HBO has released the trailer for the third and final season of its Danny McBride-starring comedy, Eastbound and Down. Created by Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way) and David Gordon Green (George Washington, The Sitter), the first two seasons tracked fowl-mouthed, washed-up baseball icon Kenny Powers (McBride) as he moved back to his hometown and courted success in Mexico, respectively. This year, Powers is headed to Miami Beach, where he’s making a last ditch effort to climb back up to the majors. Returning along with McBride are many of the show’s supporting players, including John Hawkes, Will Ferrell, and The […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Jan 31, 2012Following the adventures of two mismatched salesman hawking vanity recording deals for a small Southern recording label, Craig Zobel’s 2007 Sundance picture Great World of Sound is a beautifully crafted debut feature, emotionally rich and with a sagacious perspective on America’s escalating obsession with fame. And in the months following its release, the banter between the two men, and the hapless vocalists aiming for an America’s Got Talent-style brass ring by way of a cheaply-produced studio single, must have made the film seem like a comedy to those who missed its lacerating moral critique. That’s because, as Zobel notes below, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 2012In our Winter issue Michael Tully sat down with David Gordon Green to discuss the arc of his career, which has gone from small-scale, Malick-inflected indies to big, ’80s-riffing studio comedies. His latest is The Sitter, starring Jonah Hill, and while it may seem like a raunchy take on Chris Columbus’s Adventures in Babysitting, Green said he had a different model in mind. Here’s an except from the interview: Filmmaker: You’ve just finished shooting. Are you watching movies? Do you watch movies that reflect the mood you’re in and the movie you’re making? Or is it the opposite? Do you […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 6, 2011“By making this movie, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride have done what all of us have dreamed of doing since we too fantasized about making movies as adolescents. They have used their current success to truly test the boundaries of what they can get away with, and they’ve done it at a time when the Hollywood industry is as timid and fearful and insecure as it has ever been (which is saying something). They have caged their inner scaredy cats and swung for the f**king fence to produce something on a grand scale that has no direct precedent (or […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 8, 2011This is perhaps the longest gestating blog post in Filmmaker Blog history. Back in December, Ted Hope commented on the graying of the arthouse audience in a post entitled “Can Truly Free Film Appeal to Younger Audiences?” He asked: What is it that new audiences want? What must the indie community do to engage them? It is really surprising how few true indie films speak to a youth audience. In this country we’ve had Kevin Smith and Napoleon Dynamite, but nothing that was youth and also truly on the art spectrum like Run Lola Run or the French New Wave (Paranormal […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 6, 2010KENE HOLLIDAY AND PAT HEALY IN CRAIG ZOBEL’S GREAT WORLD OF SOUND. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Previously best known as David Gordon Green’s right-hand man, Craig Zobel has effortlessly emerged from his friend’s shadow and established himself as an important presence in American filmmaking in his own right. Though born in New York, Zobel grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and stayed in the South for his college education, studying film at the North Carolina School of the Arts alongside Green and a number of other future collaborators. After graduation, Zobel worked on Green’s first three films — George Washington (2000), All […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 14, 2007Director David Gordon Green will appear this coming Monday night at the IFC Center to host screenings of two of his favorite ’70s films: Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Sidney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson. It’s the debut of the theater’s “Monday Night with…” series at which various artists will, says the press release, “acknowledge the brilliance of a timeless classic, to spotlight an unsung gem, or to defend a guilty pleasure.” Green comments on his choices: “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Jeremiah Johnson serve as two examples in a period of American filmmaking when human nature often wrestled Mother Nature, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2005Like many of you, I’ve been watching this season’s Project Greenlight with degrees of amusement, empathy and recognition. But it wasn’t until just now that I flashed on the tidbit of trivia that ties PGL director John Gulager and his dad Clu to today’s indie film scene. Father Clu, a veteran character actor who plays the bartender in his “contest-winner” son’s PGL horror movie Feast, has only one directing credit to his name, but it’s an evocative short that inspired the career of one of today’s most interesting filmmakers. In fact, Gulager’s 1969 A Day with the Boys, which d.p. […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 7, 2005