The SF Film Society Event for the French Film Festival of San Francisco from LaFrenchTV on Vimeo.
My enthusiasm cup runeth over.
Tag: San Francisco Film Society
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.
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.
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.
Friends of mine are throwing a little party this evening to welcome me to San Francisco and introduce me around to some folks who can help initiate the vast amount of changes that need to occur to help ambitious & diverse cinema remain a sustainable and impactful art form and enterprise.
How great is that? Finding collaborators and supporters to help accomplish all I want at the San Francisco Film Society is the first step towards building solutions.
We hosted Anna Boden as an Artist In Residence at The San Francisco Film Society recently. I found it interesting to hear her say she and Ryan Fleck had been inspired by Peter Sollet’s RAISING VICTOR VARGAS and the prize-winning short that preceded it 5 FEET HIGH & RISING. They had written the HALF NELSON script and in trying to figure out how to do a short that could help get the feature made they decided to shift the focus away from the focus on the teacher (later played by Ryan Gosling in the feature) and put in on Shareeka Epps the student (and who stars in each the short and feature). This is the short GOWANUS BROOKLYN that helped get the feature HALF NELSON shot.
