Like we do with our 25 New Faces feature, which spotlights very emerging writing, directing, acting and below-the-line talent, the Hollywood Reporter has just come out with its own list, a survey of industry execs moving up the Hollywood ladder. (These round-ups are always fun pieces that people actually take very, very seriously. I once met a Hollywood exec who half-boasted, half-apologized that he was one of only two people in some magazine’s years ago profile of up-and-coming folks who didn’t go on to run a studio or agency.) Anyway, the editors at THR have picked 35 people for their […]
Paul Harrill has a good find over at his Self-Reliant Filmmaking blog. It’s a site that is figuring out a way to raise production funding for web-distributed short-form work. From Paul’s post: A few weeks ago, in an effort to show my students some of the more interesting film and video work being created for the web I discovered Have Money Will Vlog. It’s an ingenious site that helps media artists raise funds to produce their web-distributed videos and films. The project budgets are in the $2000 – $3000 range, and the donations are usually small — $10, $20, and […]
Ted Hope was honored tonight out at the Hamptons International Film Festival with its annual Hamptons/Indiewire Industry Toast. The producer of over 50 movies (and an old and good friend), Hope was given this mid-career honor for producing a body of work that, so far, includes films by, among many others, Ang Lee, Nicole Holofcener, Michel Gondry, Ed Burns, Hal Hartley, and Todd Solondz; the creation of pioneering production companies (Good Machine and now This is That); leading several industry initiatives, including the indie battle against the MPAA screener ban; and, as James Schamus quite eloquently summarized at the evening’s […]
Thought I’d congratulate Brady Hall who won the Best Feature at the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings festival last week for his feature June and July. I was a judge along with John Vanco of the IFC Center, Charlie Humphrey of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Lane Kneedler of the AFI Festival. The film is a somewhat unclassifiable drama about a pair of fraternal twins living in the Pacific Northwest as it mixes science fiction elements with what might otherwise be a small-scale indie relationship movie. Here’s the NWFF’s catalog on the film: Written and directed by Seattle filmmaker Brady Hall (POLERCHRIST, […]
There’s a film festival this weekend taking place at a decadent playground where the idle rich enact scenes of ritual perversion. And for those who won’t be heading out to the Hamptons Film Festival, there’s Cinekink, which bills itself as the “true alternative film festival.” The fest opens tonight at Bacchus with a live performance by the Wet Spots and then bases itself at the Anthology Film Archives for its screenings and panels. Highlights include a panel discussion on Saturday, October 21st at 4:30pm entitled “The State of Smut,” which features NYC filmmakers Audacia Ray/Waking Vixen Productions, Tony Comstock/Comstock Films, […]
Indiewire is reporting that Arianna Bocco is moving to IFC. The former acquisitions exec at both Miramax and New Line has, for the last couple of years, been an agent at the Gersh Agency. She’s now been named IFC Entertainment’s New VP of Acquisitions and Production. From Brian Brooks’s report: In her newly appointed role, Bocco is charged with “identifying and pursuing finished feature films that support the company’s overall motion picture acquisition strategy of aggressively growing its theatrical release slate with larger, commercial films,” in addition to “new projects that contribute to a diverse new production slate.” Bocco will […]
The fourth Tuesday of every month Nicole Rafter, author of Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, contributes a column on crime films to the Oxford University Press blog. In her latest column she takes on my favorite whipping boy from one of my favorite directors, this summer’s Miami Vice: It may be that crime films in general are running out of gas today after the revival and boom of the late 20th-century that began in 1967 with the release of Bonnie and Clyde and went into high gear in 1971, when Dirty Harry introduced the new genre of […]
I was up at the Creative Capital retreat this weekend where I saw a lot of great work by the organization’s ’04 and ’05 grantees. But if I was in town I probably would have been, along with $47 million of you, at the opening weekend of Talledega Nights. It reunites the Anchorman team of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, and that’s enough for me. James Ponsoldt, who directed Off the Black (which I produced and which is coming out December 1 from Think Film) has just launched a MySpace page and he’s already got several blog entries up, including […]
Filmmaker Joe Swanberg has got his short films streaming on iTunes, his web series Young American Bodies running on Nerve.com, and now he’s shooting a new movie with a great marketing hook. In Hannah Takes the Stairs, he’s cast folks like Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski, Todd Rohal, and Ry Russo-Young who are known for their own indie films (The Puffy Chair, Mutual Appreciation, The Guatemalan Handshake, and Orphans, respectively) as actors. The film has a MySpace site and on it’s own website, Swanberg is running a production journal/photo blog. On the site, he summarizes the film like this: “Hannah is […]
Last year I ran a new program from the IFP called the Rough Cut Lab. Over a three-day seminar held during the IFP Market, I lectured along with a group of industry consultants on the process of finishing a feature film and bringing it to market or a festival. The lab covered everything from locking picture with a solid cut of a film, negotiating affordable music rights, festival strategy, creating publicity and marketing materials, selling a movie, and delivering a film to a distributor. Folks like music supervisor Tracy McKnight, composer George S. Clinton, BMI’s Doreeen Ringer-Ross, editor Alan Oxman, […]