California

The Doc Doctor's Anatomy of a Film: "Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea"

mike — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:25:28 -0500

About this column: Many filmmakers ponder in anguish, How do other people—celebrated people—do it? Am I taking too long to make this documentary? Does everybody spend as much money as I am spending, or am I spending too little? And when filmmakers share their lessons learned in interviews in the glossy trade magazines, their tales seem to follow the arc of otherworldy heroes rather than real documentary makers, i.e. human beings like you and me. So each month, the Doc Doctor will go out into the world (this real world) of filmmakers who are successful and find out how they made it. The "Anatomy of a Film Column" is a chance to learn from filmmakers' hits and misses in real life examples. —Fernanda Rossi, story consultant a.k.a. the Documentary Doctor

Lost Angels

marla — Sat, 01 May 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I could just be romanticizing it now that I’ve moved, but in New York all the filmmakers I knew seemed to be creating by any means necessary—from Super-8 shorts to animation on their laptops while fundraising for a summer-shoot, to staging readings for a work-in-progress in between compiling documentary footage. When I moved to Los Angeles last year, I found myself at a Honda dealership working out the details of my lease agreement with Amir, a fifty-year old Iranian who preferred talking about his script for a $70 million movie to discussing the details of my Honda Civic.

San Francisco Screens

marla — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0600

In her review of Phil Kaufman’s 1978 remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “The story is set in San Francisco, which is the ideally right setting, because of the city’s traditional hospitality to artists and eccentrics.” This hospitality extends to movie venues. With its wealth of alternative screening spaces, San Francisco is one of the most welcoming cities in the country for non-Hollywood film.

Cave Paintings, Churches, and Rooftops

michele — Sun, 01 Sep 2002 00:00:00 -0500

While the Lumiere brothers originally screened their films in a Paris café, the term microcinema was not coined until 1991 with the naming of Rebecca Barten and David Sherman’s Total Mobile Home Microcinema. Since then microcinema has come to define a broad range of small screening spaces specializing in moving image media that hovers out of range of national distributors, air conditioned art houses, and sleek museums. The hermit crabs of screening series, microcinemas claim abandoned spaces, creating surprising, inspiring, and unlikely homes for media.

Distributor FAQ: Seventh Art Releasing

khards — Sat, 01 May 1999 00:00:00 -0500

What is Seventh Art?
A filmmaker-friendly specialized theatrical distributor with a video label and a full-time world sales unit. We mostly do docs.

Who is Seventh Art?

The Trailer for "Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea"

mike — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:26:20 -0500