Tag: Lynda Obst

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Truly Free Film

Filmonomics: Let The Right Ones In

By Colin Brown

Think you’ve got problems getting your films financed and seen by audiences? Well, you are in shockingly good company. In recent weeks, everyone from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to Steven Soderbergh, John Travolta, Mike Figgis, David Lynch and Lynda Obst have all bemoaned the near-impossibility of getting their own pet projects onto the big screen. Taken together, their published comments are a scathing indictment of a film establishment that is only obsessed with pre-assembled projects that pander to the planet’s widest common denominators.

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Truly Free Film

The Cinema Giants Agree: The Film Biz As We Know It Is OVER. Now What?

Perhaps this blog is now obsolete (now wouldn’t that be excellent!).  Or maybe blogging just doesn’t work the way I hope it would (man, that would be a real shame!).  Perhaps change in the film business just about impossible. I am growing afraid it might well be — at least the kind that comes from positive and strategic influence as opposed to spontaneous or reactionary disruption (that kind of change that always is constant).  So what is the next step? And why the bleep do I have to ask?

What is going on in this world when everyone agrees that something is totally f*cked but no one with power appears to be doing anything substantial to improve it?  Are there secret plansof a new cultural infrastructure hatching and 

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Truly Free Film

Sherry B Ortner’s “Not Hollywood”: Post-Feminism?

We’ve got another excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood. Subtitled “Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream”, its an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. This time Sherry looks at issues of sexism and Feminism’s current standing in the film world.

By Sherry B. OrtnerIt is a major point of the post-feminism literature that younger women find second-wave feminism irrelevant to today’s world, a world in which virtually all occupations are open to women, in which women—like the studio heads noted earlier—have been very visibly successful in many endeavors, and in which many men have been sensitized to the need for egalitarian relations between the sexes. Moreover, in this view, younger women see second-wave feminists as having more or less abandoned an interest in attractive femininity in the pursuit of gender equality; younger women reject this de-feminization and refuse to identify with the older feminist generation and often with the very term feminism.

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