Tom Quinn
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Searching for an Independent Distribution Strategy Amidst Pandemics and Streaming Wars
I made a microbudget movie called #LIKE. Amazingly it is wrapped, posted and on the festival circuit, and it has been receiving glowing reviews like this: “Writer/director Sarah Pirozek’s teenage noir #Like pulses with the energy of a ’70s thriller.” Discouraged by stats on Hollywood hiring and women directors — a 2015 DGA report reported that 84% of first-time scripted TV directors were white men — and inspired by the work of independent female filmmakers like Marielle Heller, Laurie Weltz and Anja Marquardt, I decided to stop waiting for permission to make my first feature. Instead of making a short-film calling […]
by Sarah Pirozek on Jul 16, 2020 -
Trailer Watch: Tom Quinn’s Colewell, Starring Karen Allen
Tom Quinn’s Spirit Award-nominated Colewell receives a limited theatrical as well as digital release beginning this Friday, December 13. The theatrical starts with a run at Facets Theater in Chicago, with other cities to be announced. On the occasion of its premiere earlier this year at the SFFILM Festival, I wrote, “Colewell is a gentle, melancholic film, one inflected by bursts of real anger and sorrow, that is both character study as well as meditation on loneliness and community in a time of both technological and political change.” The trailer just dropped, which gives a good look at lead Karen […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 11, 2019 -
From Maya Deren to Midnight Traveler: San Francisco International Film Festival 2019
Few things at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM for short) felt more San Francisco than being at the packed-to-the-rafters Castro Theatre on Good Friday to cast one’s eyes recklessly into the image pool rippling across the 24-foot-high screen. The visuals belonged to Maya Deren, the mystical dynamo of American independent cinema, whose core of 16mm work (At Land, The Very Eye of Night, Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meshes of the Afternoon) is a motherlode of the avant-garde, and fervent evidence of a mid-century bohemia that bloomed on the West Coast, a legacy kept alive through outfits […]
by Steve Dollar on Apr 30, 2019 -
“There’s a Vulnerability That Can Isolate Us, Whether We’re in an Era of Analog Connectivity or Virtual…”: Five Questions for Colewell Writer/Director Tom Quinn
Receiving its world premiere tomorrow in the Launch section of the 2019 SFFILM Festival, Tom Quinn’s sophomore feature Colewell stars Karen Allen, whose filmography runs from intimate dramas to some of contemporary cinema’s biggest blockbusters, as a clerk in a small town post office whose way of life — and, actually, her life itself — are imperiled when her branch is scheduled for closure. Inspired, as Quinn relates below, from learning of an instance in which a town was literally erased from a map, Colewell is a gentle, melancholic film, one inflected by bursts of real anger and sorrow, that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2019 -
Remembering Chantal Akerman, 1950 – 2015
Director Chantal Akerman died three years ago today, and I wrote the following remembrance in the Filmmaker newsletter just a few days later but never posted it online. I wrote it from the Venice Biennale College Cinema, where I arrive again today. So, it seems fitting to remember Akerman once again by finally posting it here. (Photo above, taken on an 1MP digital camera at the Rotterdam Film Festival, 2001.) Here in Venice, on the small island of San Servolo, we were talking about Jeanne Dielman. Tom Quinn, one of the filmmakers attending the Biennale College Cinema, had included a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 5, 2018 -
WEINSTEINS START VOD LABEL
A few weeks ago we learned about Focus Features’ new VOD arm, Focus World, well today Deadline broke the story that at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (which begins Thursday) The Weinstein Company will go full steam ahead on their own VOD label. The Weinstein Company has also confirmed that Magnolia Pictures’ SVP and Head of Acquisitions, Tom Quinn, will come over to head the label along with Magnolia’s head of legal and business affairs, Jason Janego. The two had been instrumental in Magnolia’s day-and-date platform. Quinn and Janego will be at TIFF scouting titles for the Weinsteins’ as […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Sep 7, 2011 -
“THE NEW YEAR PARADE”
For his debut feature Tom Quinn took the hours of footage he shot of family and friends talking about dealing with divorce for a psych class as inspiration to create a touching story that meshes domestic issues with the culture of his native South Philadelphia. After placing 13th in Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade, which is held every New Year’s Day where local clubs in elaborate costumes compete for prizes and bragging rights, the South Philadelphia String Band are stuck in a rut as their losing ways have gone on for decades now. For Mike (Andrew Conway) and his son Jack (Greg […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Nov 23, 2009
