Familiar Stranger and Digital Patina

a crowded train platform, familiar strangers, image: intel-research.net

Anne Galloway‘s on a roll these days. Until this Fall, I can’t say exactly why I find her posts about Intel Research Lab Berkeley’s Eric Paulos’ work so highly relevant just now. I can say that it’s very heartening to find an affinity with someone so smart and forward-thinking.
What the hell am I talking about? First is the social phenomena of the Familar Stranger, the people that you (don’t) meet/ when you’re walking down the street/ the people that you (don’t) meet each day. Second is Paulos’ interest in what he calls a “digital patina,” a layer of information, laid over a physical space that communicates what/who has come before. Paulos suggests RFID technology might make this possible.

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 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.

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. 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. ]

On Cows. No, Seriously. On Cows

Banksy's painted cow, a la Warhol's cow wallpaper, image: ananova.com[via WoosterCollective] Banksy, a prominent London street artist, has moved his work into a gallery for the weekend, and some people are pissed (in the American, not British, English sense of the word). Banksy tagged some live barnyard animals, and an animal rights protestor chained herself to the pen, temporarily leaving the foxes of England defenseless.
Meanwhile, in the US, when artist Nathan Banks painted words on the sides of cows and transcribed the poems they produced as they wandered the fields, no one raised an eyebrow.

For the calendar:

  • See group exhibitions at Greene Naftali, Tanya Bonakdar , [NYT reviews] and D’Amelio Terras Galleries [NYT review] in NYC.
  • Now that my gallery talk is past, it’s safe to attend PS1’s WarmUp series. Listen to it live online, in case long lines and borderline headcase non-hipsters aren’t your thing.
  • See the exhibition, Trash to Treasure: The Production Design of Vince Peranio at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore. Peranio has worked with John Waters since Pink Flamingos, and is currently PD on HBO‘s series, The Wire, which I hear is popular with the kids these days. Through Aug. 9.
  • See the Freer & Sackler Galleries‘ Made in Hong Kong Film Festival, which includes recent works by director Ann Hui. On Aug 15 and 17, they’re showing Wong Kar-Wai‘s second film, the 1991Days of Being Wild. The film is Wong’s first collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and represents and rather ambitiously takes its title from the HK release of Rebel Without A Cause.

    • Souvenir January 2003: Euro remix

    Honest mistake, but no, that's not me. Versace ad, nude dude ironingI’m off to the post office to launch a bundle of screener tapes of my second short, Souvenir January 2003, in the direction of festivals across the sea. This gives me a chance to see how my quiet meditation on ironing might go over with European audiences.
    As it turns out, Steven Meisel, the king of the appropriationist school of fashion photography, has already ripped off my poignant little film and turned it into a rentboy-meets-La Jetee ad campaign for Versace. Combine this with the recent influx of beefcake on Gawker, and my mental shores are awash with waves of self-doubt about my (fully-clothed) original version. Should I have exposed more than my emotional self? Oh, and I need to go to the gym.
    Meanwhile, in the land of Almodovar, on a new weblog, Republica de Catalombia, Mauricio writes intensely (and in Spanish) about his attempts to find ironing’s deeper meaning. “I have the smooth impression that if the Greeks, that wise civilization like no other, had had the superfluous whim to iron, the labor of Sisyphus would consist of starching perfectly and folding the Egyptian cotton tunics of the entire population of Mount Olympus, bought by Zeus from the Colossus of Rhodes.” [handcrafted Google translation]
    Mauricio ends up going to the gym, too (Damn you, Steven Meisel!), starts ironing with abandon on a Sunday afternoon, and experiences a vision “as frightening as Vincent Price in a Corman film.”
    Hmm. Rather than spend money on international postage, maybe I should splurge on the dry cleaners instead.

    David Childs’ West Side Story

    He’s the only architect listed on the Observer‘s Dec. 2000 list of Players in New York’s real estate game. Engineering a backroom takeover of the WTC rebuilding project may just be one step in David Childs’ larger plan: to 0wn the West Side of Manhattan. The site is in line–the Eighth Ave. subway, to be specific–with other major Childs’ projects in NYC:

    The New Penn Station, image: pixelbypixel.com

    33rd St: The New Penn Station, which has been widely praised. (image: pixelbypixel.com)
    Frank Gehry/David Childs NYT HQ, image: guggenheim.org

    41st St: NYTimes Headquarters, a collaboration with Frank Gehry, who pulled out after creative disputes. (Daniel, are you reading this?) (image: guggenheim.org)
    42nd St: 7 Times Square, good for spying on Conde Nast.

    50th St: Worldwide Plaza (I bet the model looked great)
    AOLTW Center, image: wirednewyork/landolove.com
    59th/Columbus Circle: AOLTW Center. ugh.

    116th St: East Campus Towers at Columbia, which would’ve gone where the Law School now is.

    After the ’04 Republican Convention, we’ll be calling them Patakian Backdrops

    White House stage manager Scott Sforza better enjoy the attention while it lasts; when the Republican convention rolls into Manhattan next September, er, 1th, they’ll be stumping in front of a George Pataki-crafted backdrop, construction of the foundations of the “Freedom Tower” on the site of the World Trade Center.
    What that Tower’ll look like, and even where it’ll be, are still TBD; these are, frankly, irrelevant details. The NY governor doesn’t care what gets built by whom, just that construction starts in time for something impressive to be visible behind the GOP dais. And if it means locking two utterly incompatible architects with diametrically opposed visions in a room until they agree to work together, so be it.

    5200 Entries for the WTC Memorial

    Postman delivering WTC Memorial submissions, image:renewnyc.com

    The LMDC announced today that 5,200 qualified entries were accepted into the Memorial Competition. That’s a much smaller yield than I estimated earlier.
    Even so, it’s the largest design competition ever (my previous quality/quantity estimate still stands). Reuters reports that the evaluation schedule will now be “open ended given the volume of submissions [the jury] would have to sift through.” Finalists will still be announced in the Fall, but not necessarily by September.

    Fox Searchlight’s new weblog

    also via GreenCine: The indie mini-major studio Fox Searchlight Pictures has launched a weblog with the ambitious tagline, “All the independent and arthouse movie news that’s fit to blog.”
    Fortunately for what still feels like a one-man operation, the first post narrows the spotlight to Searchlight and news of their release slate. It seems intended to supplement the studio site’s Weekend Read mailing list, where FS filmmakers write about their work.
    Welcome to the phenomena, kids. Now all you need to do is to move to New York.

    On interviewing film people

    On MovieCityNews: Leonard Klady shares some insights and some great war stories about interviewing directors and actors, a useful (and timely) resource as I prepare for some upcoming junkets. [thanks, GreenCine, and for the mention, too.]
    Related posts: post-game post on Bingham Ray interviewing Alexander Payne at MoMA; Lily Tomlin and Will Ferrell-as-James Lipton interviewing David O. Russell at MoMA the year before (apparently involved some kind of pipe)

    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 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.

    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 $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]

    • Tax Law & Order

    Ah, summer, when screenplay-ready drama emerges from the investment banking industry. Last summer, it was CNBC’s Mike Huckman, who, in a scrappy burst of journalistic energy not often seen during the analyst-stroking bubble years, chased Salomon’s Jack Grubman into the street (Fifth Avenue) seeking comments on the breaking MCI Worldcom fiasco. And we all know how that turned out (hint: his kids are now at P.S. 6).
    This year, it’s not street theater, but courtroom drama. At stake is a $56 million tax bill, not an eyebrow-raising amount by i-banking standards. But it’s everything, if market reversals leave your entire net worth sitting well within the $112 million spread of the court’s decision. And it’s even more everything if the star is not a mere Master of the Universe, but An Architect of the Universe itself, Dr Myron Scholes.
    MBA’s have the Black-Scholes model for pricing options burned into our heads. In hyperbolic shorthand (this is for a screenplay, remember?), Black-Scholes made modern capital markets possible, creating the common language of risk and return. Grubman’s a cog in the machine. Scholes helped define. For all the good that‘ll do him. In a NYTimes article that’d make Dick Wolf proud, David Cay Johnston tells of The Architect’s encounter on the stand with a crack federal prosecutor.

    KST:3K, KiaroStami Theatre: 3K

    The Guardian‘s Lee Roberts reports on Iranian film godfather Abbas Kiarostami’s debut stage production of the Ta’ziyeh, a compilation of classic tales of the death of Mohammed’s grandson, Hussein. The plays are a traditional part of fervent religious festivals in Iran, but are often considered vaudeville in the West.
    Kiarostami lets a troupe of Ta’ziyeh players do their thing on stage, while synchronized images of Iranian audiences’ reactions to the same play are projected behind them. The result: the Roman audience sees both the play and the Islamic audience’s more unabashed reactions to it.