Author: greg

Disney launched a production weblog for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this week. Let’s see if they’ve learned anything since 2002, when Miramax published a completely artificial “weekly production diary” site for Full Frontal . The gap between between weeks 3 and 4 was like three months.

Disney launched a production weblog for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this week. Let’s see if they’ve learned anything since 2002, when Miramax published a completely artificial “weekly production diary” site for Full Frontal . The gap between between weeks 3 and 4 was like three months.

Recently, in linking to this site, an otherwise highly accurate Internet publication called me a “film buff.” And while I’ve been known to enjoy a film or two in my time, I have to confess, I’m not buff. Anyone at the gym could tell you that, if I ever made it to the gym anymore.
But the question haunted me: if I’m not a film buff, what am I? When introduced, I say I’m a filmmaker, but sometimes I wonder if that’s just a euphemism for dilettante, the way “freelance” is for “unemployed” or “entrepreneur” is for “unemployable.”
So I thought I’d run a few personal branding options by my best friend’s publicist, Bumble, and see if I could get some free advice. No, as it turned out.
Next idea: just run a few options up the flagpole and see what happens. Work with me here, people.
Producer: No. Besides being simply a means to an end (Like anyone else, what I really want to do is direct.), this is a term used more to get one laid than to get one’s movie made. Also, no one knows what it means.
Aspiring filmmaker: No. Besides being technically inaccurate (I’ve made and am making a series of short films.), “aspiring filmmaker” covers so many people–from Tom Ford to the entire populations of Los Angeles and San Fernando Counties–it’s useless as a title.
Short film maker: No. More accurate, to be sure, but too often confused with short filmmaker, which Spike Lee is, and I am not. syn. poor and hopelessly unambitious. While nearly every filmmaker has made short films, very very few short film makers make features.
Documentary filmmaker: No. True, my films so far have been in documentary festivals, but I consider them more documentary-style. syn. hopelessly and eternally poor and dirty, and unpalatably activist. Also, it’s the title used for both Ken Burns and Michael Moore.
Documentary-style filmmaker: Yes, if I want to sound like a pretentious over-analytical ass. So, no.
Filmmaker/blogger: bwahahahaha! Would be the response I’d get from 10% of the people who knew what it meant. Back of head turning toward me would be from the other 90%. So, no.
“Filmmaker” or < air quote>Filmmaker< /air quote>: I’m holding this in reserve, in case I commit some horrible crime and get a trashy, condescending New York Magazine article written about me.
I have to admit, I was stumped. There was simply no term for someone who’s tried his hand at a couple of documentaries, decides he wants to make more, so he uses his publishing activities to ingratiate himself to entertainment industry players for his own personal gain?
Then just this morning, I was pointed to an article by Mediabistro‘s Newsfeed that answered my question perfectly.
From here on out, you will refer to me as The Editor of Vanity Fair.

The Times has an enjoyable story, “
Creepy Space, With Rats, Just $10,000 a Day” about the recurring popularity among film and TV producers of the few photogenic alleys in Manhattan. But the story doesn’t hold up and even misses the point, but not because the $10k location fee turns out to be blustery indie producer hearsay or because it lacks data of production that the Mayor’s Film & TV Office could provide with a phone call.

“The dilemma in film and TV in New York City is that writers don’t come from New York, but where they come from, there are alleys,” said Brooke Kennedy, an executive producer and a director for the Third Watch television drama. “And we don’t have that many to choose from.”
Chuck Katz, the author of…Manhattan on Film, said the alleys were popular because there is nothing like authenticity.

So alleys are authentic, but the city really doesn’t have that many. At least compared to wherever the writers “come from.”
Unless they’re all palookas from the South Side, the writers come from leafy suburbs; and that loading zone behind the shopping center is not an alley. No, the alleys where writers come from are in the movies and TV shows they saw growing up. From the earliest film noirs to Kojak, Hill Street, and TJ Hooker, alleys are an archetypal literary and cinematic device: the source–sometimes real, of course, but more importantly, imagined–of looming trouble and danger, just out of view, mere steps away, right around the corner.