Directing
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Intravenous Video
By definition (my own), Intravenous Video causes a physical change in the viewer, whether real or perceived. By this definition I would include any film...
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Letters
Austin Applauds Dear Tim, My ad in MovieMaker has brought students into my workshop from the Seattle film community. I assume I wouldn’t have met...
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Marty and Me
I had a chance to sit down with Dan Algrant when he was in Seattle a couple of weeks ago to talk about his just-released...
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Are Women Psycho or is it Just Hollywood?
I have recently noticed a disturbing trend in Hollywood cinema: the psychotic woman. The films that come to mind are Basic Instinct, The Hand That...
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Citizen Cotten
In the title of his autobiography Joseph Cotten said Vanity Will Get You Somewhere. Talent, and possibly vanity, took Cotten from his birthplace in Petersburg,...
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Spielberg Finally Wins the Gold
The Academy Award nominations have been announced, and to absolutely no one’s surprise, they were dominated by Steven Spielberg, whose Holocaust opus, Schindler’s List, brought...
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Another Getaway
When he died in 1977, Jim Thompson left as his legacy a handful of crime novels. Never popular during his lifetime, he died-not forgotten-but virtually...
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Scraping Bottom
Evil priests. Lascivious nuns. Mischievous monkeys in a graveyard. What genius dwells in the minds of low-budget moviemakers. What quirky flourishes of inspiration. What splendid...
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Portrait of the Screenwriter as a Young Man
I met George Wing through his girlfriend, who was working an unglamorous day job with me at a discount brokerage. He was (and still is)...
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Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
The Phantom Empire by Geoffrey O’Brien W W. Norton & Co., New York, 1993 $20.00 "Instead of visions modern people see movies, which wear off...
Summer 2019
Spring 2019
Winter 2019
Guide 2019
Summer 2018
Year in MovieMaker
Inside the Issue: Acting
Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker: Richard Dreyfuss
American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stand By Me, Mr. Holland’s Opus… even while reading like a what’s what of cinema, those titles are just a handful...
1Inside the Issue: Directing
Cold Piece of Work: Richard Linklater Braves Greenland Hurricanes for Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette opens with the answer to its titular question. In an impressively executed overhead shot, the camera gazes down onto placid Antarctic waters as...
Inside the Issue: How To
How They Did It: The Farewell Writer-Director Lulu Wang Shares Secrets to Turning Your Life Story into a Memoir Movie
The week before production started on The Farewell—my sophomore feature about a young woman (Billi, played by Awkwafina) and her family’s attempts to keep their grandmother’s cancer diagnosis hidden...