While surfing for Cannes reports,

While surfing for Cannes reports, I found this great Indiewire interview with Abbas Kiarostami from the 2001 Double Take Documentary Film Festival, timed to the premiere of ABC Africa, his doc about AIDS in, well, Africa. Some highlights:

  • The film was made during “location scouting,” when he was still deciding whether to accept the UN’s invitation to make a documentary.
  • “But when I actually started using [the digital cameras] — and when I realized its possibilities and what I could do with them — I realized that I have wasted, in a way, 30 years of my career using the 35mm camera, because that camera, for the type of work that I do, is more of a hindrance than a communication tool.”

    • Went to an IFP24 Market

    Went to an IFP24 Market orientation meeting tonight. This doesn’t mean Souvenir‘s been selected for the market yet; it was a Q&A session for filmmakers hoping to participate in the Market. Here are the bullet points, primarily as they relate to Souvenir:

  • In the section Souvenir‘s entered, they’ll select 15 shorts from probably 2-300 submitted.
  • The major prospects for a short film are pretty clear, and the Market is useful for at least the first two (in order of priority to me): first phase of a feature/series; calling card; and acquisition/distribution target.
  • To wit, focus more attention on film festival programmers and production companies than on distributors and buyers.
  • Be prepared to discuss the next project, whether it’s expanding the short into a feature or directing another script (both)
  • Also, focus efforts not only on the short term (hook me up!), but on the long-term as well. (It’s a relationship business, after all.)
  • Spend wisely (i.e., not that much) on glossy press kits, promo gear, etc. for industry people. They don’t really care; they’re looking for and at product, the talent; not the peripheral crap. (But what about all those muffin baskets I’ve been sending out?) Save the glossy promo material for the fundraising.

    LOLOL. Jon Stewart just said, “We’re Oldie McOldington,” on The Daily Show. And now Rupert Everett’s tearing France a new one. Heh. He’s funny.

    Of course, as soon as I started this entry, I turned on IFC and Ridicule was on, so I had to watch it. It’s by Patrice Leconte, and it is a rippingly funny, smart movie about the court of Louis XIV, where wit was the coin of the realm, so to speak. Here’s Roger Ebert’s review.

    • All that Adwords talk got

    All that Adwords talk got me thinking, so I climbed in bed with Google myself (or went into the alley behind a dumpster with it, anyway). I launched a small campaign, titled “Damn you!” to promote the movie. In it, I faux-curse some of the directors whose work/example inspired/encouraged me to get off my butt and make a movie.

    Each ad starts out, “Damn you, < insert director's name here >!” which is not a reference to Happy Gilmore, or even to Homer Simpson, although you’re getting close. It fell from the lips of God’s (and the NRA’s) anointed, Charlton Heston, in the last scene of Planet of the Apes.

    Testing my campaign, I found this article on Apple’s site about the production of Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Full Frontal.

    Full Frontal, as you can read, was made with nearly the same level of equipment (DV and Final Cut Pro) as Souvenir November 2001. And in just four months. 18 days of shooting. $2 million budget. With Julia Roberts, David Duchovny, David Hyde Pierce and Catherine Keener. There’s a website that documents the production of the film, week by week.

    Now, if you have trouble telling the difference between Souvenir and Full Frontal, just remember: Full Frontal‘s shot in PAL with DAT sound. Souvenir was shot in NTSC with MD sound.

    Poetry using Google Adwords: One

    Poetry using Google Adwords: One more non-traditional (at least by contemporary standards) medium for creative expression (besides ebay and amazon reviews, which I mentioned last week.) The difference with adwords, of course, is that it costs you money ($15/thousand views these days). This guy did it in April. I did it in February. 2001.

    There are two creative elements of an ad on google, of course: the ad itself, and the keywords it appears on. To drive a little traffic to my site (and to amuse myself, really) I set an ad to appear on searches for “haiku.” It wasn’t that the site that has anything to do with haiku, it was Google’s adword format–which had launched at the end of 2000–which clearly resembled haiku:

    Invite visitors
    to my cluster of sites
    through keyword purchase

    While editing this post, I found an interesting article from the Online Journalism Review on the emergence of text ads.

    I was on a panel

    I was on a panel today at -scope, an art fair held here in NYC this weekend. Hoping to follow in the tradition of the Gramercy International Art Fair, which began in the mid 90’s by filling the rooms of the seedy-but-cool Gramercy Hotel with young galleries from here and there, -scope put galleries into three floors of the Gershwin Hotel and scheduled a bunch of ancillary events: a benefit, a concert or something, and “Collector’s Day,” (aka Mothers’ Day). Here are some of my views on collecting art, from a wall text of an exhibition I curated 18 months ago.

    It was fine. A panel discussion is one of those tricky events where something a self-absorbed person deludes himself into believing (that, of course people want to hear him hold forth on whatever enters his head) veers dangerously close to reality (people do come to hear him say something; it’s not a panel of mimes or monks, after all.). But too much self-deprecation aside, it went pretty well, I think. people only began to flee after an 1.3 hours or so, a respectable amount of attention to pay. So kudos to Bill, who organized and moderated, who probably collects more than I do, and who was easily dissuaded from holding an “art collector’s game show” (his first idea). [Click here to become a contestant on Jeopardy!]

    Today: Picked up my bulk

    Today:

  • Picked up my bulk order of 20-minute VHS tapes
  • Started duping screening copies of the movie (eight and counting, so far)
  • Prepped entry packets for the Int’l Short Film Festival Berlin, the AFI Fest in LA, and the Mill Valley Film Festival in the Bay Area. All these festivals are in Oct./Nov., after the NY Film Festival, the ideal/dream festival for Souvenir (November 2001).

    Also, because I’ve been remiss in my Steven Soderbergh references lately, I finally found out what Itchy and Scratchy said on their DVD commentary in a recent episode (“The Bart wants what the Bart wants”) of The Simpsons. A fan on a message board posted the comment as “There’s no pleasing Steven Soderbergh.”

    • First the good news: I

    First the good news: I got my keyboard replaced, and now I have my beloved Trackpoint back. Things are looking up.

    Bad news: Here is the list of picks for International Critics Week at Cannes. One short, The Day I Was Born, by Japanese director Manda Kunitoshi, features a “baby born on September 11 2001,” so that may have filled the thematic slot I was targetting. There were no US shorts among the seven selected, though. In fact, there are no US films at all.

    Good news: I got the no-subtitles version dubbed and submitted to the Edinburgh Film Festival, which cut me a week’s slack while I tried to get the subtitled version outputted.

    Bad news: I haven’t gotten the subtitled version outputted yet. There are memory problems with Final Cut Pro, which doesn’t seem to recognize the 30+ available gigabytes on my external drive. At this rate, though, I’ll be able to sit next to everyone who watches it and translate the French parts for them.

    Editing: Final tweaks over the

    Editing: Final tweaks over the weekend to get a distortion-free output version has now deteriorated into a major structural problem with Final Cut Pro. If I didn’t have so much other stuff to occupy my mind, I’d be worried sick. The program shows that a dozen+ audio files are missing AND that they’re required to play the finished sequence, even though they’re not in the sequence. IDGI. Anyway, I’ve started going through every file, recapturing those that are in the movie, and deleting those that aren’t. It’s going to be a long week. And the submissions clocks are still ticking.

    Submissions: Got a dear auteur fax from Quinzaine Realisateurs. Maybe I don’t want people who don’t know me to see it after all…

    As I’m sitting here working, Rushmore is just ending on Comedy Central. Freakin’ amazing. What IS that movie? I’m glad I didn’t see it right before meeting Wes Anderson last week; id’ve been a blubbering idiot fan. As it is, I’m no more likely to EVER make a movie like that (at one end of the spectrum) than I am to make Weekend at Bernie’s II (at the other). No prob.

    2002-04-22 & 29, THE TALK OF THE TOWN

    Issue of 2002-04-22 and 2002-04-29
    Posted 2002-04-15
    COMMENT/ TWO STATES/ Nicholas Lemann looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of post (US)-Civil War reconstruction.
    STRING SECTION/ SLAVA AT SEVENTY-FIVE/ Charles Michener basks in the effusive presence of Maestro Mstislav Rostropovich.
    INK/ THE TIMES, V.O./ Adam Gopnik lets us know that, even though Le Monde began publishing an English-language insert from the NYT, he buys it for the French articles.
    THE BOARDS/ MAN IN TIGHTS/ Eric Konigsberg previews right-wing muscle daddy/blogger Andrew Sullivan’s Shakespeare debut.
    THE FINANCIAL PAGE/ TAX CHEAT, INC./ James Surowiecki explains why offshore tax dodging is illegal for you, but fine for Ingersoll-Rand.

    I ended up making screening

    I ended up making screening tapes from the DV master, since I have been having the same problems with output that we had before (ie., skipping, frozen frames). The movie may have found the maximum processing capacity of the G4 we’re working with. Moral: don’t go halfway on the memory or processing power. You’ll use it all, so make sure it’s enough.

    Jean and I drove from DC to NC for the weekend, and talked through the rest of the Souvenir series. I’ll post some of those notes after I get them typed up. Some general ideas around which stories may develop: remembering and returning to specific places, the differences between peoples’ memories of the same event (more Chuck and Buck than Rashomon, though), remembering as talking vs. remembering as “experiencing,” and a few more. Abstract enough for you? After hearing a 1992 interview with John Cage on WNYC yesterday, I’m pretty sure he’ll have a role in the movie somehow. (besides the music in Souvenir November 2001, that is) Anyway, everyone goes to bed early in NC, so I’m outta here.

    Making screening tapes: Groundhog Day

    Making screening tapes: Groundhog Day all over again (which may be redundant, I know). I’ve been working to swap out the shot that annoyed Jonah and me (shooting into the sun=super-blown out exposure), finding one that (except for some coke can/coke bottle discontinuity) is way way better. Now, though, the same popping and frame snagging problem that nearly derailed us last week is back, even worse.

    MoMA Benefit: what a laff riot. Spent hours in the afternoon rehearsing with David O. Russell, Lily Tomlin, and a posse of movie and museum people. It was a blast. My co-chair, Muffy, didn’t want to do any of the jokes I’d written for us (we were the fifth in a chain of intros and thank yous, and we introduced David and Lily, who interviewed him). Instead of Ben Stiller opening the evening, it was a clip from Flirting with Disaster, the one where Mary Tyler Moore lifts her shirt and shows off her aging-yet-still-firm breasts (let’s see what search engines do with THAT description). So after four refined, diplomatic, but slightly uptight intros by other museum dignitaries, my joke about Russell making movies for a TV generation that grew up wanting Mary Tyler Moore to take her shirt off went over fine. As did the line about thanking my lawyers and my manager who got me this job (people were just about thanked out). Ben Stiller’s appearance later, via “live” satellite hookup, was hilarious; he acted like he was accepting the award, then got confused and hurt when he was told it wasn’t for him. Finally, Will Farrell showed up, as James Lipton, and pulled all the actors onstage to fawn over them strangely. I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me. Then we all ran upstairs for dinner (and, for the LA crowd, an American Spirit) and the party.

    Here is a list of my new Hollywood friends (in Hollywood, if you hang out for a night, mentioning your respective projects, you can claim friendship.): Spike and Sofia (very nice. sat next to them.); the Leguizamos, Wes Anderson (very popular with the ladies, btw), Alexander Payne, and Glenn Fitzgerald. The agents were thick as thieves (in a good way), but, true to form, they don’t have entries in IMDB, so no linking. Anyway, my friends’ll understand if I have to get back to work. Let’s get together for breakfast.

    Been working on my schtick

    Been working on my schtick for tonight, where I am introducing David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin at a MoMA film benefit. MoMA is acquiring Russell’s films for its permanent collection, and the fundraising group I co-chair is hosting the program/party. Given the crowd and the committee (almost all of whom are going to be there), I’m (Spike) Jonzin’ to work the movie into the intro, no matter how tenuous the connection. Can’t see it happening, though. And with Ben Stiller opening for me and the crowd of comedians in the program, I think the best I’ll be able to do is not be a complete idiot. Paul Thomas Anderson‘ll be there, as well as Wes Anderson [a Wes Anderson blog, yet not by Wes Anderson.]; hopefully, we’re seated somewhat alphabetically…

    Details, details. Worked on the

    Details, details.

  • Worked on the dialogue transcript, which will morph into subtitles, which I assume I’ll be able to put on after some book reading.
  • Need to add another screen of credits and acknowledgements. Right now, we just have one screen with the crew and principal cast. But since there are another nine people in the movie, we gots to get them in. AND, there are sponsors and people who helped out to be thanked. I learned how to do that, though.
  • There’s one clip from inside the car, during one conversation, one line of dialogue, where the exposure’s all whack. We’d shot it early in the morning, and the sun is coming right in the window. The problem is, I’m pretty sure that’s the only take with that exact line. I’ve gotta go through all the tapes again and look for a better shot.
  • The sound needs to be remixed, I think. Basically, it’s all there, and pretty good, but levels aren’t quite right, there’s some noise in places (although most of it’s gone)…a real audio expert’ll be able to do wonders, I think.

    That said, after rewatching Kieslowski’s Dekalog–where there were tons of car interiors with overexposed landscapes and/or harsh shadows from a sun gun spotlight inside the car, and after seeing Y tu Mama Tambien, where the narrator’s voiceover cuts abruptly into the ambient audio of the story, I’m a little less hung up about the last two. Our light’s better than some of Kieslowski’s, and our sound’s better than some of Alberto Cuaron’s. That’s something. Not that I’m not going to fix these things, though, obviously.