June 2003

Over the past six years, the New Jersey Salon has been hosting networking events and screening works from local filmmakers. In the first couple of years, it was difficult for the Salon to gel, as it bounced around local coffee shops before finding a permanent home three years ago in the offices of Salon leader Allen Chou's Passion River Productions, in Edison. And while turnout hasn't always been great, there have been enough new faces and continued interest to keep the Salon moving forward.

Tucson, Arizona, has a long history of filmmaking, dating back to the good old days when Old Tucson Studios was built, in 1940, for the epic western "Arizona". There is a clique of skilled filmmakers that still try to eke out a living making feature films in Tucson, and some of them, looking for word of paying gigs, occasionally show up at AIVF Salon meetings. And then there's the rest of us—film lovers who are tired of waiting around for Hollywood productions to come to town and just want to make movies. We make up the core group of the AIVF Salon.

The notion of the starving artist is a romantic one. Sepia-toned images float through our collective minds of creative geniuses scraping together enough pennies to drink a pastis in a Boulevard Saint Germain cafe, tummies growling while masterpieces bubble up in their brains. But the reality of life in the twenty-first century requires serious cash—and it’s the rare artist who agrees to go hungry. While determined creatives might be willing to make sacrifices for their art, paying the rent requires a lot more than talent, good intentions, and scraped-together pennies.

STEP 1: GENERATE SUPPORT

When and why was Samuel Goldwyn Films created?

Independent producers in Los Angeles are finding more ways of getting their work produced, critiqued, and distributed. Still, there is a need for a local group that can address the concerns shared by all independents. The active members of the LA Salon represent as diverse a cross section of the media community as one could imagine. We have installation-based video artists, digital animators, retired cinematographers, and working actors.

While cleaning out my attic in 1998 I had an idea for a short film. I found a box of notes I had passed back and forth with my high school friends. Aside from bringing back a flood of memories, I found many to be extremely intimate, present-day windows into the lives of adolescent girls, and began plans to stitch them into a film. The story would be told through the voice-over of two girls reading the letters they write to each other during class. The visuals would emphasize the everyday and the mundane of the high school experience.

Even though no new episodes will be produced past the current season, the production unit behind PBS’s "EGG": The Arts Show is going strong. Not only has the show recently picked up a 2002 Peabody Award (the third for the production unit, which also received Peabodies in 1997 for "City Arts" and in 2000 for "City Life"), but the cable network Trio recently bought the series, which it will air on a regular basis. "This is just the beginning for "EGG," says executive producer Jeff Folmsbee.