“Because I was a no-name filmmaker,” says Lily Henderson, who made Filmmaker’s 2014 25 New Faces list on the strength of the lookbook and demo reel for her forthcoming documentary, About a Mountain, “I felt I needed to go to Nevada on spec and shoot some images for myself to see whether it was worth it to make the film.” Her initial trip was a fruitful one, generating footage—shot on the URSA Mini—and photos that captured both the lonely, dry heat and consumerist fantasy world that would be the stage for her film. As she writes in the lookbook’s introduction, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019“There’s a great infrastructure, and the credit is solid,” said Entertainment Partners (EP) executive vice president, John Hadity, in these pages one year ago about the New York State Film Production Tax Credit Program. Governor Andrew Cuomo had just extended its sunset date until 2022, with $420 million in annual funds appropriated. “That means television series that do their planning 18 to 24 months in advance have certainty that the program is going to be around for another few years,” he said. But just a year later, Hadity cites the New York program as one of his worries when surveying […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019Ask me what’s changed the most regarding pitching independent film over the years and the first thing I’ll say is the rise of the lookbook. In the 1990s, lookbooks were exotic things. A few directors had them, but the cost of making them made these collections of reference images, and sometimes original art, stand out for their uniqueness. I remember a French auteur who sent us one at our Forensic Films office—a 100-or-so pages of smeary screen grabs and disturbing pornography/pop-culture collages—that was like a perfect-bound art book. Then there was the filmmaker with an excellent script whose lookbook had […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019