On Making Movies With No Money, Or Less

  • 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]

    • From The Mixed Up Files Of Ms. Nikke Finke

    Mike Ovitz can fight his own battles–although he’s been nothing but genial to me, I don’t doubt he can be a pretty scrappy guy. But Nikki Finke’s LA Weekly article on Hollywood-style dealmaking supposedly poisoning the art world is such a raw-yet-feeble Ovitz takedown attempt, I can’t see why it even exists.
    kcostner.jpegAnd that’s even before you notice that the story’s so old, a veritable reportorial time capsule. The most recent anecdotes are from the early 1990’s. Julian Schnabel–get this!–has a movie about Basquiat. Up-and-coming dealer Mary Boone has revitalized SoHo’s gallery scene. One interviewee, Leo Castelli, actually died in 1999. Rather than even update the story or provide any la plus ca change context, it reads like Finke handed in an old floppy disk she found while cleaning out a storage unit in the Valley, and her editors published whatever killed story or chapter of an abandoned book happened to be on it. What’s next? Finke’s incisive report whether Waterworld‘s production turmoil will threaten Kevin Costner’s status as Hollywood’s sexiest leading man?
    Lest you think the cluelessness is confined to alt-freebies on the West Coast, Artforum linked to Finke’s story with a headline and a blurb so inaccurate [“For Hollywood Moguls, Collecting Is Increasingly De Rigueur”] it’s obvious they didn’t even read the piece.
    Blame Ovitz: When Art Started Imitating Hollywood [laweekly via artforum]

    Beck Programs Sony Robots To Do White Guy Shuffle

    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]

    Gorillaz “Live” Performances

    gorillaz_live_unofficial.jpg
    Using 19th century illusionist technology known more formally as “smoke and mirrors,” Gorillaz performed live and simultaneously last week at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon and at the Manchester (UK) Opera House.
    The Times of London has a bit of the “how’d they do that?”
    Gorillaz ape a Victorian parlour trick for a bit of stage presence [timesonline.co.uk via core77]
    So far, Gorillaz Live Shows covers just the 2000-2001 appearances [gorillaz-unofficial.com]

    Monkey Business

    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]

    So A Gate And A Floating Island Walk Into A Bar

    redhead_gate.jpg
    There are some posters, and some beer, and the gas for the motorboat had to cost a pretty penny, but that’s about it. Compared to the expensive (and purportedly expensive) public art it skewered, The Gate that chased Robert Smithson’s Floating Island up the East River a couple of months ago cost nothing. Now the Gate and the boat, and a documentary about the project will go on exhibit 11/18 at Redhead, the gallery of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
    The artists–who still remain unnamed–intended their project to ask and answer the questions, “Is public art still possible? Can a cheap stunt pack a punch? Does art make enough room to laugh at itself? Yes. When money steps aside and lets the work do the talking.”
    A Cheap Publicity Stunt, 11/18-12/22, at Redhead [lmcc.net via greg.org reader chandra]
    Previously: Water, Gate. The Gates Bill

    You Have <36H To See The Following:

  • Gabriel Orozco’s computer animated film at Marian Goodman, which morphs through all 700-something color permutations of the paintings in the main gallery. It’s like Jeremy Blake-meets…Gabriel Orozco.
  • Shirin Neshat’s Zarin, in which a Muslim prostitute’s spiral descent into psychic delerium is revealed. May not be suitable for infant children. At Barbara Gladstone.
  • The Journal of Short Film is throwing a launch party for its first issue, Saturday at 3pm at Columbia. The JSF will present experimental and independent short films (are there any other kind? Yes, Hollywood vanity projects for career-switchers and sponsored shorts) in a DVD-based quarterly format. Check the website or this pdf invite for details.
  • And speaking of Jeremy Blake, you now have until Dec. 3 to see his exhibit at Feigen. His latest film, Sodium Fox, is a dazzling collaboration with poet/musician David Berman. [Good to know people are calling themselves poets again.] Also good to see the gallery of paintings, drawings, c-prints, and collages; it’s like buying a “making of” dvd and finding a bonus disc with the film on it.

    • The Sound Of One Hand Bidding

    What with the hazmat crew required to neutralize the thousands of gallons of formaldehyde and the efforts to stabilize the rotting, soaked corpse, moving Damien Hirst’s shark costs an estimated $100,000.
    Meanwhile, Mark Fletcher and Tobias Meyer ended up donating a John Bock sculpture to the Carnegie rather than keep replacing the fresh melons in it.
    [Maybe they should have become Buddhists. When I was a missionary in Japan, old ladies were always offering us the fruit offerings–pyramids of oranges and melons, usually–from their butsudans, the black lacquer, gilt-edged, in-home shrines where they prayed to their departed family members.]
    “These works become like devotional objects. It’s like caring for your altarpiece,” said Amy Cappellazzo, Tobias Meyer’s Christie’s counterpart.
    Ephemeral Art, Eternal Vigilance [nyt]
    Previously: how contemporary art is like a renaissance tapestry

    Bloghdad.com/Really??

    First, I’m trying to imagine what kind of fundraiser one would find both David O. Russell and George W. Bush. But allowing for that possibility, I have to say I was surprised to hear this anecdote:

    [Three Kings] director Russell ran into candidate George W. Bush at a Hollywood fundraiser in the summer of 1999 and told him that he was making a movie critical of his father’s Gulf War legacy. “Then I guess I’m going to have to go finish the job, aren’t I?” the younger Bush replied.

    From J. Hoberman’s review of Jarhead in the Village Voice
    According to an LA City Beat interview last year around the time of I Heart Huckabees, Russell met GWB at Terry Semel’s house in July 1999. DOR called Semel “an opportunist who was jumping off Clinton and onto the Bush bandwagon at the time.” Of course, now we call him the CEO of Yahoo.

    Speculating On The Absence Of Malick

    Caryn James acknowledges that talking about Terrence Malick’s career involves a lot of speculation–before she proceeds to speculate on his “20 year absence” from filmmaking:

    Logic and cheap psychology suggest that fear of success or fear of failure might be involved. He may never duplicate the artistry and acclaim of his early films, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the prospect of competing with himself caused creative paralysis in a filmmaker who likes every blade of grass to be shot perfectly.

    Whatever. With the man’s next movie, The New World, supposedly set to debut this Christmas, you can’t help but write about him. I can totally appreciate that.
    The Enigmatic Malick Is Back [nyt via iht]

    Digging Dugway

    dugway_terraserver_01.jpg
    Whoa. The Dugway Proving Ground is in Skull Valley, an hour and a half west of Salt Lake City. It’s where the US Army tests chemical and biological weapons and defense systems. It’s the site of an incineration program for the US’s stockpiles of bio/chem weapons. And it’s probably the greatest piece of Earth Art since the Nazca Lines.
    dugway_terraserver_02.jpg
    The DoD’s alterations of the landscape–seen here in Terraserver photographs–rival the Spiral Jetty, Double Negative, Roden Crater, even, in both aesthetic power and content. Flash forward a few hundred years and ask yourself, which desert markmaking will have the most to say about the mid-20th century?
    Dugway’s been dealt out of the Earth Art discussion because it’s a) functional, and b) institutional, not individual, but those seem like quaint technicalities. What if the only reason they’re not considered art–or considered alongside art, at least–is that no one’s really had access to them?
    Dugway Proving Ground [pruned, via tropolism]
    previously: earth art via satellite

    N.Y. Doll Revelations

    Stuart, our man in Los Angeles, files this report from a KCRW-sponsored screening of N.Y. Doll last weekend where director Greg Whiteley and his producers Ed Cunningham and Seth Lewis Gordon, discussed making the film:

    Greg had known Arthur had been in a band as another church member had told him, but the film really started when Arthur told Greg that he had an email that his band was reforming. The first piece filmed was the recovery of the bass guitar from the pawn shop as he had to practice.
    The producer also talked interestingly about the way that Arthur’s voice changes through the filming from rather stumbling speech patterns early to the rather stirring and dramatic prayer at the end.
    The Morrissey part was filmed and edited in after the Sundance festival so it has a changed tone now. [And it’s pretty clear that all the celebrity interviews were grabbed in one shot at the Meltdown Festival. In the production notes, Whiteley talks about never having permission to do anything, just going as far as their “Killer has a posse” stance would take them.]
    It is also never quite clear, and Greg said this as well, whether
    Arthur was expected to be part of the reunion, as he found out almost by mistake. Obviously his fan club had an email for him, and Greg said that Sylvain probably met Arthur about once a year on his annual tours, so he knew he was available/alive.
    They do briefly mention [Kane & Johansen] last being together shouting at each other in a trailer park in Florida but nothing more than that. I get the feeling there is a great “New York Dolls” documentary waiting to be made. The Ramones doc was ultimately depressing after seeing these people just beaten down trying to get a big enough audience for their music. [Yeah, does anything good ever come from Florida trailer parks? And the Dolls seemed to drop with predictably Spinal-Tappian frequency, too; not so feel-good.]
    I thought Johansen’s entrance to the practice area with another video
    behind him a day late in the middle of a song rather stagey but Kane seemed genuinely pleased to see him. Also what was the idea
    behind only having less than 7 days rehearsal before flying and doing the gig? that almost seemed set up for failure.
    Most of the stage footage is from a second show where he is
    wearing the spotted shirt with the “diamante tie”; very few shots from
    the first show, with the white shirt.
    Johansen recorded 2 Mormon psalms, and Greg hoped they would both be on the dvd release.

    The DVD is in my prayers. Bless you, Brother Stuart.
    Previously: NY Doll – The greg.org review