Month: November 2012

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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

Don’t Hide. Declare You Are Here & Plan To F*ck Sh*t Up

And I mean that with all the love I have for the world.

Let’s be frank:

  • You want to get your movie made.  
  • You want to live a creative life.  
  • You want to give voice to the unspoken and the underheard.  
  • You know you can do it — if only you get a chance.

What are you waiting for?  Don’t ask for permission. Don’t wait to be discovered.  And don’t expect to get any help.  Who needs it?

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Issues and Actions Truly Free Film

“a great day for documentary filmmaking & for the future of books”

Variety recently reported:

“Documentary filmmakers have won a ruling from the U.S. Copyright Office that allows them to legally break the encryption codes of DVDs and online streaming content to obtain clips for their projects.

The material still must fall under the “fair use” exemption of copyright law, but the decision by Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante was hailed as a victory for non-fiction filmmakers seeking high-quality clips for their movies. The decision also allows educators and multimedia e-book authors, as well as makers of non-commercial videos, to circumvent copy-protection software to obtain such clips, although the use has to be limited in scope.” (Read the whole article)

I have long dreamed of a day when I have a wealth of titles akin to Adam Curtis’s THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES and Sophie Fiennes’ THE PERVERTS GUIDE TO CINEMA.  I love video essays and could appreciate a whole lot more of them.

Culture is built upon itself.  We need to be able to remix it.  It just can’t be taken — we need to use it to add to the dialogue.  We return value when we use it fairly.

Although this ruling doesn’t advance Fair Use, at least it gets rid of a substantial barrier.

 

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Truly Free Film

Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 11: Ranking System for Indie Films?

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Three Months of Work

Ranking System
Consistent feedback from VoD platforms: it’s tough for them to decide whether to accept — or reject — an independent film. And how useful it would be to have some sort of independent films ranking system, to give them some indication of how well a movie might perform on VoD. We agree. So we’re building it. We found the perfect person to create what is quite a complex real-time algorithm — an indie filmmaker with a math PhD from Harvard.

Here’s the concept: For every film uploaded to KinoNation we gather dozens of data points. Film in a festival? It gets points, based on the prestige and importance of the festival.

Continue reading “Diary of a Film Start-Up Part 11: Ranking System for Indie Films?”

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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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Truly Free Film

Music Biz Is Quicker Than Film Biz (again!)

Doesn’t it bug you how everyone knows the world has changed but so few folks do anything about it?  Or even worse, how whole industries choose to ignore the realities of today.  We call something the the way it is, because THEY say it is, not because it actually is.  Instead of moaning about it though, I find it heartening when some adjustments occur, bringing us closer to reality, even when it is not my community doing the readjustment.  Each step closer to the reality gives me hope.

My twelve year old boy likes to point out that curses are curses only because we call them curses.  Well, what we call success is only success because of how we define it.  I do think we have to get far beyond money as the basis of most achievement, but all that aside, even in the revenue reporting we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that The Music Biz’s paper of record, Billboard, has changed the way that they determine chart toppers, adding in digital download sales and streaming data.  Yes, this has it’s share of problems too, but I do think it more accurately reflects how people consume music (but what do I know).  And I do wish something similar would occur in the Film Biz.

Imagine if we had VOD data and streaming data.  Wouldn’t that show what people are really watching?

Continue reading “Music Biz Is Quicker Than Film Biz (again!)”

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These Are Those Things

“Stanley Kubrick Enters The Ring”

My former assistant on Adventureland, Jon Dieringer, co-directed this video essay. He also is an independent curator and the editor and publisher of Screen Slate, a fantastic daily online resource for listings and commentary of New York City repertory film and independent media.

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/11/01/from-photography-to-film-stanley-kubrick-enters-the-ring/#ixzz2AyxmIHeo