Tom Putnam
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REI Director of Content and Media Paolo Mottola on New Producing Division, REI Co-Op Studios
Earlier this year, REI, the Seattle-based specialty outdoor retailer, announced the launch of REI Co-Op Studios, a content division that is already producing short films, features, podcasts and a magazine. One early progenitor of the new initiative was last year’s REI partnership in the production and release of The Dark Divide, a feature directed by Filmmaker 25 New Face Tom Putnam and starring David Cross and Debra Messing. The well-reviewed film is a real-life story of a butterfly expert on a trek through the wilderness of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington, a tale that is representative of REI’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 23, 2021 -
Theatrical’s Not Dead; It Just Smells Like It
This article by Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez about the distribution of their Detroit firefighter documentary Burn originally appeared in our Fall, 2013 print edition. It is appearing online for the first time. “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” — Mark Twain As filmgoers are increasingly flooded with new media options to keep them at home, the prevailing theory is that the days of theatrical releases for independent films are in their last slow throes. We disagree because we just spent the last year filling 300- to 2,000-seat theaters in 170 cities with our firefighter documentary Burn. We […]
by Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez on Oct 23, 2013 -
Five Questions with Burn Directors Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez
A news item about a tragedy in Detroit got them started, and by the time they were finished—three years and 1,000 hours of footage later—co-directors Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez found that their firefighting documentary had become something bigger than they’d imagined. Burn follows a group of firefighters as they try to contain blazes in a city with an endless roster of buildings left vacant amidst an economic collapse (a topic dealt with in Detropia and several other documentaries). Detroit’s population, as the film notes, is less than half of what it was 60 years ago, and many of those […]
by Kevin Canfield on Nov 6, 2012
