Ted Hope
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INDEPENDENTS AND THE ECONOMY
Shortly after hitting send on this week’s newsletter, in which I wondered whether our current economic situation is similar to 2008, I came across this Reuters article by Joshua L. Weinstein, which wonders pretty much the same thing. Both he and I riff off this week’s Dow roller coaster ride, and while the Friday close was more optimistic than might have been expected on Tuesday, the macro challenges facing both the investment community and consumers remain. Hence, a potentially rocky road ahead. From Weinstein: But Hal Vogel, of Vogel Capital Management and the author of Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2011 -
IFP’s ANNUAL SCRIPT TO SCREEN CONFERENCE
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 […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Mar 7, 2011 -
IFP’S SCRIPT TO SCREEN ON SATURDAY
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 […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Mar 2, 2011 -
The Microbudget Conversation: Sounds Good
These past two weeks I’ve been in Rochester, NY working on the Orphaned soundtrack with all the usual suspects and collaborators. (Let me know if there are issues with the feed. This is an ongoing daily live feed where I will eventually be distributing free content…it is part of my MFA thesis.) I had been trying to write a response to the latest “explosion” of indie film acquisitions, the new world models of indie film financing, and the influx of nobody filmmakers. BUT I found that others with something to say, have already said it best, so I scrapped it. […]
by John Yost on Feb 23, 2011 -
WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS, 2/20/11
Here are a few things in my Instapaper this week. In GQ, Mark Harris looks back at “The Day the Movies Died” and the preeminence of easy marketing over original ideas. An excerpt: Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they’re now trying to sell. YouTube has […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2011 -
TED HOPE PICKS THE TRULY BRAVE THINKERS OF 2010
Perhaps my most pleasant surprise of 2009 was popping up along with 20 other folks on Ted Hope’s Truly Brave Thinkers list. It was the first list of what I hoped would be for Ted an annual tradition, and today is confirmation that it is. Visit Ted’s Truly Free Film blog for his 2010 edition, one that is even more mindful of film’s need to embrace new business paradigms and audience-development tools. You will find directors and producers mixing it up with executives from both the profit and non-profit/government-funding worlds. Indeed, the list’s swath is wide, encompassing people like Ed […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 14, 2010 -
WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so a few of these links are less than current. In any case, here are some links of interest from my Instapaper archives. First, Instapaper itself, and its founder Marco Arment, got some love from today’s New York Times. In The Paris Review, filmmaker Michael Almereyda collects largely unseen and uncollected photographs by William Eggleston. He writes: William Eggleston’s color photographs are among the most widely viewed, and widely admired, in the medium. But I wanted to survey Eggleston’s unseen, unpublished work—his B-sides, bootlegs, unreleased tracks—and to that end I made […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 12, 2010 -
“AMERICAN SPLENDOR” AT STRANGER THAN FICTION
At last night’s Stranger Than Fiction, a weekly documentary series at the IFC, host Thom Powers paid tribute to underground comic icon Harvey Pekar, who died in July of this year, by screening American Splendor, the dramatization of Pekar’s celebrated autobiographical comic series about his life as a file clerk. A comics fanatic who became friends with the writer while working in the underground comic scene, Powers described discovering Pekar’s work as “a truly transformative experience.” Powers almost did not attend a screening of the film at Sundance in 2003, terrified it would do something horrible to something “so precious.” […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Oct 6, 2010 -
INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER CONFERENCE EMBRACES THE FUTURE (AND THE PAST)
Along with Labor Day, IFP’s Independent Film Week marks the end of Summer for me. It is a time to get back into the work groove and make plans for the year ahead. In this vein, the Independent Filmmaker Conference started yesterday with a day of panels dedicated to the future of film. Joana Vincente, Executive Director of IFP, opened the conference by noting a flurry of acquisitions at the recently completed Toronto International Film Festival and suggesting that things may be starting to look a little rosier for the independent film business. There were certainly some notes of optimism […]
by Ingrid Kopp on Sep 20, 2010 -
FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: FALL, 1995
A number of cool things about our Fall, 1995 issue. First, the cover portrait of Tim Roth was an original by Nan Goldin, which was a pretty amazing coup for us at the time. Roth was one of the stars of Four Rooms, a now barely-remembered omnibus film all set in a hotel with segments helmed by Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. Roth had shaved his head for a part when this photo was taken, so he was kind of unrecognizable, but we were still thrilled to have an original of Nan’s. L.M. Kit Carson did […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 14, 2010
