DON CORNELIUS, R.I.P.

By Scott Macaulay

Sad to hear this week of the death of Don Cornelius, whose Soul Train is burned into my adolescent TV memory. From Bruce Handy at Vanity Fair (who opens with a quote from “American Pie”).

I know it’s corny quoting from “American Pie.” But it is February, and like a lot of people, I felt a genuine sense of loss and sadness at the news that Don Cornelius, the creator and host of Soul Train, died of gunshot wounds Wednesday morning in Los Angeles—a possible suicide at the age of 75. The show premiered in Chicago in 1970 and aired nationally for 35 years—the longest-running syndicated series in television history. Pretty much every great soul and R&B artist came out for Cornelius at one time or another, including James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Michael Jackson. In the 70s, without Oprah or BET or Shonda Rhimes or Dick Parsons, blacks didn’t have a lot of control over how they appeared in the mainstream media, and so in that sense, Soul Train was revolutionary. In a far less atomized but more racially segregated culture than ours—1970 was only half a decade removed from the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts—Soul Train felt like an official weekly communiqué from black America. At least, it did to preadolescent white people growing up in Northern California; it occurs to me now that, as far as my junior high-school social life went, I might have benefited from paying closer attention to Soul Train, with its dance floor full of smooth moves, sharp clothes, and bobbing, well-picked Afros.

Handy embeds the closing sequence to Spike Lee’s Crooklyn, which rescores the show to the hip hop of the time.

… Read the rest

BEN GAZARRA, R.I.P.

By Scott Macaulay

Ben Gazarra, 1930-2012. From my favorite movie of his, John Cassavete’s Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

… Read the rest

ROTTERDAM PHOTOS AND NOTES

By Scott Macaulay

For almost two decades I’ve been traveling to the International Film Festival Rotterdam immediately following Sundance, struggling to keep my jet lag at bay while I attend a few Cinemart meetings, hit the informal but productive Cinemart cocktail hours, and delve into the fest’s always excellent and eclectic program. This year several fellower Sundancers made the trip as well, including sales agent Ryan Kampe, producer Adele Romanski, the IFP’s Amy Dotson, the Sundance Institute’s Anne Lai, and director Terrence Nance, whose An Oversimplification of Her Beauty was programmed here and was one of the Park City’s true discoveries. Above is Nance, at right, pictured on the ground floor of the Doelen with Festival Director Rutger Wolfson.

“Rotterdam is the only festival with a 24-hour deejay,” Nance quipped to me. While I haven’t stumbled into the Doelen at 5:00 AM, Nance is not far from the truth. Above is the floor of the festival’s main facility, which is transformed each year into a chill-out club environment with food, music, and long benches at which to meet.

I try to keep track of folks who have appeared in our “25 New Faces,” but after almost 15 years and 25 people a year, it’s hard. In Rotterdam I was surprised to discover that a pair of filmmakers we profiled in our 2007 edition were attending the fest with the world premiere of the film we wrote about back then. Above are Richard Goldgewicht and Jeremy Goldscheider, whose “hybrid biopic” Pablo details the life of mysterious artist and filmmaker Pablo Ferro. Ferrer’s imaginative opening title sequences have adorned films ranging from Dr. Strangelove to Napoleon Dynamite.

Producer, critic and curator Madeleine Molyneaux is a familiar face in Rotterdam, having traveled here for years to scope projects for herself and do Q&A’s for the festival. She works regularly with directors Kevin Jerome Everson (another Rotterdam regular) and David Jacobson, whose new Boot Tracks is in post in L.A.

The model for the indie film financing conference, where buyers meet with reps of selected projects in a series of round-robin sessions — it started at … Read the rest

MIKE KELLEY, R.I.P.

By Scott Macaulay

Artist Mike Kelley, one of the most influential of his generation, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. His provocative multi-media work mixed irony with sincerity, scatology with sentiment, and influenced not only other artists but filmmakers, musicians and writers. A founding member of the band Destroy All Monsters, he attended CalArts and collaborated with other artists like Tony Oursler, Jim Shaw and Sonic Youth.

From Holland Cotter’s New York Times appreciation:

He began creating multimedia installations that synthesized large-scale drawings and paintings, often incorporating his own writing, along with sculptures, videos (one was based on the television show “Captain Kangaroo”), and performances, often scatological and sadomasochistic in nature. Although he stopped performing in 1986 — he later said that he always had to get drunk to do it — the other formal elements remained constants in his art.

A certain tone or attitude remained constant, too. The shorthand term for it is abjection, a deliberate immersion in the gross-out anarchy associated with youth culture. But to see only that was to miss the deep and covered-up strain of poetry in his work, evident in a series of sculptural pieces using children’s stuffed animals sewn onto or covered over with hand-knitted afghans.

On one level, the pieces were sardonic send-ups of aesthetic trends like Minimalism, which Mr. Kelley despised as elitist. On another, they took aim at the strain of too-easy sentimentality he found repellent in popular culture. At yet another level, these pieces, with their martyred dolls and ruined promise of warmth, were innocence-and-experience metaphors, suggesting the trauma of hurt and loss that underlay the juvenile delinquent antics that surrounded them.

From Blake Gopnik’s piece in The Daily Beast:

“Protean” is the term that comes to mind for Kelley, if such a fancy-pants cliché weren’t so far from his aesthetic. “He brought a dialogue with real pop culture and everyday life into high art—that was untouchable before [him],” said Oursler. Kelley didn’t so much make fine art about popular culture, as Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein had done, as erase the boundaries between the two.

Of course, some

… Read the rest

MEDIA CURRENT: AT YOUR OWN PERIL

By David Rosen

If there is one industry report that you absolutely must read this year it is Digital Dilemma 2: Perspectives from Independent Filmmakers, Documentarians and Nonprofit Audiovisual Archives, from the Motion Picture Academy’s Science and Technology Council.

The study was conducted with the assistance of Filmmaker as well as the IFP, Film Independent, and many other organizations and individual makers. Its message is short and simple:

“Most of the filmmakers surveyed for this report have given little thought to what happens to their work once it is completed. …  [F]ew store their film masters in proper environmental conditions or manage their digital masters using appropriate preservation practices.”

Indies drive the film business. In 2010, 532 movies were commercially released and the six Hollywood studios (and their subsidiaries) accounted for roughly a third (174) with indie works made up the rest.  According to the Independent Film & Television Alliance, a trade association, indie makers produced more than 400 features in 2009.

However, stats from the 2011 and 2012 Sundance festival are more revealing: for 2011, Sundance received 10,279 submissions for all categories and screened only 194 works, less than 2 percent; this year, it received 4,042 feature submissions and selected nearly 3 percent (110). What happens to the rest?

The shift from analog film stock to digital media has revolutionized film production and distribution – and (for the long-term preservation of a maker’s work) storage. It has led to a proliferation of formats, often incompatible and not forwardly migratable. The study assessES 11 storage media: film, digital Betacam, 1” videotape, HDCAM, VHS take, D-5, ¾” U-matic, DVD, Betacam SP and others.

The report makes painfully clear that there is much confusion with regard to digital storage technologies. It asserts: “… digital data of any type is subject to invisible failure mechanisms at many levels – the actual recording media, the data reading and writing system in the digital storage device, the data interface that connects the storage device to a computer, the computer network that connects individual machines, and the many levels of software that control the overall system.” Further, it warns: “If preservation actions are not … Read the rest

IFP INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER LABS OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS

By Scott Macaulay

The IFP’s unique Independent Filmmaker Labs are now accepting applications for the 2012 programs. The Labs, which consist of year-round mentorship for first-time filmmakers along with focused seminar and instruction weeks, have recently seen alumni success at Sundance (Terrence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty), Slamdance (Keith Miller’s Grand Prize winner Welcome to Pine Hill), in theaters (Dee Rees’s Pariah) and, upcoming, at Berlin (Lucy Mulloy’s Una Noche), SXSW (Matt Ruskin’s Competition title, Booster), and on TV (the POV screening of Michael Collins’ Give Up Tomorrow).

From IFP:

IFP’s unique year-long mentorship program supports first-time feature directors when they need it most: through the completion, marketing and distribution of their films. Focusing exclusively on low-budget features (

… Read the rest

JOHN BAILEY A.S.C., ON SHOOTING “THE BIG CHILL”

By Michael Murie

John Bailey was a graduate film student at USC studying film criticism when he discovered a passion for cinematography while working on a school production. His first feature-length credit was for a 1972 horror movie Premonition, and since then he has accumulated a long and impressive list of credits, including such classics as: Groundhog Day, The Accidental Tourist, Swimming to Cambodia, Silverado, The Big Chill, and American Gigolo. More recently, he’s worked on projects as diverse as Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Must Love Dogs, The Producers, and Country Strong.

I first heard John speak at an event organized by Kodak in Rochester in the late 80′s. He talked at length about the language of the movies, and about shooting The Accidental Tourist. It was a revelation; at the time, cinematography to me was framing the camera so the subject was in the scene; if the subject was too far away, you zoomed in. I didn’t think much about how the effect of using different focal lengths could change the feeling of a shot. Basically, cinematography didn’t exist for me prior to hearing John speak.

So it was a big thrill for me to hear John speak at an event last December hosted by Emerson College and the Boston Creative Pro Users Group. John spoke, along with his wife, Carol Littleton, about the making of the movie The Big Chill (pictured above) in a discussion moderated by Bobbie O’Steen.

The following are some of John’s comments from the evening:

On the two week rehearsal for The Big Chill:

BAILEY: The ability to have the rehearsal time we had on The Big Chill was actually kind of unique. I’ve had a few films where I’ve been able to be with the director and the actors for rehearsals, but nothing like we had on The Big Chill, which was two weeks. It was another time. Actors were more accessible; now agents have the actors booked so much back to back on projects, there’s so little time,

… Read the rest

“BAD FEVER” — A HAMMER TO NAIL REVIEW

By Michael Tully

(Bad Fever opens in New York City at the reRun Gastropub beginning Friday, January 3, 2011. It world premiered at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival and is being distributed by Factory 25. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.)

For those viewers with a deep-seated fondness for the character-based New Hollywood dramas that were churned out in the 1970s, Dustin Guy Defa’s Bad Fever will feel like a welcome return to that glorious past (I should know, as I am guilty of said deep-seated fondness). From the spare opening title card—complete with a copyright tag at the bottom!—to its placing of atmosphere and character firmly in the foreground, Bad Fever recalls films from the past more than it does those it brushed up alongside in film festival programs over the course of the past year. Yet, to be clear, Bad Fever isn’t some hip exercise in retro coolness. Defa’s film is a darkly funny, ultimately crushing portrait of a lost soul who is unable to forge the type of connection he so desperately wants.

Kentucker Audley plays Eddie, a Salt Lake City loner who lives with his mom (Annette Wright) and dreams of stand-up comedy stardom. The only problem is that Eddie is an Awkward Savant of at first hilarious, then increasingly heartbreaking, proportions. His DNA reeks of Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, and Raymond Babbitt. When he meets Irene (Elèonore Hendricks), it’s clear that his body has begun to awaken in a way that it has never awakened before. It turns out, Irene has been hired by a man to videotape herself—on VHS, mind you—interacting with young men such as Eddie, for his, or some other disturbed pervert’s, benefit. This footage, which was in fact shot with an actual VHS camera, heightens the film’s voyeuristic grittiness, to the point where even an innocent exchange of dialogue is laced with an undercurrent of perversion.

Irene continues to videotape Eddie, but it’s also quite clear that she is charmed by his bumbling innocence. Just days into their relationship, Eddie finally confirms a slot performing stand-up at a local … Read the rest

LARS KNUDSEN AND JAY VAN HOY SIGN DEVELOPMENT DEAL WITH K5

By Dan Schoenbrun

Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy, the producing duo behind Gotham Award Best Picture winner and Oscar nominee Beginners, have signed an output and development deal with sales, finance, and production company K5 Media Group.

The deal marks an alliance between two rising indie powerhouses. Knudsen and Van Hoy have been building their reputation for the past ten years. In 2004, they founded production company Parts & Labor and steadily accumulated a body of festival circuit sleeper hits including Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Cam Archer’s Wild Tigers I Have Known, and Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still. More recently, the duo produced Bradley Rust Gray’s Exploding Girl, Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather, Braden King’s Here, and of course, Mike Mill’s Beginners.

K5, whose offices are located in London, Munich, and Los Angeles have recently put out Vehicle 19 starring Paul Walker and Night Train to Lisbon starring Jeremy Irons. On the sales front, the company handled international sales on recent indies such as Buck, The Visitor, and Get Low.

This news marks another leap forward for Knudsen and Van Hoy, who previously had a three-year first look deal with Scott Rudin. The first titles the duo will offer up as part of their new K5 deal will be Mysterious Skin director Gregg Araki’s The Womb and Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter, to be produced with Rudin and starring Kirsten Dunst and Mark Ruffalo.

“Jay and Lars have clearly learned from one of the best in being mentored by Scott Rudin and they are at the forefront of the new wave of important indie producers,” says K5’s Oliver Simon.  “They’re ambitious too, like us, and we see this deal as a great opportunity to grow together.”… Read the rest

SXSW REVEALS FULL 2012 FEATURE FILM LINEUP

By Dan Schoenbrun

SXSW has announced their complete 2012 feature film slate. Over 90 films will screen across the festival’s ten categories, including the already announced opening night premiere of Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods and a special preview screening of Lena Dunham’s new HBO series Girls.

New additions include the sixteen films premiering in narrative and documentary competition. The eight films competing on the narrative side include Booster, directed by Matt Ruskin, Eden, directed by Megan Griffiths, Gayby, directed by Jonathan Lisecki, Gimme the Loot, directed by Adam Leon, Los Chidos, directed by Omar Rodriguez Lopez, Pilgrim Song, directed by Martha Stephens, Starlet, directed by Sean Baker, and The Taiwan Oyster, directed by Mark Jarrett.

On the documentary side, the eight competing films include Bay of All Saints, directed by Annie Eastman, Beware of Mr. Baker, directed by Jay Bulger, The Central Park Effect, directed by Jeffrey Kimball, Jeff, directed by Chris James Thompson, Seeking Asian Female, directed by Debbie Lum, The Sheik and I, directed by Caveh Zahedi, The Source, directed by Jodi Wille & Maria Demopoulos, and Welcome to the Machine, directed by Avi Zev Weider.

Other lineup highlights include the world premieres of Nelson George’s The Announcement, Adele Romanski’s Leave Me Like You Found Me, Tim Sutton’s Pavilion, Jay & Mark Duplass’ Do-Deca-Pentathalon, Matthew Lillard’s Fat Kid Rules the World, and a special in-progress screening of Drew Denicola’s documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me.

The full feature film lineup:

NARRATIVE FEATURE COMPETITION

This year’s 8 films were selected from 1,112 submissions. Each film is a World Premiere.

Booster
Director/Screenwriter: Matt Ruskin
When Simon’s brother is arrested for armed robbery, he is asked to commit a string of similar crimes in an attempt to get his brother acquitted.
Cast: Nico Stone, Adam DuPaul, Seymour Cassel, Kristin Dougherty, Brian McGrail (World Premiere)

Eden
Director: Megan Griffiths, Screenwriters: Richard B. Phillips, Megan … Read the rest