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WELCOME BACK, RAY

Our colleague Ray Pride got hit with a particularly lengthy bout of server outage over at this blog at Movie City News. After almost two months, though, he’s back with his typically exhaustive and thought-provoking series of links and postings. Welcome him back by busting his bandwith and clicking above..
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 30, 2005
DEATH BECOMES THEM

I had no idea that in addition to pictures and profiles of charmingly tattooed and pierced young women who call themselves things like a “full-time artfag film student and part-time superbitch”, the Suicide Girls Web site features regular and rather interesting interviews, many with indie film personalities like Danny Boyle and Campbell Scott. From the current discussion with Chloe Sevigny, who talks about her work with Woody Allen in Melinda and Melinda and Lars von Trier in Dogville and the upcoming Manderlay: “Lars is very personal and he gets in your business and there’s a lot of chit chatting and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2005
RETURN TO SENDER

Making its way through the blogosphere (through sites like Moviecity News) is this link to a website run by an anonymous “Manager Guy” who posts the strangest, wackiest or lamest query letters he receives online for everyone to laugh at or, hopefully, learn from. As a producer myself, I could forward Manager Guy a bunch of doozies I’ve received, but it’s not like he’s short of content. Check out his site to read pitches like this one: “‘Marriage is a great cover. Emmanuelle can’t hold a job. She is chosen to become a mail order bride to infiltrate a spy […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2005
TAKE THAT BACK!

At Filmmaker we’ve been trying to figure out editorial synergies between our daily blog and our quarterly magazine, but the below is not exactly what we had in mind. In the issue of the magazine that comes off the press today, attorneys Steven Beer and Maria Miles haved penned an article explaining the new Federal tax breaks for independent film, hailing it as a landmark windfall for independent film producers and investors. Today via Variety comes this disappointing article by William Triplett titled “Congress likely to take back indie tax break.” “Possibly as soon as next month, Congress will consider […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2005
THE NEW INDIE SCENE… THE GAMING SCENE, THAT IS

One topic Graham Leggat’s Game Engine column in Filmmaker regularly returns to is the rise of “independent gaming” in the videogame world. Just as independent filmmakers reacted against studio monoliths in the ’80s to start a new wave of indie production, there is now a slowly emerging groundswell of developers doing something similar in the world of videogaming. From the Guardian‘s gaming weblog comes this beginning-of-the-year piece, “Nine Foolish Videogame Predictions for 2005.” One of these predictions is “The Rise of the Indie Scene”: “The dominance of EA doesn’t necessarily mean the death of smallscale videogame production. Far from it. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 8, 2005
THE THERAPY OF FILMMAKING

Essential NYC weblog The Gothamist has posted this interview with actor, former therapist and filmmaker Robert Margolis. It’s part of the site’s series of pieces on interesting New Yorkers who aren’t necessarily household names but whose life and work reflect deeply on the city we at Filmmaker live and work in. Margolis’s latest film is a “faux documentary following the trials and tribulations of the fictional Robert Margolis, an actor, a pretty bad one at that, living on the fringe, trying to balance the demands and practicalities of every day life with his dream of becoming a successful actor.” From […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2004
CITY SLICKER

Chicago-based critic Ray Pride has appeared many times in Filmmaker‘s pages, but now readers can catch a daily — or, if the first week’s posts are any indication, near-hourly — dose of Pride in his new Movie City Indie blog up at the ever-growing web empire that is Movie City News. Pride’s links-scouting is already impeccable. So far he’s posted links regarding the firing of Buenos Aires Film Festival head Edgardo (Quintin) Antin, Robert Altman directing an opera based on The Wedding, Isabelle Huppert on making a new Cimino film based on an Andre Malraux novel, and Alexander Payne on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2004
THIS DVD WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN…

In a blog entry below we reported on “window-busting” release of Chazz Palminteri’s film Noel, which will appear in theaters, on cable and on DVD all within the same month. It’s part of a marketing strategy designed to score Noel some ink in the press — perhaps to divert attention away from the reviews, which Rotten Tomatoes scores only 18% positive. In our entry we were intrigued by the release strategy, but the folks at The Movie Blog linked to this USA Today piece which describes it in more critical terms. Some of the comments in the piece, like the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 15, 2004
NICK NOLTE… PARODIED!

The folks at Greg.org got suspicious first, and their fears proved correct. Nick Nolte’s online diary, linked to below, is revealed by its creators to be a parody. Or, alternately, a work of fiction. Or a satire containing photographs protected by Section 107 of the United States Copyright Law. Whatever. For the few seconds it takes to scan a home page and link to it here, we were fooled.
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 26, 2004
WEIR, GIBSON, PATTERN RECOGNITION AND JOHN KERRY

I stumbled across author William Gibson’s (Neuromancer) online blog today and caught up with the news that director Peter Weir is attached to direct a film version of Gibson’s latest, Pattern Recognition. The novel is a contemporary cybernoir about a “cool hunter” who winds up on the chase for the director of mysterious multi-part Internet film. Locations are being scouted in Moscow, London and Tokyo. I wound up bookmarking Gibson’s blog as he seems to update it daily and has some interesting political commentary on it as well. In today’s entry he describes the process by which he feels an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2004

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