It takes a herculean effort to produce a first film that’s accepted to festivals and showered with praise (and prizes – SXSW handed it the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Award this past March), but first-time director Ana Asensio pulled it off in her debut Most Beautiful Island, a grounded-in-reality genre film following a Spanish immigrant who moves to New York City to start a new life. Emotionally distraught over the death of her child, Luciana (played by Asensio) works dead-end jobs—in one scene, dressing up as a chicken to promote a local poultry joint—trying to make ends meet and keep […]

Blue City The 1986 release Blue City might not be one of the best movies Walter Hill ever had his name on, but it’s certainly one of the most fascinating from an auteurist standpoint, despite the fact that Hill isn’t even its auteur. That credit goes to Michelle Manning, who got the job while still in her mid-20s after her former boss, Ned Tanen, took over as head of Paramount. Manning’s early career trajectory was swift: fresh out of University of Southern California film school, she rose from Zoetrope production assistant to a position as Tanen’s associate producer on a […]

Ah, there’s nothing quite like the smell of pitches in the morning. This past Saturday, the IFP kicked off its annual Script to Screen Conference with five brave writers pitching their scripts to a panel of producers and agents.   Although all the panelists agreed that it was useful for writers to compare their projects to other films (a practice known as “using comps”) Peter Van Steemburg, the Director of Acquisitions at Magnolia Pictures, warned against using obvious ones such as “Juno or Napoleon Dynamite,” recommending that if you are pitching something that’s a lot like another movie, you should […]

It’s not too late to attend the IFP’s Script to Screen Conference, which takes place this Saturday at 92Y Tribeca in New York City. Highlights include conversations with writer-director Barry Levinson (Rain Man) and Black Swan screenwriter Mark Heyman; a Pitch Workshop in which five emerging screenwriters will pitch their screenplays to a panel of experts (including sales agents, Magnolia Pictures’ head of acquisitions, and a producer from Glass Eye Pix); a case-study with the team from Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene moderated by Ted Hope; a live reading of two IFP alumni screenplays for dialogue analysis with independent […]

Our favorite NYC-based low-budget horror mega-studio, Glass Eye Pix, celebrates its 25th anniversary with a two-week retrospective series of screenings at reRun in New York that begins today. They include founder Larry Fessenden’s first picture, No Telling, his excellent and quite movie Wendigo, and films by its roster of artists including Ti West and James McKenney, whose Satan Hates You, says Fessenden in the New York Times video below, is an “oddly serene and pious Christian scare film.” In Fall, 2009, Filmmaker celebrated Glass Eye Pix’s 24th anniversary with an article and interview of Fessenden by Lauren Wissot. From her […]