Movie City Indie Archive for April, 2005
Online: Errol in the Booth
Follow Errol Morris into the photobooth for PBS.
Protecting the cuttters: "The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act"
With “The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act” headed for a presidential signature, will its provisions also allow someone who trimmed anything from a movie to claim protection for their derivative work? Or does the bill neatly define “sex, violence and foul language”? “Fledgling technology that helps parents prevent children from watching movie scenes depicting sex, violence or foul language won new legal protections Tuesday under a bill Congress is sending to President Bush. “The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act “would assure manufacturers of DVD players and other devices using such technology they would not be violating copyrights of the Hollywood producers of movies… Critics of the bill have argued it was aimed at helping one company, Utah-based ClearPlay Inc, whose technology is used in some DVD players to help parents filter inappropriate material by muting dialogue or skipping scenes. ClearPlay sells filters for hundreds of movies that can be added to such DVD players for $4.95 each month.”
Chris Doyle sings the Blue
The Telegraph continues their series of Filmmakers on Film with dependable Du Ke Feng, or cinematographer Chris Doyle: “Without hesitation, Doyle picks Blue. I assume he means the first of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy. “Of course not,” he says. “Kieslowski represents a more intellectual aspect of filmmaking. Derek Jarman’s Blue is one of the most intimate films I’ve ever seen.” Jarman made Blue as he was going blind in the terminal stages of AIDS…. A diary, it muses on his illness, the aesthetics of colour, the state of the nation in 1993 and more. Visually, it consists of an 80-minute shot of a blank, bright-blue screen. A weird choice, then, for a DoP. “It’s the obvious choice,” counters Doyle, who shares Jarman’s fascination with colour and now treats me to a crash course on the topic which takes in the I Ching, Goethe, Simon Garfield’s book on the invention of mauve and the economics of fashion and Jarman’s own book, ‘Chroma.’ …But surely the computer generation Doyle spoke of would… call it boring? “I think those kids would take Ecstasy and really enjoy it. How much MTV can you watch? Don’t shove it down their throats but let them know it’s there. That’s why I’m talking about it now.”
Danny Boyle answers: "You made a religious film?"
Danny Boyle on belief and “realism”: “Often the imaginative process isn’t dependent on realism, on making things look like they could really exist. The imagination, and what we go to cinema for, is often about something other than that. That’s why I always keep hold of that. The idea of [Millions], in the end, is about what his mom says to [Damian]: you have to keep faith in people. I link faith directly to the imagination because it involves having “leapings” of things. There aren’t steps… all the time. Some of it is trust; there’s a gap that you have to go over. People say, “How come you made a religious film?” For me it’s not religious. I can understand for some people it would be religious, but to me it’s about the imagination, about faith and belief in a wider context.”
Microindie: Wes Malvini has a vision
Candace Baltz-Smylie of the Twin Falls Times-News catches up with a local filmmaker on his third $3,000 production: “Wes Malvini has a vision, and it’s just a little disturbing. “Sarcastic, sardonic, sadistic and morally satiating,” reads his website… “Romantic angst,” he says. “Traditional values versus current values that torment a person.” That is where the Twin Falls 20-year-old draws inspiration… But he doesn’t like being part of the independent scene. No, Malvini says his films are independent of mainstream filmmaking, but also independent of indie film. Independent squared… But Malvini has no dreams of stardom or wealth. He got a check for about $100 from Lamphouse Theatre owner Dave Woodhead when his first film was shown [there]… “Even with star power, independent movies are lucky to make $250,000 countrywide… And this happens over and over again… It’s like an assembly line… Independent film brings it down strictly to the heart. Making a movie for $3,000—you definitely have to be creative.” Malvini also says he doesn’t want to attend film school because it would dilute his talent…. Malvini works for a title loan shop and part time at The Lamphouse, which is where he keeps coming back, probably because The Lamphouse deals in offbeat films.”
Indie billions: Waxman on eager new producers
The Times’ Sharon Waxman surveys Hollywood’s new indie moguls, the latest rich outsiders drawn to the reflected light: “A light rain fell on the actors Aaron Eckhart and Cameron Bright as they strolled along the oceanside pier here, shooting a scene from “Thank You for Smoking,” a dark comedy about lobbying for the tobacco industry. David Sacks, 32, an Internet entrepreneur who has co-financed the movie with his own money… made no effort to conceal his enthusiasm… Mr. Sacks, an inventor of… PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, is [not] the only young tycoon to come to Hollywood lately with a bagful of cash and a hankering to make movies. Jeff Skoll, a co-founder of eBay; Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, the founders of Broadcast.com; and Bob Yari, a real estate developer, are among the… internet magnates, trust-fund entrepreneurs and sports-team owners changing Hollywood’s landscape with their ambitious slates of pictures and vast stores of personal wealth to finance them.” Ah, the golden fleecing…
The 7 Basic Insults: Why We Review Books: Kakutani
The Times’ Michiko Kakutani sets Christopher Booker‘s “The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories” down for a talking-to: “The problem is that most of Booker’s theories are highly familiar, lifted in part or whole from a range of influential, even canonical works by writers and thinkers as varied as Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell and the folklore experts Peter and Iona Opie… What does Steven Spielberg’s shark-fest Jaws have in common with the Old English epic “Beowulf”? … What could Peter Rabbit, Scarlett O’Hara and Alice from Wonderland possibly have in common? Or Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Silas Marner and Scrooge? … These are questions that lie at the heart of [this] gargantuan, sometimes absorbing and often blockheaded new book.”
Taxes and Texas hold'em: more state incentives
Austin Chronicle reports on the latest in tax breaks for filmmakers (sure beats building baseball stadiums): “Senate Bill 1142, which sets up $20 million in incentives to lure Hollywood to Texas, has passed unanimously through subcommittee on to the committee on Business and Commerce [where it’s] expected to move on to the full Senate. … Proof the incentives are needed? New Mexico just upped its hand by increasing the cap on film loans from $7.5 million to $15 million and allowing projects to receive 80% of their expected tax rebates up front. A $4 million interest-free loan allowed New Mexico to nab the Lions Gate series ‘Wildfire.'”
Rubber Johnny: Chris Cunningham
Chris Cunningham has a dark new short film, Rubber Johnny, made in collaboration with Aphex Twin. Trailer and details at the link.
French stickler? Projecting Araki digitally in Paris
Gregg Araki’s latest, Mysterious Skin, is being released in Parisian theaters only in digital projection, according to Liberation. But, it seems, Marin Karmitz, owner of theaters and distributor MK2 did not tell Araki, international rep Fortissimo, or the public. Despite potential repercussions, Karmitz, who has produced films by Chabrol, Kiarostami and Kieslowski, asserts that economics are forbidding for “small films,” with his costs increasing 52% between 2002-2003. Justifying Mysterious Skin in this format, Karmitz cites falling profit margins, and believes that current technical standards are “sufficiently good,” current lab standards are lousy, and journalists are willing to review movies on VHS or DVD. [The original article is in French.]
An auteur's signature: Albert Maysles
Albert Maysles is moving from his longtime home in Manhattan’s Dakota apartments to Harlem and he makes a few confessions to the Times magazine: A thing that is a little strange about myself is that I personally sew name tags into every article of clothing I have, from underwear to socks to jackets and shirts. I use a sewing machine. When I was a kid, I was envious of other kids who went to camp, but my family couldn’t afford it, and what I liked best about camp was you had labels sewn into all your clothes.
Walter Murch on the merch
A short QuickTime movie of editing great Walter Murch talking about what he’s up to with the new Final Cut editing tools [via Greencine]. Until now the border between sound and picture has been this crisis point. By making the interaction between the two transparent, the integration of Soundtrack Pro with Final Cut Pro is going to fantastically change the nature of what we do, he says.
Amy chasing: Joey Lauren Adams directs
After 5 years trying, Joey Lauren Adams returns to central Arkansas to write and direct a movie set in her home state. “Adams spoke Monday at a news conference at the North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce… Adams said that shooting the film in Arkansas instead of in a state that offers better incentives cost her nearly 25% of the movie’s $2.5 million budget. “If I had shot this film in Louisiana I would’ve saved about $700,000. Which, on a budget of about $2-$3 million, you can see how big of a difference that would’ve made.” More on the state of movie finance in Arkansas here.
Control: Control Room's Josh Rushing speaks
A dispatch from Lt. Josh Rushing, the U.S. Marine Corps’ liasion to Middle Eastern news outlets in the 2003 start of Iraq war, at one of his post=Control Room speaking engagements, to an audience in Oregon: “What’s the difference between propaganda and propaganda, between good propaganda and bad propaganda?” asked one man in the audience. Sitting at the stage’s edge, Rushing quickly replied the U.S. had set aside 5% of the money for the Marshall Plan—almost universally admired for reviving the economies of shattered Europe after World War II—to opinion-shaping newsreels titled “Me and Mr. Marshall” and “Let Us Be Tolerant.””We’ve long been in the propaganda business,” [Rushing] said unsentimentally. “It’s up to you to decide the value of that.”
The importance of having an indigenous film industry
English screenwriter Jonathan Gems offers an extended analysis of why there’s no UK film industry: “A revival of our industry cannot be achieved while governments cling to an absolute belief in the free market… It’s hypocritical of the government not to protect British films when it protects British television. In TV, legislation dictates American products cannot take more than a 30% share of terrestrial broadcasting. We won’t have a film industry until we’re releasing at least 50 films regularly each year. For this to happen, we don’t need grants or lottery funds, we need bankers who understand the movie business—and we need a measure of protection. All the government has to do is inform UK distributors that 20% of the films they release must be British. Local distribution and marketing managers will welcome this because it will make them important players in the new British film industry. And, although their foreign parent companies are bound to squawk, they will still retain 80% of a lucrative market.”
