Author: Ted Hope

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Truly Free Film

Make It Tasty: Part 2 of 3

Today’s guest post continues yesterday’s from producer Cotty Chubb.

A memorable dream

Two years ago in the middle of the night I woke up heart hammering. I’d been having an argument in a dream. Actually, I’d been screaming. Screaming at a director, I don’t know who. We were standing alone in the front row of an empty movie theater. “You think,” I ranted, gesturing up at the blank white screen, “you think that what’s up there is the movie, and you think that it’s your movie, you made it, it’s yours. But you’re fucking wrong [I told you I was screaming, right?]. That’s not the movie. The movie… the movie… the movie is what happens in the air between up there and down here. That’s the movie, you moron.” And then I woke up.

Maybe I’d eaten too much supper, like the boy in Winsor McKay’s Dreams of A Rarebit Fiend. Or maybe I was sick of narcissist auteurs. 2008 was a bad year for that.

Kubrick’s advice

In the mid-eighties Stanley Kubrick went to Michael Herr, one of the great writers of the Viet Nam War (Dispatches, check it out) who also wrote the Martin Sheen monologue in Apocalypse Now. Kubrick said “I want to do a Viet Nam movie and I want you to write it.” And Herr said, “I don’t know how to write a screenplay and I’m not about to learn how to write a screenplay writing for the best film-maker in the world.”

But Kubrick said, “It’s not that hard.

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Bowl Of Noses

Ultimate Fan Film: StarWarsUncut

Star Wars Uncut “The Escape” from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Hundreds of 15 second fan-supplied & created scenes we cut back to back to create this bit of beauty.

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These Are Those Things

Good Stories Well Told: “The Square”

I find it very rare that I end up telling stories of movies, particularly short films. That is what happened when I first saw Nash Edgerton’s SPIDER, perhaps my favorite short of recent history. I found myself doing it again when he started making videos for Bob Dylan. This is his most recent video and it, like Dylan’s Christmas tunes, has a good sense of goofy fun — although I miss Nash’s signature mayhem.

I am relieved that Mr. Edgerton’s finally made a feature, because there’s too much story inside it for me to ever tell well. You just have to see it. With no stars, no fancy VFX, just talent in craft, he spins an excellent yarn. Discipline, the avoidance of the unnecessary, the commitment to the declared agenda, has long been one of my favorite attributes in cinema, and this man’s got it. The NY Times agrees (“Mr. Edgerton, with crack timing in the editing room and a sure hand on the Steadicam, is a coldblooded professional. His craft is frightening.”) so hopefully this film will prove that people do care for good movies, even without the hype and star trappings.

As some of you might know from my tweets when I first saw it, I dug this movie. Someone once complimented me for making many films that captured the awkwardness in sex on film as it is real life. Film history is filled with the fluff in both sex and violence. Nash stages fights as the mess they are and it does wonders for bringing us in to the movie and keeping us there. It’s just one in a number of approaches that makes this film work. He makes it look easy — and is not. Still, it makes me wonder why we can’t get noir right. This is good pulpy fun played for real without winks and nods.

Check out the trailer below, and please see it soon, as we have to vote for the work we want with our dollars.

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Truly Free Film

Make It Tasty: Part 1 of 3

Today’s guest post is from producer Cotty Chubb.

Film-makers talk a lot about film-makers and distributors. There’s a lot of the former and not half enough of the latter. But what about the third leg of the stool, the independent film audience? Who are they? What do they want? Where the hell did they go? And how do we get them to come back?

When I was coming up, in the mid-eighties, working for Ed Pressman, independent films were hard to make, but at least the infrastructure was there.

Fueled by the roll-out of the video-cassette, a healthy eco-system developed of audience, distributor and film-maker, with a business model that relied on well-capitalized foreign sales companies, healthy home entertainment divisions, specialty theatrical distributors and a banking system that translated contracts into cash for production. Over twenty-five years, that’s all eroded.

Easy access to capital led to a glut of product. The immutable truth of Gresham’s Law prevailed. Bad movies drove out good. Distributors and financiers vanished. The audience, overwhelmed by mediocre pictures, lost its taste for the new.

Does any of this sound familiar?

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Truly Free Film

The TAKE-BACK Manifesto

I wish I had published this earlier.  It comes from Michael Tully, our editor over at HammerToNail. It was originally published on his blog, Boredom At It’s Boredest, on Indiewire. It takes a much different tact than most of what we’ve been discussing here.  I totally get it; discussion and strategy about reaching audiences, is exhausting.  For some, it will never create better films, or even bring them to audiences.  Yet, courtesy of HTN, I have come in contact with a plethora of good films that are not being seen by audiences.  I love the spirit of this manifesto, but….

The Take-Back Maifesto

By signing the following petition, we film lovers of all types—critics, reviewers, screenwriters, directors, producers, production assistants, grandparents, art history snobs, coach potatoes, Multiplex squatters, etc.—believe the following to be true:

— We realize that bringing any film into fruition, however great or small the budget, is an outrageously difficult task. We realize this, and yet we don’t care. The final product is all that matters.

— A production’s back-story only becomes relevant after—not before—one has watched the film on a screen. Once we see your film and like (or dislike) it, that is when we will decide if we want to learn more about how it came to be. Not everyone can be Werner Herzog.

— We know that making thought provoking, ambitious, challenging, adventurous films is complicated by the fact that cinema is such an expensive art form. We know this, and yet we say so what. Everyone is a martyr for their art.

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Truly Free Film

Remembering The Past, Segueing Into The Future

Today’s guest post is from filmmaker Bette Gordon (whose Luminous Motion I produced, and will screen at the IFC Center in NYC on Monday night.  I plan on being there, and hope to see you there).  Everything old is new again!

In the current culture of independent filmmaking, most of us are plugged in to the idea of DIY distribution. This is not a totally new idea.

In 1983, I had just made my first feature film, VARIETY. Its about a woman who sells tickets at a pornographic movie theatre and becomes obsessed with following one of the clients from the theatre into the world of men, money and lower Manhattan. We shot on a very very low budget, with friends and friends of friends. The theatre I used as a location, The Variety Theatre, was a porn theatre on 13th Street and Third Avenue, and after a week of shooting there from 11pm at night until 9am the next morning, we had developed a good relationship with the owner. The projectionist even played the part of “the projectionist” in the movie.

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Truly Free Film

Using Social Media Tools To Build A Truly Free Film Community

If only 30% of people’s online time is spent viewing content, then there is real hope for indie film.  The other 70% of users’ time is spent in search and social.  We know that people not only want to discover stuff (like great stories and films) but even more so, they want to talk about it.

One way to define Film is as the transformation of leisure time into intellectual capital and then into social capital.

The question all filmmakers need to ask themselves is what can we do to get the others to talk about film more.  How can we improve the conversation people have about film?  We have the tools.

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