Category: making movies

Finally, someone’s asking the right questions in Iraq, like, “how’d they get that shot?” Virginia Heffernan reports in the Times on the ultimate embeds: the soldiers who go into battle armed with digital video cameras (“the camera is our first weapon”) to record US military activity. Like Saddam Hussein’s medical checkup, which includes shots–like the glowing underside of Hussein’s tongue–that Heffernan rates as high art.

what’s the opposite of independent? Film, that is. image: nytimes.com/getty images
These combat camera crews use Sony PD 150’s, just like civilian photojournalists (and the rest of us). In fact, I bought my first camera, a Sony VX-1000, from a war-documenting friend (whose production company, no coincidence, is named Combat Camera), who was supposed to star in Souvenir November 2001 until he got pulled into Tora Bora (ahh, the memories).
Like most documentarians, these filmmakers have a hard time getting distribution; Pentagon suits are even tighter-fisted than Miramax. But if they make a real heartstrings-pulling story –like the Jessica Lynch rescue or the Hussein body cavity search–when it does hit screens, it opens verrry wide.

Excellent story in the Guardian by Chris Payne about a film school outside Havana whose students’ production–an actually independent feature film– doesn’t officially exist, but nonetheless is getting plugs for Sundance. There’s more story here to be told.
Also from Havana, the Biennial. Maria Finn’s Times article has an interesting angle: the economic impact of international art world attention on Cuban contemporary artists. Even emerging artist-level prices (ie, in the thousands or low five figures) enable artists to live like kings in the dollar-starved Cuban economy. But collector friends who just came back from Havana noticed how outsize success–or at least the trappings of it on the ground, which also often signal collaboration or acquiescence with the regime–polarizes artists.
From what I’ve heard, and from what Blake Gopnik’s ecstatic survey in the Post says, the quality of the art was incredible. But alongside the disparities it creates, an internationalized Cuban contemporary art market runs the risk of exploitation. In the Outsider Art market, this meme is already too well established: art world slickster “discovers” a naive, native genius, buys up all his work, establishes some “gatekeeper” stranglehold on his production, and manipulates the prices to her own–not the artist’s– advantage.

Hide your peasant bread, people. the half-assedly Atkinsing Neil Labute just landed in New York, and he’s loaded for bear claws. Yesterday in his Slate diary, Labute wrote about an eating a meeting for his next project, a screen adaptation of Vapor, the second novel from Amanda Filipacchi.
Amanda Filipacchi picked me up at the 10th Street Lounge many years ago, and we went on a date. We saw an HBO-sponsored movie at Bryant Park. It was pleasant, but there was no real connection. We parted in the park, and I went alone to meet friends for drinks at the Royalton. Some time later, she re-entered my life as the rather serious girlfriend of my now-wife’s physics post-doc colleague at Columbia.
Without going into details, I have a feeling she found the right writer to adapt her book. [3/23/05 update: Of course, I could be totally wrong. Amanda emailed recently and alluded to the collaboration in the past, not-happening tense.]

Finally, POV is back, and in a relevant way. By relevant, I don’t just mean talking money. But that’s what she’s doing, with a post about fundraising for independent films. Liz reviews the Money Matters issue of The Independent, which is published by the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.

It’s the dialogue, stupid. (Or is that, “It’s the dialogue. Stupid.”?) After only three episodes, I’m getting fed up with the uncertain, equivocating, sometimes borderline incoherent dialogue that constitutes the majority of HBO’s K Street. I know it’s improvised, and that non-actors are supposed to be non-acting, but unless the unacknowledged agenda of the producers is to show that no one in Washington knows what the hell they’re talking about–ever–something needs to be done. Politicians are expected to deliver content-free platitudes or sermons on camera; everyone else (except for the vaguely metrosexual Californian) needs to have something–anything–to say.
Seriously, if these people are expecting to get paid to consult, they need to cough up some value-added, and I haven’t seen any since Carville delivered his one-liner to Howard Dean in Episode One. You don’t need full-blown scripts, but Sunday should be Googleday for the K Street crew, yielding some talking points for each character.
Why, even the most cursory surf of anti- and pro-RIAA sites and articles would’ve yielded a meatier discussion and plausible pitch for the RIAA’s business than the K Streeters put out. Ditto the Saudi thing this week. I hope “Nobody reads beyond the cover of Time magazine” is just a line, not a scriptwriting strategy. Even so, waving it around and calling it story is like putting your textbook under your pillow and hoping it’ll soak in while you sleep.
Some other suggestions:
1) If you want to play an inside game, play inside, fellas. For example, in the music sharing episode, why did Francisco make the appointment for the pitch? Wouldn’t it more intriguing if the stalker-y lesbian lobbyist knew someone at the RIAA? Or if she was expected to know someone, but she had to beg off because of undisclosed restraining orders?
2) Speaking of inside games, why not turn up the heat with some actual headlines? Check out Talking Points Memo, where Josh Marshall’s been posting up a storm about actual Republican lobbyists, who, like K Street star Mary Matalin, just left the administration, but who are setting up shops to help companies get sweet rebuilding contracts in Iraq. Nice work if you can get it, and you don’t have to worry about ratings.
3) Of course, you could combine #2 and 3: The Register reported in April that Hilary Rosen is rewriting Iraq’s copyright laws.
There. That’s five value-adds right there. Just call my people if you’d like some more.

A friend showed me a website for a DC spa that was so hilariously and transparently metrosexual, I almost posted it here last week (at the risk of either reigniting the whole tired metrosexual discussion, or, far more likely, being woefully behind the curve). But I resisted.
Until I saw the Grooming Lounge make a huge, sponsor-like appearance on tonight’s premiere episode of K Street. [F’rinstance, the Lounge pitches a manicure with this butched up rationale: “After all, your mitts are the first thing you offer a prospective boss or wife.”] Then within minutes, the character appears in Thomas Pink, the source of dandy’s shirts now that Britches is no more.
Forget all my speculation about Trent Lott’s cynical opposition to K Street: he’s just shoring up his rough-handed, unibrow-sporting anti-metrosexual base.

HBO’s K Street is shot in DV and makes the most of the saturated blues (outdoor) or yellows (indoor) that come from shooting with available light. Even though the processes are very different, the photography is reminiscent of Traffic. That’s because director Steven Soderbergh used the same cinematographer–one Peter Andrews–on both projects.
On the Traffic DVD, Soderbergh criticizes Andrews’ work, wondering aloud why someone didn’t fire him. Still, Andrews is credited with the camera work on every Soderbergh film since then. Surprising? Hardly. Peter Andrews is Soderbergh. [FYI, Mary Ann Bernard, who edited of Solaris, is Soderbergh, too.]
This nameplaying is amusing but pales in comparison to Robert Rodriguez, who does (and credits himself with) seemingly every above- and below-the-line job on his films. But it takes on added significance for K Street. When Trent Lott warns ominously of “chaos if we have film crews setting up all over the place [aka Capitol Hill],” he’s essentially banning a man with a camera.
[The Times‘ Allessandra Stanley is unimpressed with the show. She tries to pre-spin it into irrelevance with a too-studied, too-jaded disdain for spin and fictionalizing that sounds about as believable as some of the show’s one-take, improvised dialogue.]

Apparently, only real lobbyists have unfettered access to the halls of power.
TMN points to a Roll Call story that the Trent Lott, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee has deemed shooting of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s new HBO series K Street a “commercial or profit-making purpose” and banned them from using any Capitol locations.
One solution: get the crew–and the talent– some press passes and slap some CNN logos on those cameras. The show’s on-the-run, “shoot and air it” schedule is designed to make it an influential voice in the real world’s political debates. If things go according to HBO’s plan, DC’s power elite would start spending their Sundays parked with George Clooney instead of George Stephanopoulos.
Or maybe the solution’s so obvious, it takes the subtlety-free Lott to point it out. After all, K Street is about lobbying, that dark hotel bar of an industry* where “politics as usual” chats up “commercial and profit-making” before they head off to bed together.
K Street features cameos from real politicians, including–according to the report–John McCain, Hilary Clinton, and Orrin Hatch–senators who were, coincidentally, the #1, 2, and 5 recipients of cable TV industry campaign contributions in the 2000 election year. McCain and Clinton each got well over $100k, and continue to get mad money from cable. Lott was #9, with $20,500, and he hasn’t gotten a dime since. You do the math.
Rather than a challenge unique to shooting in Washington, Lott’s disruption tactics are business as usual. If anything, they’re similar to problems the LA film industry’s already familiar with: extortion artists who follow film crews around with leaf blowers, angling for a few hundred bucks to go away. How’d they address that problem? By getting the Calif. state senator from Warners and Disney Burbank to introduce a bill that bans the disruption of location filming. I have a feeling this’ll work out just fine.
* The seduction scene between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Soderbergh’s Out of Sight is one of the greatest sex scenes ever. Read my posts about it here and here.

David Kirkpatrick’s got an interesting article in the Times about how DVD sales are an increasingly important factor in greenlighting films.
Net net: men buy action blockbusters. No one buys anything else. DVD sales projections drove the glut of pathetic action movie sequels this summer. If anyone buys those things on DVD, we are all doomed.

I’m working on a couple of new features, or Features, interviews with some interesting filmmakers.
Greencine must know that, because they’re throwing up so many interesting filmmaking reads, including:
Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester’s Getting Away With It: Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw,
and Lawrence Grobel’s Above the Line: Conversations about the Movies
. Read an Austin Chronicle review for excerpts.

According to a NYTimes article on the recent poor performance of several expensive, hand-drawn animation films, and the success of such CG films as Pixar’s Finding Nemo, Dreamworks (with voice provided by animaster Jeffrey Katzenberg) is calling hand-drawn animation “a thing of the past.”
Another nugget of apparently accepted wisdom: as the poor box office of Sinbad, Treasure Planet, and Titan A.E. demonstrates, animated action films targeted at boys will fail. Hmm. Or else, these three films blew chunks. As Final Fantasy showed, you can make a bad action movie with CG, too.
The major studio solution, comedies and sequels (Shrek 2, anyone?), betrays the blockbuster mentality that’s ruining live action films, while ignoring the world where action and animation are thriving: anime. The gorgeously hand-animated, Oscar-winning Spirited Away cost only $12mm to produce and scored $10mm in US box office, $12mm in Europe, and like a hundred trillion dollars in Japan.
Animation can learn a lesson from both anime and indie producers. Danny Boyles’ horror/thriller 28 Days Later has earned $33 million in the US, performance which means failure for a $140m juggernaut like Treasure Planet. For a DV production with an $8 million budget, though, it signals wild success.
[update from Saturday’s NYT: animators Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt aren’t taking this studio lameness lying down. They’re touring The Animation Show around the country, setting out to drum up audience–and to make themselves the go-to guys–for indiemation.
And on Studio 360, Kurt Andersen basically gives you the audio version of this post.

Wired interviews director/etc. Robert Rodriguez, a young master of the atypical production process, for the launch of his new film, Spy Kids 3-D. It’s less than a year since Spy Kids 2, when the NY Times‘ Rick Lyman looked at Rodriguez’s one-man-band approach to movies. (Director is only one of seventeen different credit categories in his imdb profile. More than almost any other director, a Rodriguez film is literally, a Rodriguez film.)
But yet he’s not really considered an auteur. Unlike more auteur-y directors (Steven Soderbergh comes to mind) who enjoy passionate followings among critics and film schoolers, Rodriguez’ vision is far less rarified. I mean, he sets out to make westerns, teen and kiddie movies. But he makes them well, he makes them profitably, and he makes major production innovations that should have a farther-reaching influence.
Here’s an early interview by John Connor, from just before El Mariachi‘s appearance at Sundance; not much has changed, it seems. Rebel Without a Crew, Rodriguez’s production diary from El Mariachi, is a modern, entertaining bible of the behind-the-indie-scenes genre.
[update: Maybe more like the bible than I intended. Making a feature for $7,000 is as tough to duplicate as feeding 5,000 with a fish. Indie filmmaker Felix suggests that anyone who reads Rebel Without A Crew should also read The Unkindest Cut, movie critic Joe Queenan’s hilarious failed attempt to replicate Rodriguez’s $7k feat.
Also, the Ed Park’s Voice review pegs Rodriguez for his “DIY monomania.” If his DVD commentaries are anything to go by, he may be to annoying to become a guru. ]

Rebecca Traitser writes in the Observer that the tide has turned (again), and studios are coming back to New York to develop new films. As John Lyons puts it, “I think there is a little sense of exhaustion creeping in with all the high-concept action-sequel movies.” Mr. Lyons, it turns out, was just named president of production for Focus Features (Congratulations, Mr. Lyons. Muffin basket’s on the way.) , and is staying put in New York, where ex-Good Machiners David Linde and James Schamus are, rather than decamping for LA.
Dreamworks and others are opening development offices here, mostly to scout books. But frankly, that doesn’t seem like a huge story. If a studio didn’t have a book person in NYC, the books just went west. Lyons’ choice to stay just consolidates mini-major power in New York. New Line and Miramax have always been NYCentric; Bingham Ray keeps UA’s center of gravity here (his reported brushoff line is, “Call me in LA.”); Christine Vachon stays here; Soderbergh moved here. Why, it’s the thinking person’s Hollywood.

Jonathan Van Gieson has launched a team production weblog for his off-off-Broadway show, Buddy Cianci: The Musical, wherein “more than 20 people (10 cast members plus a sizeable staff) all working their asses off to get “Buddy” up and running by August 9th,” will stop being polite and start being real. [via Lockhart Steele]

It’s Wit Capital-meets-HSX. (i.e., sounds a lot like 1996) In the LA Times, Josh Friedman reports on Civilian Pictures‘ plan to fund Billy Dead, an $8m feature starring (and produced by) Ethan Hawke, through an IPO. [via Daily GreenCine]

Rustboy is Brian Taylor’s gorgeous-looking animated short, which has an equally impressive production website. Taylor’s use of off-the-shelf s/w and h/w should be a kick in the pants to anyone thinking about making films. [via BoingBoing]

From CG to as-real-as-it-gets video, a CNN story about artist Sam Easterson, who outfits various creatures great and small with cameras for his ongoing project, Animal, Vegetable, Video. Here’s a Filmmaker Mag article on a recent installment, Where the Buffalo Roam. Here’s an excerpt of a sheep stampede. [also via BoingBoing]