The Hollywood filmmaker Joe Dante once said that the hardest part about directing was having to get up before 10:00 every morning. Obviously, Dante has a gift for cooking his schedule. But the wake-up time is the least of a director's worries. Directing is one of...
The screenwriter is one of the most important figures in the creative process. Any screenwriter will tell you this tidbit. They are also treated as the most disposable member of the production team. Any experienced screenwriter will also admit this. Without the script, there would be...
Like the first falling leaves, the summer figures are still rolling in (as well as the seasonal metaphors). And thanks to a solid overview from Peter Knegt at IndieWIRE, we have the list of the most successful low-budget movies of the summer. The good news is...
The recession is over. All the wise guys who didn't see it coming in the first place are now insisting that the economy is in the clear. Gee, I bet we all feel relieved. At least those of us who still have jobs, savings accounts,...
You know it's the end of summer when the air turns a little chilly, the leaves begin to change their colors, and Quentin Tarantino slithers out from under a rock somewhere and begins insisting that he's still hip after all these years. Yep, woolen jacket...
It's a bit tangential to our usual focus, but I can't resist responding to Roger Ebert's blog piece from Aug. 6 In an article subtly entitled "The Gathering Dark Age," the aging master of the thumb has just determined that the quality of movies...
Back in 1993, the Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima directed the movie Sankofa. It was an incredibly unflinching look at the conditions of slavery at a pre-Civil War plantation, which also means that it was widely considered unreleasable. Since no distributor would touch it, Gerima took...
The biggest problem in show business is that if there is no show, then there is no business. That's why theatrical distribution (mostly, the lack of it) is one of the most critical problems currently facing indie movies. Of approximately 38,000 screens in the US (a...
A documentary filmmaker once described the process of making a small budget movie as "crawling through a field of broken glass." Admittedly, he was making political documentaries and shooting in various war zones of the Middle East. Over there, it's hard to find the glass...
Back in the early spring of 1977, an executive in charge of booking for a major Midwestern theater chain was feeling perplexed. He was trying to pick what might be the big summer hit for his company and had narrowed the choices down to one...