Category: making movies

Huh, what’re the odds? I just finished a piece for an offline publication about machinima, and the first thing I see at this year’s Margaret Mead Documentary Festival is Beyond Manzanar, a video game-based exploration of the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and political attitudes toward Iranian Americans during the 1979-80 hostage crisis. It was created by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand.
Fortunately, America has moved beyond the dark era of racially based policies, into the crystal clear dawn of religion- and nationality-based detention and discrimination. Why not celebrate our progress this Saturday?

Beyond Manzanar, presented somehow at 4:15, Sat. 11/13 at the AMNH
Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, Nov. 11-14 and 20-21, at the American Museum of Natural History
Beyond Manzanar‘s site
Ansel Adams’ photographs of Manzanar and its internees

ICM’s Man in New York, Bart Walker is going to CAA. Walker is known for making it happen for filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. His “Jarmusch-style” foreign presale fundraising helped Coppola keep the copyright for Virgin Suicides and maintain final cut over Lost in Translation. [via filmmakermagazineblog]
Related:
Translating the deals into a movie [greg.org]
Tokyo Story [fall 2003 Filmmaker Mag]

ICM’s Man in New York, Bart Walker is going to CAA. Walker is known for making it happen for filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. His “Jarmusch-style” foreign presale fundraising helped Coppola keep the copyright for Virgin Suicides and maintain final cut over Lost in Translation. [via filmmakermagazineblog]
Related:
Translating the deals into a movie [greg.org]
Tokyo Story [fall 2003 Filmmaker Mag]

No, that doesn’t mean they’re now recruiting Bush dodgers. It means they’re promoting the country as an up-and-coming alternative location for film production. Here’s a partial list of benefits to shooting in Iceland:

At least four months a year, you don’t have to shoot “day for night”.

Another four months, there’s 18 hours of sunlight.

You remember how Tribeca was just starting out, and you’d always see Bobby taking meetings at Tribeca Grill? Reykjavik’s like that, except that it’s Sigurjon Sighvatssonn.

On the weekend, the whole place parties like rockstars.

Fewer Bjork sightings than shooting in Brooklyn.

You can scout a location one day, and when you go to shoot the next, it’s gone. Something about the weather. [wtf?]

Whatever. Iceland will rebate 12% of your in-country production costs, and without demanding a part for their new wife.
In Iceland, Freeze Frame Takes on New Meaning [NYT]
There it is in black & white at The Invest in Iceland Agency.

Dutch filmmaker and great grandson* Theo Van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street today, ostensibly because of his short film, Submission. [That’s the title.] Since Submission was broadcast on the VPRO TV network in August, Van Gogh and the film’s writer, an “ex-Muslim” member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had received numerous death threats and accusations of blasphemy.
Seriously, what is up with these people? I can’t believe anyone not related to the filmmakers actually watches a short film, much less gets mad enough to kill over one.
[There was that one time when MVRDV got death threats over their short animated film, Pig City… And the guy who got them in that trouble, Pim Fortuyn, did get assassinated himself…]
Of course, if you make a movie with verses from the Koran painted on nude women’s bodies, which are visible through a translucent chador, I guess you might piss some of the wrong people off. So is it the offended militant Muslims who are crazy, or the Dutch?
Watch several minutes of Van Gogh and Ali’s film, Submission at VPRO.
A BBC profile of Van Gogh calls him “the Netherlands’ Michael Moore.” [talk about kickin’ a guy when he’s down…]
Reuters just reports, thank you very much.
* [update: When a guy’s named Van Gogh, you figure he’s related. When he’s named Theo, you should figure he’s related to the brother. He is. He’s Theo’s great-grandson, i.e., Vincent’s great grand-nephew. Vincent didn’t have any kids. That we know of.]

Dutch filmmaker and great grandson* Theo Van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street today, ostensibly because of his short film, Submission. [That’s the title.] Since Submission was broadcast on the VPRO TV network in August, Van Gogh and the film’s writer, an “ex-Muslim” member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had received numerous death threats and accusations of blasphemy.
Seriously, what is up with these people? I can’t believe anyone not related to the filmmakers actually watches a short film, much less gets mad enough to kill over one.
[There was that one time when MVRDV got death threats over their short animated film, Pig City… And the guy who got them in that trouble, Pim Fortuyn, did get assassinated himself…]
Of course, if you make a movie with verses from the Koran painted on nude women’s bodies, which are visible through a translucent chador, I guess you might piss some of the wrong people off. So is it the offended militant Muslims who are crazy, or the Dutch?
Watch several minutes of Van Gogh and Ali’s film, Submission at VPRO.
A BBC profile of Van Gogh calls him “the Netherlands’ Michael Moore.” [talk about kickin’ a guy when he’s down…]
Reuters just reports, thank you very much.
* [update: When a guy’s named Van Gogh, you figure he’s related. When he’s named Theo, you should figure he’s related to the brother. He is. He’s Theo’s great-grandson, i.e., Vincent’s great grand-nephew. Vincent didn’t have any kids. That we know of.]

Interpol Claims Designer Knockoffs Fund Terrorism [via village voice]
related: Interpol announces short film contest

Why didn’t I think of that? After reading the page in Matthew Barney’s film-financing handbook where he describes selling sculptures and limited editions to raise money for the Cremaster movies, Tom Ford has released his own veritable work of art.
Actually, it’s probably more of a catalogue raisonnee, but there is a white leather-bound limited edition for $350. Don’t worry, Amazon knows you never pay retail; they’ve got it for $238. [There’s also a pleather-priced edition, $85, down from $125.]
Yes, this IS the book on Ford’s coffee table when The Times dropped by last weekend. Tacky? Not in LA, my friend. Not when a man’s got a book to sell. And a movie to finance. [via Towleroad]

The Cinetrix has an engrossing review of an equally engrossing documentary, Nina Davenport’s Parallel Lines. The New York director was away on a freelance gig in San Diego on September 11th and decided to film her way home.
Through the fall and early winter of 2001, Davenport asked the dozens of people she met along the way about the terrorist attacks, a question which, more often than not, opened the floodgates to each person’s most nakedly painful experience.
Parallel Lines [pullquote]
Parallel Lines site
Souvenir (November 2001), my first short, set in this same moment in time, about kind of the same thing.

NYT fashion reporter Cathy Horyn goes to Hollywood to see what Tom Ford’s up to. True to reports when he left Gucci, he’s looking to make a small fortune in the movie business.

“If I’m going to get one shot to make an impression,” he said, “I want to have around me at least the padding of professional organization. I would not be able to make a little film that will go unnoticed the way it might for other beginning directors. Everyone will be looking. `Is he any good?'”

Tom Ford’s Intermission [NYT]

On the long-anticipated convergence of films and video games: on City of Sound, Dan Hill points out GTA3: Vice City‘s remarkable multitude of similarities to Scarface, from the landscape, to the music, to the interior decorating details of Tony Montana’s mansion.
Scarface is Vice City is Scarface [City of Sound]

My mother’s house was recently scouted as a location for this season of The WB’s Everwood. She didn’t want all those people stomping across her limestone, so she turned them down.
But according to the LA Times, some homeowners say yes, again and again. Says one location manager who has booked Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22 for many films, “You can shoot a McMansion anytime you want, and no one will remember it. It just satisfies my creative juices to get great architecture into movies.”
Using the same houses for every movie? Sounds about as creative as casting Negroes as servants. But that’s L.A., always trying to shoot around the palm trees.
Best House in A Leading Role [LAT, via Towleroad]
Related: Wes Anderson’s Dream House [NYO]
The owner of the New Jersey McMansion used as a set for The Sopranos claims 250 replicas have already been built using his $699 Soprano Home Design blueprints [NYT 08/2002, via City of Sound]