Tag: Cinema By The Bay

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Truly Free Film

Film Culture Must Shift Away From A Mass-Market Focus

The Film Biz, and thus the culture it birthed, originally had no option but to be mass market.  But we now have a tremendous opportunity of an alternative method and it is right before us, ripe for creating. Shall we do it?  Or should we just sit on our ass and let this moment pass?  Although most of culture is waking to this reality, those of us who opted to first and foremost create feature films are still leaning towards the latter.

Look at where we were however, and you might just be able to see where we need to go. Back in the olden days of yore, EVERYONE had to go to the movies for the infrastructure to be built.  And they did. And it was.  And it was pretty fantastic and widely loved. But….

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Truly Free Film

How I Learned to Stop Whining and Love the Game

by Katherine Bruens

I work professionally as a Producer and Production Manager in the advertising industry and independent film world here in San Francisco. I am also one half of a partnership that has produced three micro budget features here. Rather than become frustrated that the market in San Francisco has demanded that I spread my attention between these three worlds, I’ve embraced this hybrid.  This market gives me a way not only to maintain my freedom to usher forward new personally driven works, but it also allows me to produce media through a broad spectrum of strategies, sometimes with vastly different amounts of money. What’s more, in the end these projects are all trying to achieve a similar result.

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Truly Free Film

FEAR & MOVIES: Morocco, Hollywood and Me

By John Slattery 

Having been overseas for three and a half years, I returned to the United States.

When I came back, I came straight to San Francisco.

In the first few weeks people would ask, “So, where’d you move here from?” When I told them I’d just come from a year of teaching in Paris, 99% of their responses had a similar theme, which all fit into one category: I LOVE PARIS!

Typical responses were:

“Paris! Wow, lucky you!”; or

“You know my wife and I had our honeymoon in Paris”; or just,

“Man, I love Paris!”

 

Often in the same conversations, their follow up question had to do with where I was before Paris. When I told them that I’d been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco for two and a half years – they had a very different kind of response.

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Truly Free Film

Sometimes You Have To Change The Ending — Metaphors & All

By Alejandro Adams

“If we do not reunite Sykes and Thornton, which shows that people do side together, that they do stick with each other…then perhaps we have destroyed everything we have been talking about in this picture.” — Producer Phil Feldman in a letter to Sam Peckinpah regarding the the final scene of THE WILD BUNCH *

It’s not every day that a notorious bruiser of a director gets along with his producer. But it’s equally rare that a producer respects a filmmaker and his vision to the degree illustrated by the note above–Feldman had even protested Peckinpah excising some of the film’s more violent bits. Directors are usually the ones who get so far up the ass of their own work they can’t see clearly. In a somewhat alarming inversion, Feldman was a producer exhibiting more concern for the integrity of the film than for the paying audience. **

I’ve started with an anecdote about a producer not only because this quasi-promotional outing is brought to you by Ted Hope’s kind invitation but also because filmmaking is about relationships, sometimes just one relationship, and it can feel like the scene that reunites Sykes and Thornton. Or not.

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