The production designer Kelly McGehee called me one afternoon. I had been a production PA on a film we had both worked on. She told me she was starting a new movie and asked if I knew any art department coordinators. I didn’t — in fact, I didn’t even know what one was. But like any ambitious young person I did what you do in that situation: I said, “I can do it.” Not knowing what Google was yet, I hung up and did what you used to do when facing questions such as this one: call an actual human […]

In his 1986 book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, film theorist Robin Wood explored, in a chapter entitled “The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the ’70s,” just how and why so many seminal films of that era were — ideologically — incoherent, unable to maintain a sustained and coherent vision of their protagonists as well as their fictive worlds. Wood did not mean incoherent in a pejorative sense; he wasn’t referring to movies that “failed” or that were poorly made. And he wasn’t talking about films that were deliberately chaotic or incoherent, but rather films that subconsciously reflected and distorted larger […]

“If filmmakers actually knew what industry people thought of their projects and were able to receive constructive criticism and what I call ‘productive honesty,’” says Iyabo Boyd, “they’d be able to improve at a much faster pace than just with that filmmaker peer-to-peer thing.” Boyd is speaking here of the realization that led to the creation of Feedback Loop, her new advisory service for filmmakers. Boyd — an independent film producer (the ’17 Berlin-premiere and Tribeca selection, For Ahkeem), writer/director and veteran of filmmaker support organizations (most recently Chicken & Egg, but also Tribeca Film Institute and IFP) — has […]

When Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture, writer-director Barry Jenkins and his team weren’t the only ones celebrating. For many filmmakers, the Moonlight triumph was both a victory for indies but also a rebuke against the racism, sexism and prejudice of Trump’s America. It was, perhaps, the entertainment industry’s biggest embrace of “the Resistance” yet. But the Trump regime isn’t just affecting awards shows and celebrity Twitter accounts. Financiers and producers speak about an uncertain marketplace, fueled by the wild vacillations of the Trump presidency, which has the ability to both hinder and bolster independent films. Yellow Bear […]

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL By Ashley Clark At this year’s ceaselessly snow-pummelled Sundance Film Festival (Jan. 19-29), I hardly expected to experience my first slice of knockout formal invention while languishing at my laptop in my hotel room. But these are strange times and, having landed in Park City on Jan. 20, hours after the surreal presidential inauguration of a bit player from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, I found immediate succor in scrolling through my Twitter feed. It had been colonized by a panoply of speedily crafted user videos depicting white supremacist goon and Trump supporter Richard Spencer […]

The Gatekeepers It may not make for comforting reading at this time, but context is always helpful: Chris Whipple’s new book is succinctly described by its subtitle, “How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.” Whipple — formerly a producer for 60 Minutes and ABC News — uses his years of access to interview all 17 of the living chiefs of staff plus a bonus two presidents. Explaining how the chief of staff can help make or break the implementation of policy, The Gatekeepers may help illuminate the role Reince Priebus will play (or hopefully fail to) in […]

In the current climate of conglomerate studio entertainment, the Holy Grail is no longer the summer tentpole or the once fabled franchise. It is now the “shared universe,” a property capable of infinite expansion across an ever-enlarging landscape of consumption platforms. No outfit has embraced this new paradigm more than Marvel, whose television and film empire spans multiple networks and studios. As a product of FX and Marvel Television, Legion belongs to that universe, yet the new series from Fargo creator Noah Hawley feels like its own creature — not an offshoot or a spinoff or a cog in a […]

The role of the digital imaging technician has become perhaps the most controversial and least understood in modern filmmaking. Some directors of photography refuse to work without a DIT, while others wave the DIT off as an extravagance. Many producers understand the DIT to be an efficient and cost-reducing asset, but some refuse to approve even a single day of prep for an entire season of network television (or cut them loose after the pilot is in the can). What’s going on here? Nobody gets this worked up about the best-boy grip. The DIT position emerged during the painful Great […]

For many years I have kept in my nightstand drawer a rectangular electronic address book from the early 1990s. About the size of a flattened wallet, the device is matte black, slim and opens up to reveal a narrow screen and tiny keyboard on which I could type in and retrieve phone numbers and addresses. Or I could when the battery worked. I have saved this little booklet for so many years not because it reminds me of my petty pleasure-flaunting vanguard technology but for another reason: It contains Derek Jarman’s phone number. Then, the sequence of digits signaled a […]

Sheer, unbridled glee — it’s not an emotion one would associate with today’s increasingly portentous blockbusters, their apocalyptic grimness ineffectively untempered by their series of rote one-liners. Indeed, while there is certainly a place for the adult-themed superhero movies following in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and a certain fascination to the interlocking narratives of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too often in superhero movies one hopes for more of the out-there, the bizarre and, even, the childlike. All those qualities were what fueled the unexpected success of Marvel’s 2014 picture Guardians of the Galaxy, in which a misfit […]