March 22, 2004

Kevin Smith and Lars Von Trier, or greg.org reads the papers for you

Both in today's NY Times: Slate's Bryan Curtis interviews Kevin Smith in advance of the Jersey Girls release. Jersey Girls makes Kevin Smith sound like the perfect spokesmodel for daddytypes.com, but Smith's best comments are about Mel Gibson, "fellow Catholic." [Damn, that's one big tent.] Tony Scott's got a very astute read/review of Dogville, Lars "Von" Trier's new movie. Scott makes some keen references to both Mayberry and South Park, while skewering the reactionary anti-anti-Americanism of reviews like Variety's. Jessica...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2004

Video replaces Paintings !?

Don't tell the Whitney Biennial folks. That trademarked slogan comes from a series of video loops designed for your giant flatscreen TV that are "100% narrative free with strong visual aesthetics" called Souvenirs from the earth [Ahem. A series called Souvenir? I hope you kept the number of that trademark lawyer...] You can buy their DVD for $50 from Dynomighty, on east 10th st, or, like Alain Ducasse did for Mix, you can commission a custom version. They're also...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2004

Chad's Dads

Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun talks to David Kehr about Abouna, his second feature and only the third film to be made in his native country. There is no commercial cinema in Chad, yet films--and particularly US films--have a powerful influence on the imaginations of young people living in impoverished isolation. An ardent admirer and student of foreign directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Hou-Hsiao Hsien, Kitano Takeshi, and Clint Eastwood, Haroun is an uncommon internationalist in the nascent African filmmaking industry. He's...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

Sky Captain: Not Some Studio Kitsch After All

When I first saw the trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I was fascinated, then confused. It looked like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but it had... Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow? It's some weird studio stunt, I figured. But I was wrong. Turns out Sky Captain is the culmination of one man's nearly impossible-to-believe vision. Kerry Conran worked for four years, alone, to produce the six minutes of seamlessly melded CG and live action footage that ultimately led...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:00 AM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2004

Buy it and make something good with it

[via Gawker] It'll cost you, but this may be the closest you'll get to a hummer from Chloe Sevigny. Director/actor/antagonist Vincent Gallo is selling his meticulously assembled and tuned film production package on ebay. According to the sale, Gallo designed and assembled and fine-tuned the package after Buffalo 66 and has shot 60,000 feet of film with it for Brown Bunny. According to Gallo, The package would have to include everything needed to make the film: 2 cameras, a high...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2004

My Architecture

[via Archinect] In Metropolis Magazine, David D'Arcy looks at an onanistic genre of film (as if there were any other kind): "the making of the building" documentary. These now-de rigueur films share a common dramatic arc: "The process is depicted as tough but triumphant, the architect is 'visionary,' the trustees who funded his work 'courageous,' and the public overwhelmingly grateful for the new building." "I've come to think of them not as films but home movies, institutional metaphors for the...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2004

The WTC Films of Etienne Sauret at Film Forum

Two films by Etienne Sauret, including the eerie WTC: The First 24 Hours, [which screened on the program with my first film at MoMA's Documentary Fortnight] are showing at Film Forum today through March 16. Etienne will introduce the films tonight at 6:15 and 8:00. Mark Holcomb reviews them in the Voice and gets cranky about the FDNY. Stephen Holden reviews them more straightforwardly in the Times....
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Posted by greg allen at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2004

Learning at Errol Morris's Knee

Last week, in the Sony Classics offices on Madison Avenue, I sat down to talk with Errol Morris, whose current documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was nominated for an Academy Award. Morris's films are best known for the intensity of the interviews he conducts. He invented the Interrotron, a teleprompter setup that gets the interviewee to look and speak straight into the camera. I, in the mean time, didn't have...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

Ford Exploring

Tom Ford has signed with CAA agent (and longtime friend) Brian Lourd to find films to direct. The NYPost's Suzanne Kapner pitches him a really edgy story: Robert Evans called. He wants his schtick back... "For his last Gucci menswear show, there were scantily clad dancers with big hair and heavy eye makeup gyrating around stripper poles and worldly gentlemen with tumblers of whiskey. Keep an eye out for such images in a future film - perhaps a cross between...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2004

Che Sera

Doin' it for the children of the revolution: Malick's directing another movie before these kids graduate from college. Production is set for four months, starting in July--this July, 2004-- for Terrence Malick's next film, Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as the world's most logo-friendly marxist. Malick's writing and directing. Del Toro and Steven Soderbergh (I thought he was taking a year off?) will produce the $40 million picture, which comes--if you calculate by Malick-Time-- almost 14 years ahead of...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

Stop-Action Knitting

[via Fimoculous] Michel Gondry's new video for Steriogram is all stop-action knitting. There's a little too much Peter Gabriel going on, but the shots where the band's watching a knitted movie are brilliant. It reminded me of a piece at the Whitney's "Into the Light" exhibit of American video art, Anthony McCall's 1973 Line Describing A Cone, where a projected image of a circle created a cone of light in the smoke-filled gallery. I just watched all Gondry's videos, and...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2004

Our (Film) Town, or Pale-Cheeked Pinkos

Don't know how I missed this. The Guardian/Observer's Damon Wise goes on a revealing to Filmbyen, or Film Town, a Danish hive of suburban movie production, founded by Lars Von Trier and his producing partner, Peter "The Eel" Jensen. (That nickname'll be TMI in a minute, by the way.) Dogme95 co-conspirator Thomas Vinterberg has also set up shop in "town." At the agressively but unsurprisingly unconventional Filmbyen, VT and The Eel insist on various musical and flag-raising rituals and on...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2004

On Finishing a Film Without the Director

After British director James Miller was killed--shot in the neck by an Israeli army sniper in Gaza in May 2003--while filming an HBO documentary, his wife Sophy, field producer Dan Edge and other crew members felt compelled to complete the movie. Her story is in the Telegraph, and Edge writes in the Guardian about making the film--and watching Miller get shot in front of him. The finished documentary, Death in Gaza, is a fly-on-the-wall account of a young Palestinian boy...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2004

"[Strauss] recently signed with William Morris for feature film and television representation."

[via Gothamist] The Style Section article a few weeks ago where Neil Strauss plays wingman to some David Blaine wannabe named Mystery (Seriously. You think the Times didn't factcheck something so goofy?) has been optioned by Columbia Pictures (along with a book based on the piece). The price? "In the low six figures." Strauss will advise, but not adapt....
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Posted by greg allen at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)

K Street: Who's Acting Now?

For the ever-popular Law & Order, the producers mine today's headlines for new story ideas. HBO's K Street is just the opposite. Not in the "what, it blew and nobody watched it?" way you're thinking, in the "life imitates art" way. In one K Street plotline, the actress and former Cheneyac Mary Matalin worried about being investigated by the Feds for leaking a CIA operative's identity. At the time, the subject was innocuous or implausible enough to pass the...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2004

The All Too Real World

Mary-Ellis Bunim, the co-creator of The Real World, which revolutionized television while destroying civilization, died of breast cancer at age 57. Bunim also produced The Real Cancun, which, while better than Justin and Kelly, was not as entertaining as the reviews of it. Take some solace, at least, knowing she probably had fun making it. Very related: Support the fight against breast cancer...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2004

Roger Avary: "I reveal too much of myself"

If screenwriter/director Avary doesn't reveal enough for you in his Q&A session with the Guardian, go to his weblog--which he must deplore. And when you view his webcam, he may flip you off personally. He was working on the script for David Fincher's remake of Dogtown and Z Boys but the Guardian has him adapting Bret Ellis's Glamorama now. But since I missed his garage sale (an army of professional rummage sale zombies rummaged it clean as soon as the...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2004

Like I was saying about Mormon Cinema and...

Filmmaker reports that in the face of religious boycotts, the missionary-meets-boy tale, Latter Day, was dumped by its Salt Lake venue, Madstone Theaters. Actually, this is good news; it means they might be open to dumping Mel Gibson's controversy-baiting The Passion of Christ, which is scheduled to open Feb. 25. In the Village Voice, Ed Halter hears the good news about Mormon Cinema. [O me of little faith...] I think I may have been friends with one of the silly...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2004

First, Movies in DC, now Making Movies in Miami

I see through fellow Best NY Blog nominee Lockhart Steele's feeble ruse to get me to post more non-NYC stuff. Even as I'm powerless to thwart it. Tommy Ryk's documentary, Work Sucks, I'm Going Skiing follows the antics of a New York hotel developer in South Beach. No story there, folks. Throw a rock in SoSoHo (as I called it in 1990, when then-friend Tony Goldman put me up in the Park Central) and you'll hit a New York hotel...
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Posted by greg allen at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2004

Fake Documentary-making in The Court of The 5th Baron of Saling-in-Essex

Christopher Guest talks at length with the Guardian's Richard Grant about the incredible levels of authenticity required for making fake documentaries. Hilarious anecdotes from This is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind ensue. If Grant's right when he calls it "the funniest film ever made," the DVD of Spinal Tap is twice that funny; the outtakes and deleted scenes are easily as long and as good as the original version. A Mighty Wind opens next week in the UK. Oh,...
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Posted by greg allen at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2004

Yet Another "Largest Film Ever Edited on Final Cut Pro"

On another site, the headline would read, "Walter Murch edits Cold Mountain, but on MacCentral, the headline is "Final Cut Pro used to edit Cold Mountain." Posthouse DigitalFilmTree set Murch up on four full FCP stations and several PowerBook-based "satellite stations, " which they used when there was massive amounts of footage. DVD Studio Pro was used to burn and distribute the dailies to everyone, and special effects went back and forth for review via Quicktime. Apple, thankfully, lets Murch--who...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2003

Make a film in 24-hours two months ago

Just ask Dharma. According to the Formula, you can have only one creatively named character per sitcom. Fortunately, Wired Magazine articles have no such limit. And so, in this month's wacky episode edition, Choire and Xeni team up to report on NYC Midnight, a DV Dojo -sponsored contest to write, shoot, and edit a film in New York, all in 24 hours. What's that, the contest was in October? And it started in May with a rewritten press release on...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2003

Combat Camera

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2003

Gus Van Sant's Go-to Guy

Gus Van Sant, Elias McConnell, and Dany Wolf at Cannes 2003, image: festival-cannes.com There he is, scorched in Death Valley and on the Saltflats of Utah; in a mold-closed school with a barebones crew on scooters; and on the Palais steps of Cannes, where he accepted the Palme D'Or this year for Elephant. Gus Van Sant? Sure, he's there, too, but I'm talking about Dany Wolf, the producer. The guy who actually has to figure out how to make...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2003

Havana: about making films, about art

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2003

Neil Labute, Amanda Filipacchi, and me

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2003

M Street, or DC Eye for the NY Guy

EXT. SATURDAY NIGHT - WASHINGTON, DC A WEEKENDING NEW YORKER approaches the entrance to Agua Ardiente, an "upscale," "hip tapas restaurant" on the "DC Latin circuit." He is wearing a vintage suede jacket, black cashmere turtleneck, black Prada Sport loafers with that silly little red stripe that he neverthless insists be cleaned with glycerine every time he gets them shined, and, embarassingly, the slightly weathered pair of Banana Republic khakis with the little black label carefully picked off the back...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2003

On Making Deals to Make Movies

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....
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Posted by greg allen at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2003

"We can easily believe that Gus Van Sant is worth ten Greenaways."

Gus Van Sant's the center of the universe, you see, or you will see, by the end of this post. [Before, I'd been forced to the alarming conclusion that the universe revolved around Norman Mailer, so you'll understand if i'm eager for a replacement.] Anyway, if you were dazzled by my groundbreaking interpretation of Gus Van Sant's Elephant and Gerry you'll be double-dazzled by Scott Macaulay's excellent interview in Filmmaker Magazine with Van Sant on the inspiration, ideas, and...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2003

Fixing K Street

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2003

Translating the deals into a movie

Anne Thompson has a very informative artlicle in this month's Filmmaker Magazine about the hustle to get Lost in Translation made. Sofia Coppola's first finished draft of her script--the one they used to raise money--was only 70 pages long, which freaked a lot of funders out. Still, such a short script (1 page = 1 minute is the filmmaking-as-usual rule of thumb) suited Coppola's (and Bill Murray's) improvisational, intuitive shooting approach. [For a writer-director, the link between script and location--and...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2003

The Suntory Commercials of Akira Kurosawa

Nothing wrong with bigname film folks making commercials. Errol Morris (whose The Fog of War I just saw and will write about soon) directed the Apple Switch ads. Swedish master Ingmar Bergman made some cake by selling cakes of soap. Hell, Spike Lee's got a whole agency, SpikeDDB, to sell out through. And as Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation shows, Japanese commercials are a great way for stars to pay their jumbo mortgages. Coppola mentioned she got the idea...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2003

Advice for Shooting Authentically in New York City

Directors: If you are concerned when your writer proposes to populate your circa 2003 New York City streetscape with the following characters, please rest assured that these are not fantastical or implausible, but just the opposite. They are as real as real gets. 1) An older man in a yellowing undershirt and trousers carrying a large zither many blocks from the nearest zither repair shop or flea market. 2) A younger woman in an ever-so-slightly too-small Chanel tanktop and slacks,...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2003

K Street: Pushing the Metrosexualist Agenda

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)

K Street: A Man with a Camera

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2003

"The Real World: Washington" hits a snag

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2003

On the Growing Influence of DVD's on Filmmaking

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....
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Posted by greg allen at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2003

talking about filmmaking, v2

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....
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Posted by greg allen at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2003

Director's Readin' Roundup

From David@GreenCine's, Summer reading list (hint: print them out for the Jitney): Graham Fuller's 1999 NYT look at directors who make a city their own. For the more hardcore, try Michael Wood's London Review pretty followable, ecumenicist recap of anti-Deleuzian film analysis (you've been warned). Via TMN: David Sedaris' tips for reading Moby Dick. Not a read, exactly, but food for thought. In his Voice review of Boys' Life 4, Dennis Lim gets fed up with the splitscreen-because-you-can school of...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2003

Dreamworks swears by CG, swears off hand-drawn animation

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:51 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2003

Robert Rodriguez swears by HD video, swears off film

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....
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Posted by greg allen at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2003

Production links from all over

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)

Filmmaking in New York now cool again

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...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2003

Shoot sequentially, post asynchronously

Don't know how I missed this; in Feb., Gus Van Sant talked to The Onion A.V. Club about making his films. The sequential filming mode from Gerry was used again on Elephant; with a small, light crew, Van Sant was practically flying along, shooting whatever he wanted. It was an approach he'd missed since his first feature, Mala Noche. One review of Gerry deadpanned that Los Angeles is enough of a desert itself, why go to Death Valley; since...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2003

Documentaries officially hip. So where's my trucker hat?

via GreenCine, although I should be reading Indiwire more regularly anyway. We all should. Howard Feinstein pays homage to First Run/Icarus on the distributor's 25th anniversary. "Now officially hip, documentaries are gaining more and more converts among aficionados of fiction." I know what you're thinking. Hasn't Greg made started a series of Slacker-meets-À la recherche du temps perdu documentary-like narrative short films? Riiight. As if. You're actually thinking, so what's showing at the Anthology this Saturday at 3:30? Why, it's...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2003

101 Cameras: Lars von Trier and Me

For almost three years, I've carried a little red movie ticket in my wallet, the old-fashioned pulpy kind, from a big roll. It says "Emergency Re-admit" on it. It enables me to return and see Dancer in the Dark, which I went to see one weekday afternoon in 2000. After 15 confusing minutes, I snapped and decided I'd better get back to work, and I hastily, if temporarily, abandoned the controversial film. Last night, I watched it on DVD, and...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2003

Everyone's Making Movies

Well, Jason is, anyway. It's a love story. Believe me, you'll laugh, you'll cry....
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Posted by greg allen at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2003

ISO: Warner's Little Brother (or Sister?)

In the the Observer's "Satisfying Mr. Soderbergh", Rebecca Traitser writes about Warner Brothers' drawn out search for someone to head up their long-planned specialty film division. One of the key requirements of the job: make Steven Soderbergh happy by releasing his films properly. One name that being bandied about was Elvis Mitchell, the aim-for-the-blurbing-bleachers NYTimes critic. But whoever the new studio head is, Traitser lays out a combination of director-sympathy and strategy-awareness that makes me think she's gunning to succeed...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2003

Badass Buddy Icons and the Honda Element

Thanks to a 13-year old niece of Boing Boing, I found Badass Buddy. It's a site with 1,200 AIM free buddy icons, a collection which, over 2+ years, has evolved from simple riffs on the little AOL dude (you know, the one who hooked up with Sharon Stone) into a unique medium of it's own. In addition to the predictable ones--Fart, Spongebob, Jackass, School Sucks-- BAB has created little narratives that are HI-larious, timely, touching, and pretty damn cool. To...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2003

On Getting Gawker Stalked

Wave UFO, Mariko Mori for the Public Art Fund image: Tom Powel, nytimes.com INT - DAY, IBM BAMBOO GARDEN, 56th & MADISON A promising DIRECTOR wanders into the atrium to examine Mariko Mori's Wave UFO, a large, shiny pod-looking art object nestled among the towering thickets of bamboo. A YOUNG ARTIST mills about, hesitant to approach him. YOUNG ARTIST Um, Excuse me. DIRECTOR Huh? YOUNG ARTIST Did you have a film in the MoMA Documentary Festival? DIRECTOR (shocked, confused,...
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Posted by greg allen at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2003

Boxing Isabella: Guy Maddin's Production Diary

Also from the Voice: I have no idea what to make of Guy Maddin's production diary for his newest film, The Saddest Music in the World, but it's good readin'. Something to do with a legless Isabella Rossellini. Don't let the film's absence from Maddin's IMDb entry get to you, either. (I mean, if Charlie Kaufman's brother can get nominated for an Oscar...) Maddin's got a joint at the Tribeca Film Festival and a Dracula: The Ballet movie opening...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)

On What are you working on?

I don't mean in the sense of "So, what do you do?" for people whose profession (e.g., writers, filmmakers...especially writers) might not appear to involve actually doing very much. I mean in the nosy sense. A boss or busybody or fisher of insider information might ask you what you're working on, leaving you to wonder what, exactly, they're getting at. To avoid the appearance of micromanaging, hovering, or intrusion, the passive aggressive boss might install cameras ("They're just webcams!" he...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2003

On First Films

John Malkovich has been doing the media circuit for The Dancer Upstairs, his directorial debut, and it sounds pretty respectable. It got me thinking, so I made some Amazon lists for your blogger-/info-/shopper-tainment: Directors' famously first movies What I really want to do is direct, movies by ____-turned-directors. Bonus links [thanks, Fimoculous]: 25th Hour author David Benioff writes in the Guardian about adapting his nearly unpublished novel, first for Tobey Maquire, then for Spike Lee. He sounds a lot tougher...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2003

On The Real The Real Cancun

"Who wants to star in The Real Cancun 2?" image: therealcancun.com As a maker of documentary-looking films, I was a reluctant fan of New Line's The Real Cancun once I figured out what it was. Now that I've read Joel Stein's hi-larious review in New Line's corporate sibling pub, Time, I'm now a fan of entertainment synergy, too. The real Real Cancun sounds even better than the film itself:...[the film's 16 thrown-together non-actors] indirectly deliver the requisite moral lesson...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2003

A Report From An Overcast Magic Hour In NYC

Last evening, 7:30, heading to a tour a friend gave a museum group of her art collection, I was momentarily freaked out by the light. At first, I figured it's how streetlights turn on before it gets dark, but no. The sky was mottled, completely overcast, a bright, diffused, grey>>faint plum lightbox. It was that post-sundown interlude cinematographers call magic hour, except you never hear about "cloudy magic hour." For some reason, the light was cold, and every streetscape detail...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2003

On Relieving Payne, On Power And Behind-The-Scenes

from r: Jane, David, Nancy, Swoosie First, the good. Star photographer-to-the-stars Patrick McMullan has posted Billy Farrell's party pics from the Alexander Payne event last week. Then, the lame. In a bit they call House of Payne, the Daily News pretends that Alexander Payne was a pain in the ass and that "he should get over himself," slamming him for his "snippiness" toward good friend and interviewer, UA chief (and legendary indie film producer/distributor) Bingham Ray. But it's totally...
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Posted by greg allen at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2003

The New Yorker On Making Movies, On Remembering War

Tad Friend attends the hilariously useless Jean Doumanian seminar on "How to Get Your Play or Movie Produced." Here, Doumanian ("You may know me from such films as "Woody Allen sued me and my bankrolling boyfriend.") advises an attendee on getting distribution for her film: "Try to get a European sales agent," Doumanian suggested. "There's a fellow named John Sloss—" "How do you spell it?" "I don't know," Doumanian said. "I've never worked with him." Roger Angell writes with reticence...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2003

If Ric Burns Calls, Tell Him You're Busy.

Today's Guardian asks twelve actual historians to lend their authoritative-sounding accents on politicians' arguments that Iraq is the next [check all that apply] 1939 Germany 1956 Egypt 1967 Israel 1991 Iraq 1963 Vietnam 1899 South Africa 1936 Ethiopia A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away Naboo As someone who made a movie (S(N01)) about looking at the past (WWI) to make sense of the present (Sept. 11), I'm interested. One big lesson is best expressed by Simon...
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Posted by greg allen at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2003

Washington, DC Is The Kind Of Movie Town Where

when someone sneezes during the movie, six people-- from around the theater, as if in THX Surround Sound--say, not "SHHH!" but "bless you." when you ask to see the manager about the sound that, annoyingly, kept shorting out, he thanks you, chuckles, and walks off, thinking you were trying to make a helpful suggestion, not complaining and expecting apologies and/or restitution....
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Posted by greg allen at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2003

Can't Wait To See It

Anthony Lane on Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary, Lost in La Mancha: "For anyone who suffers from the wish to make movies, or who fears that this terrible condition may strike at any time, here is the cure."...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2003

Look At The Camera: Cyan Pictures Developing

Now that S(J03) is locked and getting ready for color correction and film transfer, I thought I'd catch up with the guys at Cyan Pictures, who I'd been in only intermittent email contact with for the last few weeks. They're both walkin' the walk and talkin' the talk, in that order. They're in production with Adam Goldberg's feature I Love Your Work, which emerged from veteran indie Muse Productions on. Their first short, Coming Down the Mountain, has been accepted...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)

December 31, 2002

Putting the Director in Director of Photography

Sifting and digitizing footage for S(J03) until the batteries in my camera ran out, when I watched two DVD's back to back, XXX and Don't Look Now. At a stretch, I can say XXX is research for the Animated Musical. Nicolas Roeg's 1973 thriller, though, is a concentrated course in editing in general and intercutting in particular. When I cited the seduction scene in Out of Sight as inspiration for intercutting scenes 1 and 2 in Souvenir, a couple of...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:43 AM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2002

Guess J. Lo Was Busy, or The Adaptation of About Schmidt

Louis Begley spoke before a screening of About Schmidt last night. An extremely genteel guy, he explained why he's quite pleased with the film, even though it differs significantly from his novel. For Begley, "write what you know" means Schmidt ("known as Schmittie to one and all") is an Upper East Side lawyer, recently retired to Bridgehampton, something, presumably, a vast majority of the screening audience knows well, too. Consistently for Alexander Payne, "film what you know" means a studied...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2002

The Reel Truth: Getting Behind Behind-the-Scenes

Commercial production house Zooma Zooma is hosting The Reel Truth [Quicktime], a hi-larious, sodium pentathol-laced short film, set on the set of a commercial. My favorite scene is the one with the MBA client in it: INT - SOUNDSTAGE Accompanied by the ass-kissing PRODUCER, the suit-wearing BRAND MANAGER visits the set to consult with the DIRECTOR. BRAND MANAGERCan I look through the camera? DIRECTOROf course, of course. It's a little known fact that some of the world's best cinematography is...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

November 05, 2002

Hey! They shot that scene in the church on my corner

The Opposite of Sex and The City, by FTrain's Paul Ford....
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Posted by greg allen at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2002

Some Quotes and Links

"Asbury's book is a tribute to the magical power of naming: long stretches of 'Gangs [of New York]' are taken up by lists of gangs and villains and even fire engines, and, like the lists of ships in the Iliad, they are essential to the effect...We read of Daybreak Boys, Buckoos, Hookers, Swamp Angels, Slaughter Housers, Short Tails, Patsy Conroys, and the Border Gang, of Chichesters, Roach Guards, Plug Uglies, and Shirt Tails, and we melt." -- Adam Gopnik discussing...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)

Director's Cut? That, My Friend, is TMI

On the set of Starship Troopers: DP Jost Vocano, director Paul Verhoeven, star Casper Van Dien, writer Ed Neumeier Yesterday's NY Times Magazine is a veritable toolbox (and I use that word deliberately) for film, all you want to know, and more. First, what you want to know: There's the Cinderella-story of indie director Joe Carnahan's tremendous success on the Bel-Air Circuit, where Narc, his ignored-at-Sundance cop flick became the favorite film of (among others) Tom Cruise and Harrison...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2002

On Seeing Jackass: The Movie; Souvenir (November 2001) Press Updates

Whatever else it may be, Jackass is possibly the purest cinema experience ever. It is undiluted, unadulterated and unambiguous. It will make you run. You certainly don't need me to tell you, though, if you should run toward or away from the theater; whatever your pre-existing inclination, you will do well to follow it. Jackass will not mislead you. Hustled out to Queens to get press screening tapes of Souvenir (November 2001) to MoMA's Film Department. Falling a little...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:06 AM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2002

Real Men, Rank Bulls, Raw Sport (and Glidecam)

So I'm watching the PBR Bud Light Cup World Finals, and there's a camera guy in the ring, all decked out like he's, well, like he's going to the biggest bullriding rodeo event of the year, thank you very much, and he's got a Glidecam, just like we used in France....
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Posted by greg allen at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2002

Independent Film Distribution, or The Crisis of The Decade of The Week

In this article in Moviemaker Magazine, David Geffner lays out the latest crisis in independent film: distribution. Sure, DV and laptop editing may have spurred a renaissance in indie production (Hi, nice to meet you), but in the same period, a whole swath of veteran indie distributors “flamed out” or were bought out by studios. Non-studio box office dropped as a pct of total [use whichever data source will get someone else to pay for your drink]: the-numbers.com says it's...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2002

Possibly the most recursive film weblog ever, and Bret Easton Ellis on American films

Jason Kottke made a weblog on Susan Orlean's site about Adaptation, a movie Spike Jonze directed based on Charlie Kaufman's script about adapting a Susan Orlean book about orchid thieves. It's OK to go back and read that sentence again. From a Nerve.com interview with Bret Easton Ellis about The Rules of Attraction, his favorite adaptation of his (favorite) book: The most terrible thing about American movies right now is that people who love movies aren't making them — lawyers...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2002

Porn ('n Chicken) on the Internet? What'll they think of next?

James "Sweet Jimmy the Benevolent Pimp" Ponsoldt was a co-founder of Porn 'n Chicken, a Yale timekiller-cum-media spoof-cum-Comedy Central movie. (If that sentence doesn't get this weblog banned by your corporate firewall, it'll at least get you a reprimand at your performance review.) Tad Friend's New Yorker piece contains Jimmy's description of his latest project: "It's 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' set in rural Appalachia," he said, "with themes of rifts between generations, loneliness, becoming a man, and OxyContin addiction."...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2002

keep the curvoisier, pass the maker's mark

Congratulations to the guys at Cyan Pictures for getting their rough cut fedexed to Sundance just in time. [Technically, they could've eked out a whole other day by flying the tape to the festival office in person, so they had a huge time cushion, but hey, that's enough dramatic tension.] Their short film, Coming Down the Mountain, is set and was shot in/around Hazard, Kentucky, which is near Troublesome Creek. Last night, on plasticbag.org, I read about the Fugate family,...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2002

What you really want to do is direct??

Dateline, Malibu: Directin' ain't easy, even for Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, a man who has Steven Soderbergh on his Buddy List (and IM's him for advice on "Super-35 blown up to anamorphic" or not). He writes about his unblinking-but-not-too-pity-inducing directorial debut in the NYTimes. Gaghan also tells a good story (ahem, surprised? He's an O-winning screenwriter.) on the Criterion DVD for Traffic....
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Posted by greg allen at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2002

On Robert Smithson, film, and finding the way

The Spiral Jetty is back. Although it was submerged when we checked in July, my college senior sister said it was visible from the hill above it when she took a first date out to see it a couple of weeks ago (talk about a litmus test; it's a 3+ hour drive one way, half on rutty dirt paths.) Sure enough, the SL Tribune has an article about it (Thanks, Artforum.) Read Smithson's own comments on making the Jetty here....
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Posted by greg allen at 07:42 PM | Comments (0)

August 06, 2002

On Scripted vs Ad-libbed or Improvised in re Full Frontal and the President of the United States

This weekend, after seeing Full Frontal, we discussed the dialogue at length. My (grew-up-on-the-stage) wife spotted a lot of weak improv, or weakly directed improv--actors left to figure it out for themselves and, more often than not, not pulling it off. Besotted Soderbergher that I am (nothing like three DVD commentaries in the last two weeks to make you feel like you know the director.), I'd argued that surely Soderbergh knew what's up; he's shooting a script that's written to...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2002

On Full Frontal and the opening of Hollywood's kimono

The reviews of Full Frontal are coming in, and it's not sounding good. Here's a broad cross-section from the global media: New York Press ("Even a bad Steven Soderbergh movie is worth seeing, and Full Frontal is worth seeing."); New Yorker ("...perhaps the most naïvely awful movie I've seen from the hand of a major director."); the New York Observer("...reminds me how new movies like Full Frontal bring out all the Old Hollywood in me. Still, I liked seeing...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2002

The Look of DV: Tadpole vs. Full Frontal

"The advantage of [shooting on digital video] is that nobody knows, or at least cares, that you're making a movie; the disadvantage...is that the end product appears to have been filmed through a triple layer of bubble wrap." - from Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Tadpole, the latest from IFC Productions' InDigEnt. Compare this to the complicated process Steven Soderbergh used to get "enhanced graininess" on his new DV movie, Full Frontal (from an apple.com article): Finish FotoKem received...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2002

Traffic School

I may be the newest proponent of home schooling, home film schooling, anyway. Spent the afternoon watching the Criterion Collection edition of Traffic, which--in addition to three complete commentary tracks (dir./writer; producers, consultant/composer)--has a supplemental DVD with 25 deleted scenes, piles of additional footage (Soderbergh shot everything on two or three cameras) and editing, dialogue and film processing details. [Just stop dithering and buy it now. Amazon's at least as cheap as any store.] 1) I'd forgotten what a watchable...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:03 PM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2002

Welcome to the party! This

Welcome to the party! This week, another weblog launched documenting the conception, birth and life of an independent film. Cyan Pictures is the brainchild of two guys, Joshua Newman (aka "a veritable Doogie Howser") and Colin Spoelman (aka, a veritable Vinnie Delpino, I guess). As Newman notes on his personal site, self-aggrandizement.com, their's is the "the web's first moviemaking weblog." [of the week, I guess. I added them to the short list.] They, too, are starting with a short and...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2002

Yeah, yeah, I'm working on

Yeah, yeah, I'm working on a post-preview screening post, but in the mean time, There's this crackup exchange from the courtroom where Woody Allen gave testimony in his lawsuit against his one-time producers and friends (as excerpted in the NY Times): [Woody Allen] would have answered them at considerably greater length had Justice Gammerman not frequently, if good-naturedly, cut him off. When Ms. Weiss asked Mr. Allen if he was now working on a movie, he replied, "Yes, and that's...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2002

Director's Headshot

One of the reasons I'd delayed submitting to some festivals was (of all things) my lack of a "director's photo (B/W)," which some festivals require. Last week, Roe Ethridge, a friend and artist whose work I've collected for three-plus years, took some photos of me. In the pinch, I scanned in a Polaroid and printed it out for the submission packets, but there are real prints on the way. Roe works as a photographer for a huge pile of magazines....
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Posted by greg allen at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2001

Since I made the decision

Since I made the decision to actually go forward and shoot this film project (rather than just ruminate over it and periodically outline it), I've been watching films in slightly changed light. Now, I'm much more conscious of really parsing out: what a director's intentions were, when something was executed (i.e., writing, acting, directing, setting, editing, etc.) how he/she did it (i.e., technical processes, decisionmaking process). I basically have gotten into full "influence/tool/idea absorption mode. The result so far is...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2001

Some links I've found as

Some links I've found as I familiarize myself with to-date research and thought on how culture, worldview, personality, and behavior patterns develop or are transmitted: Faces of Culture [via PBS.org] this appears to be an introductory anthropology course comprising a series of films/tv shows. Interesting-sounding episodes include 204 Language and Communication, 205 Psychological Anthropology, and 206 Alejandro Mamani: A Case Study in Psychological Anthropology. Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency: Advances in Criminological Theory A dense but intruiging-looking essay on...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)