Kimberley Jones writes the scrappy tale of independent filmmakers who have to keep bootstrapping their films after Harvey Weinstein’s check surprisingly fails to materialize. It’s a fairly clear-headed, if mostly analysis-free, look at how promising films can be well-received, but still not “make it” into the “marketplace.”
Over at GreenCine, David Hudson puts these woes in context, though, pointing out that truly independent filmmakers have a long history of busking, throwing their print in the back of their car and hitting the road to show it wherever they can. More significantly, at least form my perspective, is the unexamined (here, anyway) potential for indie DVD distribution, using off- and online promotion to find a film’s audience. I know from my own experience that the audience SN01 has reached through this weblog far outnumbers the butts in the theaters when it screened. And that’s cool
When Business 2.0 wrote about Netflix’ potential as an independent film distribution channel, I kept doing a mental find-and-replace with GreenCine, which combines an independent sensibility with film-loving community. While Netflix may offer potential reach for an independent filmmaker, GreenCine’s subscribers seem far more likely to actually care about (and watch) non-studio films.
What Jones doesn’t mention until the end is the…endgame for first films in the…first place. If you use them as calling cards, as a base for building your long-term career, as a tool for making better the films you need to make, then it ultimately matters a little less that Harvey’s not yet returning your calls.
Bloghdad.com/Remnants
Matt Taibbi takes a look at the semantic evolution of the people attacking US troops in Iraq. They’re variously called “loyalists,” “remnants of ____,” and, of course, “terrorists.” But that’s just the tip of the descriptive iceberg.
Bloghdad.com/HBS
Not the Heaps of BS they called apple pie when they wanted to go to war, and not the coverup for which Condoleeza Rice pushed George Tenet onto his sword. Go to Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo unimpeachable reporting on that impeachable offense. I’m talking about HBS, where Bush got his MBA. If he learned anything there, he’s apparently keepin’ it to himself.
On NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday, Terry Gross had a fascinating conversation with Edmund Andrews, economics reporter for the New York Times, who came back from Iraq with mundane, incredible stories of apparently unforeseen economic crises and chaos that are turning Iraqis’ lives upside down.
My favorites: the emergency $20 stipend paid to Iraqi civil servants causing wild swings in the dinar-dollar exchange rate. And near-riots when a shortage of small-denomination dinar bills leaves banks unable to make change. There’s plenty more where these came from.
Well Hung
When our DC neighbors’ rather inconsiderately left their wireless networks turned off this morning, I ran over to the Hirshhorn to see their new, temporary installation of the permanent collection. It’s pretty fresh, with room to breathe. A lot of wall and floor space is devoted to newer work, which had always gotten short shrift in the Hirshhorn’s rather staid, historical hang (like a history teacher in May, having to cover “WWII-to-present” in a week).
There are moments of real enjoyment, if not brilliance, but the limitations are the collections’ (pretty good, with a few greats), not the curators’. Turning from the all-black wall (Ad Reinhart, Frank Stella, Richard Serra) to find a rarely seen Robert Smithson spiral sculpture perfectly framed in the doorway is awesome, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
Maybe it’s my skewed NYC perspective, but the installation takes a luxurious approach to space; Wolfgang Laib pollen carpet has a huge gallery to itself. In an equally giant Ann Hamilton room, ceiling robots periodically sent sheets of white paper fluttering to the floor. Some tourists frolicked in the resulting paperdrifts, flailing goofily to catch the falling sheets. Their photosnapping attempts to capture what is, essentially, an experience, didn’t fare much better.
It’s always good to see a Tobias Rehberger, even if it’s taped off like a crime scene; and they thankfully purged a lot of the tchotchkes that made the sculpture hallways so avoidable.
One thing I don’t understand, though, is the Hirshhorn’s embarassing practice of selling its old mail. Seriously. There are two milkcrates in the giftshop, full of minor auction catalogues, reports, and obscure 1970’s exhibition brochures from other museums. Priced are based solely, it seems, on binding type. It’s enough to make me take a stand, Tyler Green-style: lose the trash bins. Or, at least, start throwing out more interesting stuff.
Sforzian Backdrops: Africa
While looking through Yahoo News for a linkable photo of those elephants protesting George Bush’s abstinence-driven AIDS program funding, I was happy to find that African Bush has the same production design team as White House Bush and Crawford Bush.
Sforzian Backdrops is the term NYTimes reporter Elizabeth Bumiller coined (and I latched onto) for the made-for-TV-and-only-TV sets and wallpapers that White House image czar Scott Sforza deploys whenever Bush (and the White House press corps) goes anywhere.
And that anywhere includes Africa. It’s at once comforting and disturbing to see how consistent the White House’s approach to image
Take, for example, Bush’s speech at an AIDS Support Centre in Uganda. Sforza & co. went for a theme of low-tech authenticity, simple materials and visuals. AFP’s Luke Frazza captured the window & kinte cloth curtain background; the elaborately “found wood” Survivor-meets-Frontierland dais; and a “local” wallpaper caption as bare-bones as PowerPoint allows, Arial-on-white, no 3-d shading. Meanwhile, the one that “came from” the White House, the one with Bush’s “own” message on it, is rendered in proper First World 3-D
That other Sforzian favorite, the Human Wallpaper, shows up, too. (For other shots, see the Yahoo slideshow.) Since the 2000 Republican convention, Bush has been photographed regularly in front of rows of non-white people. So to let viewers know that these black folk are in Africa, an advance team stylist dressed the orphan choir in leopard skin. The Africa-as-imagined-by-Texan-administration look feels like a Sixties-era Tarzan movie, translated for a drill team competition on ESPN2.
[related link: Elizabeth Bumiller profiles White House photographer Eric Draper, emphasizing how official photographs reflect the administration’s bias. Totally different from professional journos’ biased-by-the-administration’s- stage-management images. Totally.
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 reading it, I’ve wanted to do a shot-for-shot remake of Gerry, set in teeming east LA. After all, for a west-side anglo, being stuck on foot in East LA could be as alienating and threatening as an empty desert.
[Update: I finally found it; It was a Voice interview with Van Sant, who said: “In the West, as soon as you get out of town, depending on which direction you go, you can hit desert, especially in L.A. I mean, L.A. is really a desert anyway.”
Unfortunately, there’s something screwy going on with the DVD release of Gerry. Criterion is apparently handling it, but there’s no mention of it at all on their site.
Iran and The Ninth of July
There’s been a great deal of political turmoil in Iran lately, most of it homegrown and not driven by the US administration’s “you’re next” rumblings. Jeff Jarvis has trained a consistent blogging eye on Iranian weblogs, which provide varied and in-depth accounts of student and public protests against the hardline religionists. The ayatollahs and their militant supporters answer calls for reform with violence.
Today, July 9th, is the four-year anniversary of student-led demonstrations at Tehran University, and politically explosive events were feared/planned/anticipated/rumoured as it approached. [As the BBC reports, they happened, too.] But you didn’t learn that from any of the major US news sources. Oh, Iran led the news, but with the sappy story of conjoined twins dying on a Singaporean operating table.
The timing and the ubiquity of this irrelevant tearjerker made me think back to, oh, Sunday, when the NYTimes ran an almost corny article on recently declassified State Dept. documents from the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of the Guatemalan government. When the CIA’s activities were discovered and reported in Guatemala, Headquarters recommended, “If possible, fabricate big human interest story, like flying saucers, birth sextuplets in remote area to take play away.” If it ain’t broke, I guess…
But I was also reminded of an amazing film I saw in April, one which seems eerily important now. It’s making the film festival rounds, and should be turning up on Sundance, the sooner the better. It’s Thierry Michel‘s 2002 documentary, Iran, Veiled Appearances. Michel gives a clear-eyed view at exactly the forces at play in Iran right now: swelling numbers of youth grown tired of revolution, and tightly wound religionists holding back the tide.
I spoke with Michel at length when his film screened as part of the Sundance at MoMA festival a couple of months ago. I suggested he might make a similar film here, in the US, and he admitted that he’d already become fascinated by the possibility. Turns out for a previous film, the excellent doc, Mobutu, King of Zaire, he had interviewed a friend/supporter/partner of the dictator, a man who left quite an impression on Michel. That friend: our own American ayatollah, Pat Robertson.
On PS1
First, thanks to most of you for not coming today. It was kind of nervewracking, but my gallery talk went okay. There was a group of a dozen or so people who stuck through the whole thing, but a small mob would materialize whenever we’d stop to talk.
Two things that helped the crowd: Richie Hawtin didn’t open the Warm Up Series, he headlined it. That, and many of the galleries were air-conditioned.
Anyway, I hung out for the whole show, listening in the VIP room as a couple of dj’s compared notes on musician-friendly daycare. Then, as Richie went on and the and dusk arrived, I joined an eager crowd in James Turrell’s skyroom. [Actually, I jumped to help a friend move some pedestals out of the room, and I had it to myself for a few minutes while everyone else cooled it in line.]
Seventy-plus people, jammed, jabbering into the room. It took about twenty minutes, but peoples’ energy changed, and the room grew quiet. For the rest of an hour, thirty or so people sat and watched the sky change color. To a scratchy techno beat.
I drove home. At a light near the 59th St Bridge, I glanced around, and saw the man in the car next to me, a very normal-looking guy in his thirties, crying to himself. He caught me looking, I furrowed my brow in some kind of concern, and he nodded once. When the light changed, he turned, and I got on the bridge, wondering.
A Reminder: Other things to do at 3:30 on Saturday
If you’re debating whether to join me at PS1 for my gallery tour among the selected exhibits, remember that many other things are going on at the same time:
Conclusion: unless you’re a slave to movie musicals, documentaries or rice pudding, I’ll see you there.
[update: At GreenCine, David puts La Commune into annoyingly chilling perspective. If you’re only going to see one 6-hour film this year, make it La Commune.]
DVD extras for The Atomic Revolution
Well, almost. I consolidated all my posts on The Atomic Revolution, the shockin’ awesome Military Industrial Complex comic that artist Ethan Persoff re-discovered. Now it’s a greg.org feature.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out online, Saturday at 3:30.
WTC Memorial Submission: All Action, No Talk. Until Now.
For a few days, anyway. I got my Memorial competition submission done, expensively printed at Kinko’s, and delivered. (The official Competition Site forbade hand delivery and said couriers must be “listed in the phone book,” a verification system clearly designed to thwart my plan if I missed the Fedex deadline: dress up as a bike messenger using gear from my Kozmo.com collection.)
Until I saw Ed Wyatt’s Times article about plans pouring in yesterday, I was pretty satisfied with my efforts. My idea’s still great, but now, I think I didn’t pack it carefully enough.
Faced with actually producing a thing that could explain my idea in a (hopefully, at least remotely) compelling way, I holed up with the computer, but without the weblog. Trust me, at 2AM, scanning schematics drawn with fabric paint at the Alexandria, VA Kinko’s, I longed for what The Gothamsts call the “all talk, no action” approach. (Scanning barely-dry paint is like washing your dog’s blanket; it’s better to use someone else’s machine.)
But webloggers can’t stay quiet for long, even if the competition rules preclude publicly identifying oneself with one’s design. Jeff Jarvis worked the competition into a sermon and kept posting (making me jealous of either his weekly magazine-crankin’ production discipline or the team of elves he had working on his poster). So now that it’s over, I’ll tell you, not what I did, but how I did it. Inevitably, I took the ex-consultant and GMAT-taker’s Princeton Review-like approach to the competition, imagining what the real goal should be and how the judging process would play out.
Substance moves ahead of Style
This stated objective for Stage I is not to choose The Memorial, but to choose “approximately five finalists” , who will develop their concepts in Stage II. If a design has enough substance, i.e., if it’s promising, clearly thought through, and successfully fulfills the Mission & Principles, jurors will want to see it developed further. But the Final Five is just one possible goal. You could also set out to be one of the 100 concepts that’ll probably be exhibited, or the 2-300 that’ll get published in some book. Or you could hit a sacrifice fly, submitting a concept that tries to impact the juror’s thinking/discussion. Imagine how 1,000 proposals to recognize firefighters separately might ripple through the selection process.
About “clearly thought through”
Maya Lin’s nearly abstract rendering of her Vietnam Memorial proposal is repeatedly cited as a competition precedent, but that belies the understanding it actually represented. Lin said she spent far more time on her written concept than on her drawings. One juror noted that the submission showed that “(s)he obviously knew what (s)he was talking about.” “Clearly thought through,” then, applies to the concept and the experience. It specifically doesn’t require deciding every detail, material, and elevation: that’s Stage II. Get the right balance of concept images, descriptive text, and relevant, evocative references.
Memorial is not Monument
So many times, people have conflated the two things. It’s understandable, given the monumental scale of the Towers. Last year, I quoted two German artists who said, “The traditional concept of a monument only encourages people to contemplate a hulking stone building and an abstracted past.”. I took Maya Lin at her word when she asked for “a new way of defining what a memorial can be.”
Design for yourself
Maya Lin called for people to submit “what [they] truly believe needs to be done there.” Handicapping the jurors to reverse-engineer the concept or designing to meet currently irreconcilable agendas, or playing it as a political game won’t work.
Produce for the process
We talked about it at the Charette; I imagine the judging process will comprise a series of filters, each with different criteria:
Sanity Check — move crackpot schemes into the Outsider Art bracket. Pick a few fascinating ones for the exhibit.
Elevator Pitch — Can it pass the 30-second test and get the meeting? (i.e., Does it appear compelling and smart/effective/interesting enough to warrant fuller evaluation?)
Clustering — There are only so many possibilities under the sun. Group all the Put Bush and Giuliani on Mount Rushmore proposals over here, all the How About A Gift From the French? proposals over there. Best of Breed will move on. Anything remotely French will be saved for public burning at the Republican convention.
Libeskind/Silverstein/Westfield Factor — Does a concept play well with other uses and forces on the site? Does it break the rules in a net-positive way? I figured a concept that stayed entirely within the competition’s parameters, that didn’t attempt to inform other aspects of the site, was shirking its mission.
Take the Heat — A Final Five concept will be subject to incredible pubic/family/political scrutiny, but only after they’re selected. I can’t imagine the jurors selecting a straw man concept they know will get pilloried. Unlike the Port Authority’s first attempt to redesign the site (which I, with forced idealism, choose to read as a negotiating ploy to gain public outrage-driven leverage over Silverstein and Westfield), playing hardball with the memorial won’t be tolerated.
Numbers
The unweighted probability of a concept making it to the Final Five is extremely low, but back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal submitting to be a worthwhile exercise. That–and hubris–lead me to believe my concept will get relatively serious consideration by jurors. And if it influences their minds as they choose a memorial, it’ll be well worth it.
# of registrants: 13,683
# who submitted: 10,000
minus # who meet submission criteria: 8,500
minus # of Outsider Art entries: 7,500
minus # of “traditional monuments”: 2,500
% that are evocative–beautiful, even–but ultimately unrealizable: 10
% that are conceptually interesting, but ultimately unrealizable: 10
% that break the rules, but whose concept obviously can’t survive to completion: 10
% that are compelling, but that have some dealbreaking shortcoming in terms of Mission/Principle: 20
% that are admirable descendants of the Vietnam Memorial, but which lack its refinement and staying power: 30
# of Stage II slots going to such entries: 2/5 or 3/6
Minimum percentile where I can, without agonizing arrogance, imagine my submission rankng among the 500 that are left: 80th
Where I actually rank it now, without having seen any other entries: 99.9th
Of course, I’m also sure (or at least I hope) there are proposals much better than mine.
An Eye for Collecting: Museum Tours @ P.S.1
I’d say “Come to my museum tour this Saturday,” but I just realized they booked my talk against Detroit Techno-god Richie Hawtin (aka Plakstikman), who’s performing in the Warm Up Series. I have no illusions.
On the occasion of the exhibition Site and Insight: an Assemblage of Artists, P.S.1 offers a series of museum tours, each led by an emerging collector or a curator for a private collection. Site and Insight is curated by Agnes Gund, one of New York’s most prominent collectors and patrons. Ms. Gund’s curatorial selections are informed by her experience as a collector and thus reflect her unique relationship to art and to artists.
These museum tours invite young collectors or curators of collections to present their views on works in P.S.1’s summer exhibitions and to provide insight into the processes behind collecting contemporary art. Led through the galleries by a collector, participants are introduced to the issues, questions, concerns, and inspiration which face a collector when viewing new work. The “collector’s eye” will be a new lens through which to experience contemporary art at P.S.1.
All events take place at 3:30pm and are free with museum admission ($6)
Sat., July 5th: Greg Allen (collector)
Sat., July 19th: Emily Braun (curator of the Leonard Lauder Collection)
Fri., August 1st: Agnes Gund (collector and Site and Insight curator)
Sat., August 16th: Anne Ellegood (curator of the Peter Norton
Collection)
Sat., August 30th: Bill Previdi (collector)
Making Musicals Film Series? Sign me up.
Film Forum is presenting a 3-week series, The Freed Unit and the Golden Age of MGM Musicals. Stuart Klawans gives a preview in yesterday’s Times and recommends the dark, slightly weird, The Band Wagon.. [By the way, it was written by Comden and Greene, directed by Vincente Minelli, and starred, um, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.]
The Band Wagon opens July 4, which means my PS1 museum tour is booked against the 3:15 Saturday screening. At least I don’t have to compete directly with Betty Comden, who’s making a personal appearance after the 5:45 Monday show…
Must. Finish. WTC. Submission
Must. Learn. To. Photoshop. Properly.
Must. Learn. Illustrator.
Must. Admit. Powerpoint. Is. Not. A. Real. Graphics. Program.
Must. Say, puffy fabric paint and a scanner is easier than learning Form-Z.
Must. Say, I have newfound appreciation for the way artists’ studios accrete materials and tools. You can’t just go out and buy some of that stuff.
Must. Add, that the world of craft supply stores is actually a solar system of tinier worlds: the claymolding world, the tole painting world, the modelmaking world, the balsa world, the cast-and-paint-your-own-doll-head world, the make-your-own-gel-filled-candles-or-soap world. Oh, and the puffy fabric paint world.
Part 3: The Making of The Atomic Revolution
Finally, for the the half dozen people who are as intrigued by The Atomic Revolution, the Cold War propaganda comic Ethan Persoff put online, here is at least part of the story of its origins.
Mushroom cloud, from The Atomic Revolution, image: www.ep.tc
The comic itself is copyrighted 1957, by Mr. M Philip Copp, an artist nearly subsumed in an Eisenhower-era Establishment. At a time when comic books were being attacked in Congress and the popular media for contributing to juvenile delinquency, in an denigrated-yet-promising medium populated largely by second generation Lower East Side Jews, the Connecticut WASP Copp
According to a Sept. 1956 profile of “industrial comics,” which annointed Mr Copp as the go-to guy for American Business Interests’ comic needs, TAR, which was “largely devoted to the peacetime uses of the atom,” was designed as a resource for those “interested in learning something about the fundamentals of atomic life.” [emphasis mine.]
M Philip Copp, right, reviews artwork for
The Atomic Revolution with artist Samuel Citron. image: NYTimes, 1956
More than a year in the making, Copp farmed out the creation of the book to “no fewer than eleven free-lance artists and four writers. (The artists and writers are frequently replaced until the combination jells.)” Oliver Townsend, a one-time aide to Gordon Dean (ex-Chairman of The Atomic Energy Commission) is credited with the “basic text,” and Life‘s science editor Warren Young turned in the final script. The only artist mentioned is Samuel Citron, shown reviewing the artwork for page 30, the “spotless” domed Antarctic mining city and “complete control over our environment” that the atom would soon make possible.
But where did the grand vision for TAR come from? Not from Copp, a self-proclaimed “catalyst,” whose real talent seems to be his eye, and whose own “creations” were limited to fawning profiles in the Times of the more accomplished members of his Connecticut shore yacht club. But ships do factor into the story.
TAR was the brainchild of John Hay Hopkins, the chairman of Groton-based Electric Boat, a WWII submarine manufacturer, which, under Hopkins’ leadership, became General Dynamics. According to the corporate history, Hopkins “saw that the need for defense was a permanent need, and not one that could be satisfied by improvisation in a time of crisis. ‘Grow or Die’ were words by which Hopkins lived…”
Hopkins turned General Dynamics from a shipbuilder to a diversified one-stop-shop for the Cold Warrior, and the atom was a major part of GD’s offering. It built the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, and launched its General Atomic Division in 1955. Do the math. A year in the making, profile in late ’56, TAR could’ve been conceived on the deck of a vermouth-soaked General Atomic after-party.
Or perhaps it was part of a much more comprehensive media strategy. Hopkins turned to his slipmate M. Philip Copp for a $50,000, 500,000-copy run of an atomic comic, but to make “Grow or Die” the operating principle for military expenditures would require a multimedia
Check out Prof. Marc Langer’s amazing AWN article, “Disney’s Atomic Fleet.” After keeping his studio afloat during WWII by making animated training and propaganda films for the US armed forces, Walt Disney was asked to participate in Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program in 1955. The result: a multi-year, multi-channel atomic edutainment extravaganza that reminds us that skilful collaboration between the media’s and military’s big guns didn’t start with embedding Jessica Lynch on MTV.
Disney began producing a live-action/animation program, Disneyland, for the emerging ABC TV network. In turn, ABC was asked to invest, alongside Western Publishing, in the new theme park the show would promote. In 1957, Disney aired My Friend The Atom as a Tomorrowland segment on the show. The program, along with millions of copies of the accompanying book, went into schools. When Tomorrowland actually opened at Disneyland, it featured a fleet of “nuclear powered” submarines. Vice President Richard Nixon accompanied Disney on the sub’s maiden voyage on June 14, 1959; the event was broadcast live on ABC.
My Friend The Atom promised a future where “‘clean’ nuclear reactors will replace grimy coal and oil power plants. Radiation will be used to produce better crops and livestock. People will zoom from place to place in atomic cars, trains, boats and planes. ‘Then, the atom will become truly our friend.'” If that future sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s almost an exact frame-for-frame description of the contents of The Atomic Revolution.
Like TAR, My Friend, The Atom was produced in collaboration with General Dynamics Corporation. John Hay Hopkins passed away in 1957, and while he never got to visit Disneyland, and it’s unlikely that he saw the completion of MFTA, he surely got to see a final proof of The Atomic Revolution, thanks to the tireless work of Mr M. Philip Copp.
Related links:
from the Eisenhower Library, a 1953 report by the [William Hay] Jackson Committee on international information warfare
Part 2: M. Philip Copp, State Dept. Info-warrior