He’s in the middle of week two, so if you’d like to follow from his production, head over there now. You can find footage tests, make-up tests, test […]