Category: making movies

The Beastie Boys handed out 50 video cameras to fans at a November 2004 MSG concert, and have edited the footage they shot into a concert documentary called Awesome! I F***ing Shot That!:

The film will cost the Beastie Boys about $1.2 million when the sampling fees are added in; the band returned all the Hi-8 Sony cameras (a step above a typical camcorder) to the stores where they were bought, in some cases for a full refund.

The film debuts Saturday at Sundance and comes out in March. They’re promoting it by playing the Park City launch party for MySpace’s filmmaker community.
This Is Not Spinal Tap: A Concert Film by Fans [nyt]

I’m a fan of Bernadette Corporation, so even though it’s not about results but about process, I’m interested to see what came out of their film gig in Berlin. That’s where they ran Pedestrian Cinema, a temporary production center for DV and any other creative medium they saw fit to trot out. As they put it,

Each day, Pedestrian Cinema will confront the question of fabricating itself. Is it to be based on history, dramatize the everyday, be documentary-like and specific, or metaphoric and abstract? At the same time, the film studio turns to debates internal to the medium, deciding to re-examine everything proper to cinema (shot, sequence, frame, sound, actors’ bodies, time, speaking, space, light, montage, etc.). These could be exercises, investigations, and fragments that result from meeting a new actor, a series of interviews turning into monologues, and so on. The activity presented to the public will not be limited to digital film, there could also be a newsletter, live performances, music, drawings, or sculpture.

While production cost barriers are falling enough to make a year of “shoot whatever, we’ll see” feasible, the distribution bottleneck remains. BC’s chosen the arts institutional channel to screen and exhibit their work. So far, pieces have been shown at Frieze in October, and as part of a BC retrospective [which just closed] at Witte de With artspace in Rotterdam [smart people, nice place]. And Chrissie Iles put PC on two lists she made: a ten best for 2005 list for Artforum–and the Whitney Biennial.
Pedestrian Cinema proposal [bernadettecorporation.com]

Warner Bros. has released a PDF version of Stephen Gaghan’s script for Syriana, which we just saw last night. A very intense film, the story is perfectly matched with the fragmented, multi-threaded structure. In another filmmaker’s hands, this movie would have repeatedly ground to a halt for some nonsensical expositional set piece speeches.
Now I’m looking forward to seeing how Gaghan did it.

Syriana-Screenplay.pdf [warnerbros.com via bb]

All through 2005, Eirikso shot photographs out of his window in Norway at random times and on random days. Then he merged them into a single, 3.5 minute or so movie using Photoshop and Sony Vegas Video.
See the film, download the film [which he also output to 720p HD, for television viewing], and read about how he made the film at eirikso.com.

The Video Of The Seasons In Norway [eirikso.com via boingboing]

Back in the day (Feb. 2002, that is), I requested clearance to use “Google” as a verb and to show search results screenshots in my first short. The head of Google’s marketing sent me an email saying it was a-ok, and wishing me good luck.
Now it turns out Google’s founders Larry and Sergey bankrolled half the sub-$1mm budget for Stanford friend and Dreamworks CG animator Reid Gershbein’s first live-action feature film, Broken Arrows. The fils is described as “the story of a man who loses his pregnant wife in a terrorist attack and then takes a job as a hit man.” [Clearly, I was searching Google for the wrong thing. From now on, please formulate your requests appropriately.]
According to Gershbein’s production blog, they just screened a rough cut for team members last week, and they’re starting audio, effects, and music editing next month.
Google team sets sights on big screen [sfgate via defamer]
Broken Arrows production blog [brokenarrowsthemovie.com]

Have you heard of Wet Magazine? proto-Punk/New Wave LA deal from the late 1970’s? I confess, my parents were just taking me to my first concert–the Osmond Brothers–in the late seventies.
Anyway, in the Nov/Dec 1978 issue, an unnamed-but-hardhitting journalist from Wet sat down to breakfast with New York Doll David Johansen and really worked him over. The whole interview is about style, style vs. taste, image, clothes, looks, and death. And taxes. Seriously. It’s one of the most deeply, satisfyingly, superficial things I’ve ever read.

WET: Are you very attached to your image?
DJ: I din’t know if I’m that conscious of it. When I see a videotape of myself I wonder who it is for the first couple of minutes. I listen to myself and I say, “Who is that guy? Listen to his voice. He sounds like he comes from Brooklyn or something.”
WET: Where do you come from?
DJ: Staten Island
WET: How often to you go through image changes?

Sharpeworld has scans of the entire issue. The DJ pages are here.
Wet: The Dawn of the L.A. New Wave (style) [sharpeworld.com]
Previously: greg.org on NY Doll

And here I thought Jeff Jarvis was the only one flogging vlogs. The NYT had an article over the weekend about the explosion of vlogging, and the distribution deal that slightly funny vlog Rocketboom made with TiVo. TiVo gives Rocketboom 50% of the revenue from ads it sells on their content.
Then Andy picked up producer Kent Nichols’ call of the coming–and monetizable– “indie tv” wave, a combination of online and TiVo subscription vlogs and DVD sales, with existing TV networks cherrypicking proven content for broadcast.
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and to an independent TV producer courting networks all the time, everything looks like a pitch&development process. Personally, although the mad money TV networks might throw around as they lurch toward oblivion may be irresistible to some future vloggers, I can easily imagine people rejecting the creative and commercializing meddling by network suits, and just sticking with a smaller, more manageable process and audience online.
Of course, this also takes away a lot of excuses. Soon, with exorbitant production costs and distribution strangleholds out of the way, the only reason you’ll have for not being a famous comedian is that you’re not actually funny.
The Indie TV Movement is Here [beatboxgiant via waxy]
TV Stardom on $20 a Day [nyt]

Unrated is the new Rated R. In addition to 17 additional minutes of edited-out footage, the New Unrated Version DVD of The 40-Year-Old Virgin contains “a four-camera behind-the-scenes look at Steve Carell’s character, Andy Stitzer, having his chest waxed.”
I feel like I’m letting down my hairier readers, but I’m unfortunately not going to be able to make the “Hairiest Chest Waxing Contest!” promotional tie-in being held in 17 markets around the country on Tuesday. [Of course, if they threw in some earlobe- and back-waxing while they’re at it, I might be persuaded to rearrange my schedule.]
As of December 13th, The 40-Year-Old Virgin will be available in both R and Unrated DVD versions. Collect them all!

Although it was released on DVD last year, C’etait un Rendezvous, Claude Lelouch’s classic/notorious underground film, has turned up online. The film is a Ferrari-eye view of a flat-out race across Paris, shot in a single 9-minute take using a gyro-stabilized camera mounted on the car.
Now the web is filling up with stuff that should’ve been on that DVD. Folks have mapped out Lelouch’s route [from Porte Dauphine to Sacre Coeur] and analyzed the car’s average speed, landmark to landmark. I was discussing this with Alain Robbe-Grillet last night at dinner. [thunk. Sorry, did I just drop something?]
Find a download/streaming source at Jerry Kindall’s C’etait un Rendezvous post
Here’s one Googlemap of the route
Here’s a breakdown of the average speeds from The Physics Factbook

Annie Proulx has seen “Brokeback Mountain” twice: once, when the characters and story originally made their way from her head to her short story in the New Yorker. Then again, when Ang Lee’s film rose up before her on the screen. She’s as happy as a woman can be about doomed gay cowboy love.
The Village Voice’s Jessica Winters has an account of the story’s translation from the page to the screen:

In transcribing a 10,000-word story onto a celluloid canvas, Brokeback Mountain takes the opportunity to enlarge and embellish upon Proulx’s glancing details and grace notes, or as [co-screenwriter Larry] McMurtry puts it, “We milked it for every single sentence, every single phrase we could.” Proulx adds, “Usually, screenwriters work with novels, and that means whittling and chopping and squeezing it down into 90 minutes or whatever approved movie length.”

[vv]
Previously:

Presumably because he was made to by his editors, Andrew Pulver momentarily entertains the notion that a film directed by Madonna would somehow not be an utterly self-absorbed, epically unwatchable trainwreck:

She certainly has the strength of will to become a film-maker, too. [Jonas] Akerlund is the credited director of [the widely panned as sycophantic] You’re the Next Best Thing, but you can’t imagine a single edit got in without Madonna’s approval. And she knows the worth of a good photographer and art director, which is half the battle of film-making.

What I really want to do is not have to see or hear about another Madonna-related film project ever again.

Can Madonna beat Guy at his own game? [guardian]

Bosnian filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic writes in the latest issue of Make Magazine about turning her website, Diary of a Political Idiot, into a documentary–while her city, Belgrade, was being bombed by NATO forces in 1999.
The schedule for each of the 19 days of shooting was determined by which sector of the city had power at any given moment. Editing took place on machinery cobbled together from a bombed out TV station, and the film was smuggled out to the Venice film festival and German TV by a couple of blondes carrying “a car full of Walt Disney cartoons.”
How to make a film without money, while being bombed [pdf, makezine via boingboing]
Meanwhile, in other, suddenly much less dire-sounding filmmaking news, the NY Times resports that fledging filmmakers who’ve spent between $0 and $1 million on their projects, only to find no commercial success, are variously moving back in with their parents, working dayjobs in the industry, or looking forward to attending high school. Go figure.

Join a Revolution. Make Movies. Go Broke. [nyt]

Like this music video, “Motorcycle,” from The Rumble Strips, which involves a roundabout, some bikes, a delivery lorry [sic], one light, and a guy who sounds a lot like Lloyd Cole.
“Motorcycle,” directed by Harry Dwyer [rumblestrips.co.uk via waxy]

If the Washington Post, of all “can’t dance” papers says someone “break-danced and jigged in a manner so lifelike they seemed like hip-hop aliens from the planet Funk,” you’re right to be wary. And yet we were seduced, at least for a couple of days.
the underdelivery: the video for “Hell Yes” on beck.com
the oversell: Beck Gets World’s Only ‘Dream Robots’ Dancing To ‘Hell Yes’ [mtv.com]
qrio robot home site [sony.co.jp]

In attempting to “remove the clutter” that normally accompanies such “major tent-pole movies,” Universal has pared down the marketing and product licensing partnerships for Peter Jackson’s King Kong to the barebones minimum.
Here’s the list. If you start reading now, you may finish before a second Collector’s Edition 3-version DVD pack comes out [which may include never-before-seen outtakes from the original Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries 2-disc set.]
King Kong – Business Monkey [kokogiak via waxy]