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Finding Inspiration in Iraq
Movies find a home, a character and inspiration in this war-torn country
In recent years, Iraq has been one of the film industry’s most sought-after backdrops. Since the United States’ 2003 invasion into the country, movies set in or around this war-torn battleground range from big-budget Hollywood features like Jarhead to revealing documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11 to small local productions like Damn Gum, a movie made by Baghdad native Ammar Saad, referencing the current role of Iraqi journalists.
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Clark Gregg Gets Choked Up
Actor attempts adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's Choke for his directorial debut
You’ve seen him in movies and on TV. He’s that smarmy, balding, authoritative guy in State and Main (2000), In Good Company (2004) and this year’s blockbuster Iron Man (2008); on the hit CBS sitcom “The New Adventures of Old Christine” he plays Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ ex-husband. Yet, what you might not know is that he’s also a founding member and former artistic director of the Atlantic Theater Company in New York and made his screenwriting debut with the successful 2000 Robert Zemeckis thriller What Lies Beneath, starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. On September 26th, Choke, his directorial debut and one of the most talked about movies at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, will be released into theaters. What’s this versatile guy’s name again, you may ask? Meet Clark Gregg.
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Docurama Film Festival Comes to Your Living Room
Didn't make it to Sundance this year? No worries—there is the Docurama Film Festival, an event of a different sort that you don't have to hop on a plane in order to attend. In fact, you don't even need to leave your living room. Docurama, a leading distributor of documentaries both in digital and DVD forms, commenced its fifth annual film festival today by releasing 12 award-winning documentaries on DVD.
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Deborah Kampmeier Stirs the Pot with Hounddog
Deborah Kampmeier Stirs the Pot with Hounddog
It's been nearly two years since Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival but as it gears up for a September 19 theatrical release, the same controversies that surrounded it then have reappeared. The story of a precocious young girl (Dakota Fanning) who has her innocence stolen when a local deliveryman rapes her has been drawing critics since before it was ever screened. Here, MM talks with writer-director-producer Kampmeier about the movie's intentions and implications.
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MM Aims Its Six Shooter at 15 Modern Westerns
Join MM as we take a look back at 10 of the best modern Westerns—and five runners up—from the past 20 years.
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Scripped and Write Brothers Join Forces, Plan World Domination
Beginning writers (read: unemployed writers) look for merely two characteristics in their screenwriting software: Low price and a tolerable level of functionality. And if need be, the latter will be waived for the former. Thanks to a new partnership between Scripped and Write Brothers Inc., this sacrifice may not be necessary anymore.
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Discover New Technology at HD EXPO New York
Want to learn more about the latest innovative film technology, and even try it out yourself? Then HD EXPO, making its New York City debut on September 25th, will be right up your alley. This exclusive trade show features keynote speakers and intensive workshops that will allow participants to hear how top leaders in the entertainment industry are applying the most up-to-date innovations in their current work. Participants will then be given the chance to test out this eye-popping technology on the HD EXPO exhibit floor. MM spoke with HD EXPO's CEO/founder Kristin Petrovich about the upcoming event.
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Mill Valley Film Festival Marks Three Decades of CInema
For the last 30 years Mill Valley, California has welcomed moviemakers and audiences with open arms to its annual 11-day film festival. The long-running and well-loved event sells more than 40,000 tickets and attracts more than 200 international moviemakers each year. Hosted by the California Film Institute, the Mill Valley Film Festival focuses on featuring films that have yet to secure U.S. distribution.
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Greg Chwerchak Sends His Greetings From the Shore
Director Greg Chwerchak’s first feature, Greetings From the Shore “grew out of a sunset in Malibu” but is without a doubt a love song to New Jersey. The coming-of-age tale, written by Chwerchak and Gabrielle Berberich, tells the story of bright-eyed Jenny (Kim Shaw) who spends her last summer before college at the Jersey Shore. Recovering from the recent death of her father, Jenny befriends a local mechanic (Paul Sorvino) and falls in love with a mysterious sailor (David Fumero).
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John Fusco Enters The Forbidden Kingdom
After 30 years in the making, screenwriter John Fusco's The Forbidden Kingdom made it to theaters, featuring the martial art talents of none other than Jackie Chan and Jet Li. On September 9th, Lionsgate released the movie on a two-disc special edition DVD and Blu-ray disc. Before the release Fusco spoke with MM about The Forbidden Kingdom, screenwriting tricks of the trade and how the industry has changed since the beginning of his career.
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Jon Avnet Aims for a Righteous Kill
From Risky Business to Righteous Kill, director-producer has a weak spot for great actors
His filmography defies easy categorization because Jon Avnet says he's only interested in one thing: Great acting. He's proving it this summer, as he teams up with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro for Righteous Kill.
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The Coen Brothers: Still Burning with Creativity
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Develop Your Movie at San Francisco’s FilmHouse Residencies
The San Francisco Film Society has announced the creation of the SFFS FilmHouse Residencies, a new program designed to support local independent moviemaking by providing 2,800 square feet of production office space available free of charge
“FilmHouse has all the makings of a new vibrant and dynamic hub for independent filmmaking in San Francisco," says Mayor Gavin Newsom.
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10 Landmark Premieres from the Toronto International Film Festival
From Chariots of Fire to Borat, audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival have been treated to some very memorable premieres since the festival's inception in 1976. With this year’s festival nearing its close on September 13, MM takes a look back at 10 of the landmark premieres TIFF has hosted in its 30 years.
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Towelhead: Alan Ball's Controversial New Film
Writer-director doesn't shy away from controversy, as he's proving once again with Towelhead
In 1999, a plastic ball floated in the wind—the most beautiful thing ever seen by the strange boy next door—and with that, Alan Ball won an Academy Award for his very first screenplay, American Beauty. Nine years later, he's making his feature directorial debut with Towelhead, which, even before its release, is confronting controversy for its title and few key scenes.
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Evan Rachel Wood Wrestles With Her Acting Choices
Though Mickey Rourke's turn as a has-been wrestler in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler is making headlines from Venice to Toronto, co-star Evan Rachel Wood's turn as his estranged daughter is also turning heads.
“I think the only time I really am truly true to myself is when I’m acting," Evan Rachel Wood explains. "That’s when I can completely forget inhibition and jump headfirst. You look at my work and you’d never know I’m shy...But with acting, I’m pretty fearless.”
If her choices as an actress are any indication—as with her role in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Woody Allen's upcoming movie Whatever Works and a rumored role as literary figure Anne Brontë—there’s no doubt that Wood, the person, is just as fearless.
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Chris Eska's August Evening: The Little Indie That Could
A multi-generational tale about an undocumented farm worker and his widowed daughter-in-law could be the unexpected box office hit of the Fall. Or, at least, that's what writer-director Chris Eska is hoping for when his first feature film, August Evening begins rolling out in theaters September 5. Winner of the 2008 Spirit Awards’ John Cassavetes Award and the Best Film Awards at the Los Angeles and Woodstock Film Festivals, August Evening has already acquired buzz on the festival circuit. Now, it awaits a larger national audience.
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Young People Fucking: Or, Ways Tease Your Audience
If you're in the process of making a movie right now, you might want to pause and learn a quick marketing lesson from Martin Gero, director and co-writer of the new comedy Young People Fucking. Yep, that's the lesson right there: Grab people's attention with your title. The Canadian film, which hit select U.S. theaters Friday, August 29, 2008, is as honest and unflinching as the title, but the chances of many people seeing it, let alone $400,000 worth in Canada, would have been slim were it not for the intriguing title. Gero himself admits as much. "At the end of the day, we're a Canadian film, we really have no bankable stars, so to speak, and certainly no one's like, 'Oh awesome! Another Martin Gero movie!'"
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What Happens in Toronto Affects the World
With the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival kicking off September 4 and recent productions that include Blindness, The Rocker, Lars and the Real Girl and A History of Violence Toronto is fast becoming the apex of moviemaking: A great place to film and get your movie screened.
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Aaron Wiederspahn Explores The Sensation of Sight
For his first feature, writer-director Aaron Wiederspahn has made a winding drama of epic proportions. The challenge, Wiederspahn says, was clear from the beginning: He must take the difficult route if he were to really bring this screenplay to life. In the end that means a movie that revolves around six main characters looking for resolutions to their shared problems. From the estranged father and son to the son’s problems with the law and his own young family, from a mourning brother to a lonely mother, the relationships Wiederspahn created weave a complicated tale of loss and rebirth.
Like the misplaced souls of its story, The Sensation of Sight has gone through a period of uncertainty when after many festival screenings it ended up with a rather unconventional distribution deal. It is this and more that Wiederspahn explains to MovieMaker on the occasion of the movie’s DVD release.
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10 Disaster Movies to Die For
A cruise ship filled with joyous passengers gets caught in a tsunami and rapidly starts sinking. A catastrophic asteroid, with the power to wipe out the entire human race, hurtles towards Earth. An underground volcano, dormant for thousands of years, unexpectedly sputters back to life in New York City, while a deadly virus is simultaneously unleashed on the population in the midst of a record-shattering earthquake... These are just a few of the common scenarios found in a disaster movie, one of the most audacious and crowd-pleasing subgenres of Hollywood moviemaking.
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David Kaplan Celebrates Year of the Fish
David Kaplan’s first feature film, Year of the Fish, may be a retelling of Cinderella. But with the title character toiling away in a Chinatown massage parlor while her “stepsisters” engage in sex work, it’s a far cry from the Disney classic. The animated movie (live-action sequences were shot and then digitally painted over, giving it a look similar to Richard Linklater's Waking Life) is an updated retelling of the oldest known Cinderella story, a Chinese version recorded circa 850 A.D.
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Warner Bros. Remains Firm on Towelhead
Recently the Council on American-Islam Relations (CAIR) asked Warner Bros. and Warner Independent Pictures to change the title of Alan Ball's upcoming film, Towelhead. Warner Bros. has refused to change the name and, several days ago, writer-director Alan Ball expressed in a statement why the title would remain. Now, Alicia Erian, author of the novel on which the film is based, and Warner Independent Pictures have released their own statements explaining the reasoning behind their decision.
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Neal McDonough’s Golden Rules
Neal McDonough has come a long way since his debut film role as Dockworker #2 in Sam Raimi's 1990 comic book adaptation Darkman. After brief appearances on a bevy of television shows, including "Murphy Brown," "NYPD Blue" and "Murder One," McDonough landed a starring role in the Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries "Band of Brothers." Spielberg liked the actor's work on the project so much that he asked McDonough to act in his then-upcoming futuristic flick, Minority Report. Since then McDonough has enjoyed more starring TV roles, in the Peabody Award-winning "Boomtown" and the Wizard of Oz-reworking "Tin Man," as well as parts in Flags of Our Fathers, The Guardian, 88 Minutes and Jeffrey Nachmanoff's Traitor, which is in theaters now.
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Jeffrey Nachmanoff Discovers a Traitor
After working as a script doctor for several years, Jeffrey Nachmanoff got his first major credit as the screenwriter of the box office hit The Day After Tomorrow, which he co-wrote with director Roland Emmerich. Now he's getting a chance to show he can do it all himself with the release of Traitor, which hits theaters on August 27th. The film, which stemmed from an idea from Steve Martin (yes, Three Amigos Steve Martin), was written and directed by Nachmanoff and stars Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce. Shortly before the film's release, Nachmanoff talked with MM about the luxury of starting a screenplay with the end already in place and the challenges (and perks) of directing actors who only speak Arabic.
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Rainn Wilson’s Big Break
It’s hit or miss when cast members from NBC’s “The Office” land themselves a lead role in a big-screen comedy. Steve Carell’s turn as The 40-Year-Old Virgin propelled his already growing popularity while John Krasinski, the show’s romantic everyman, just couldn’t appeal to enough swooning fans to make License to Wed a box office success. But like Carell, Rainn Wilson’s television alter-ago, beet farmer Dwight Schrute, is not exactly the most respected employee at Dunder Mifflin. Maybe that bodes well for the Seattle native, who will next be seen as the star of Peter Cattaneo’s The Rocker.
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The House Bunny Visits the Playboy Mansion
Scantily clad girls running around in pink miniskirts, ultra high heels and little white bunny ears: Does this image sound familiar? Probably not from firsthand experience—only a select few have breached those exclusive gates—but it's certainly a known piece of pop culture trivia. The notorious Playboy Mansion, home to the ultimate playboy, Hugh Hefner, and his buxom blonde girlfriends, is known around the world with help from its various film and TV appearances. This week's release, The House Bunny, takes the idea of the Playboy empire to another level.
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Paul W.S. Anderson’s Rules Can Be Deadly
British action director Paul W.S. Anderson shares his Golden Rules for Making Movies
British action master Paul W.S. Anderson reveals his Golden Rules for Moviemaking just as his latest film, Death Race, hits theaters.
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Kodak Announces Eastman Scholarships and Faculty Scholars
The winners of the 2008 Eastman Scholarship and the Kodak Faculty Scholars Program were announced at the 62nd annual University Film & Video Association Conference in Colorado on August 13th.
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Rocco DeVilliers Takes Off With The Flyboys
The Flyboys is not your typical coming of age story. This adventure movie follows the story of two young boys who accidentally end up aboard an airplane that just so happens to be owned by the mob. Writer, director and producer Rocco DeVilliers took charge of the film, which stars young actor Jesse James and the veteran Stephen Baldwin. DeVillliers has taken The Flyboys around the festival circuit this summer and has already generated positive feedback, garnering more than 45 awards so far.
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Elizabeth Chandler Sticks with the Sisterhood
From A Little Princess to What a Girl Wants to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Elizabeth Chandler has made a career out of writing movies that feature female protagonists. Her latest project, this summer’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, is the story of “four young women who share an unbreakable bond” and was adapted from Ann Brashares’ best-selling book series. Previously, it was Chandler who brought Sarah Crewe of the Frances Hodgson Burnett classic A Little Princess to the screen for the 1995 film of the same name. And it was her again who adapted Laura Zigman’s novel Animal Husbandry into 2001’s Someone Like You, starring Ashley Judd as the lovelorn Jane Goodale, who takes romantic matters into her own hands. Throughout her career Chandler has managed to adeptly adapt plucky heroines from the page to the screen. This year proves no different.
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Shakespeare on Film: Titus
In MM's 12th week of Shakespeare on Film, Julie Taymor's imagination takes viewers through Shakespeare's darkest hour
Evoking A Clockwork Orange and The Silence of the Lambs, Julie Taymor's Titus reveals that the horrors of Shakespeare's play are matched only by the play's compassion. In her feature film debut, Taymor, who based the movie on her off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's darkest play, combines ancient horrors with more recent history or cinematic fiction. The writer-director fashioned a masterpiece not from an inherently cinematic, fast-paced drama such as Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, but a play that in the theater may seem purely horrific or excessively comic, devoid of emotional or intellectual meaning.
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The Ballerina Ballroom: The Place of Moviemakers’ Dreams
From the minds of Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton and director-producer Mark Cousins has sprung a rather unconventional film festival that combines everything from fairy cakes to Singin’ in the Rain to Joel Coen. Opening on Friday, August 15th and running until August 23rd, the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams was conceived on what Swinton calls a “quixotic seizure” when she first stumbled upon, and subsequently fell in love, with an endearing ballroom—called “The Ballerina”—nestled in Nairn, Scotland. Together, Swinton and Cousins have developed an exciting new event that rids itself of red carpets and press conferences, A-list pretension and superficiality, in order to simply appreciate, celebrate and fall in love with the magic of moviemaking.
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Ben Stiller's Days of Thunder
Reluctant funnyman still doing his own thing with Tropic Thunder
Best-known as one of Hollywood's most bankable funnymen, Ben Stiller has always been more interested in what's going on behind the camera. His upcoming slate of films, including Tropic Thunder, which he produced, directed and stars in, is proof positive.
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Tropic Thunder Creates Storm of Controversy
When Ben Stiller was penning his latest film, Tropic Thunder, he probably never imagined the kind of controversy a subplot would create: A call to boycott the film from more than 20 disability advocacy organizations, just days before Tropic Thunder’s August 13th premiere.
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Video Views Pick: Wanted
The editors of VIDEO VIEWS magazine pick Wanted, based on the Mark Millar graphic novel, as the best new DVD this week. Featuring eight bonus featurettes and a cast that includes James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, home video watchers can't go wrong.
Posted 12.3.08 | Video Views Pick | 1 comment
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