A Futile and Stupid Gesture

“Nothing Irritates Me More than When the Cinematography Steps on the Story of a Movie”: DP Kevin Atkinson on A Futile and Stupid Gesture

Comedy writer/director David Wain returns to the Sundance Film Festival for a fourth time with A Futile and Stupid Gesture, his feature on the rise and fall of the National Lampoon empire. The film stars Will Forte as Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney and is based on a 2006 book by Josh Karp. Wain tapped Kevin Atkinson to shoot the film after the two worked together on Wain’s Childrens Hospital and the prequel and sequel to Wet Hot American Summer. Below, Atkinson discusses his experiences as DP on the project with Filmmaker. A Futile and Stupid Gesture hits Netflix on January […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 26, 2018
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 6: Madeline’s Madeline, Of Fathers and Sons, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, The Price of Everything

Context is everything — I’m writing this final Sundance dispatch at a remove of a day/continent from Park City, back in NYC, with a day’s pause between marathon-writing while reconsidering the chronological melange of what I saw and what, if any, narrative can be extrapolated about this year’s fest. My feeling, overall, is of a weak year, despite having (per usual) missed some of what appear to be the standout titles (Mandy, alas), which framed my response to Madeline’s Madeline, the last film I saw there. Is this a great movie? With a day to think about it, I’m not sure […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2018
“How Do You Give Meaning and Structure to Decades of a Person’s Life?”: Director David Wain | A Futile and Stupid Gesture

As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? A Futile and Stupid Gesture was my first experience doing a biopic, which I learned is a daunting task. How do you give meaning and structure to decades of a person’s life, in the course of one movie? And Doug Kenney’s life was defined by chaos. So we knew that in shooting, it was important to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 24, 2018

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