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How to Create a Franchise, Indie-Style

Transmedia is a buzzword that has been used quite a lot in the last couple of years to define all sorts of things, from the independent movie that has a companion Website and a Facebook fan page to the...

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Steve Martin to Host 2010 Oscars With His “Enemy”

Academy Award hosts can take a lot of heat for the vitality of the live broadcast. For every respected Hugh Jackman, you get a maligned David Letterman (“Oprah, Uma… Uma, Oprah”). So, for the first...

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Adam Yauch’s Sure Shot

We’ve all been indoctrinated—by inside sources, “Entourage” and Harvey Weinstein—into thinking we know how studio heads are supposed to act. Firing people for mis-hearing a lunch order, assaulting...

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Marlett & Me: Cuff Links, Handcuffs, Swords & Sausages

As sure as passions blossom each spring, so do the passionate hopes of selling your film or getting an actor attachment. Such passionate hopes, longings, despairs and frustrations are felt in the...

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Jon Avnet Aims for a Righteous Kill

I had to get rid of my Wayfarer sunglasses because of Jon Avnet. The year was 1983 when an Avnet movie called Risky Business came out and ruined everything. The success of that movie was so complete...

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Random Thoughts From the Set Jeff Garlin I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

I have a good job. As an actor, executive producer and sometime director on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” I’m very happy. Really. So then why would I make an independent, equity-financed film? It’s not...

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Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist Producers Have a Theory on Who Sent...

The two-part opener of Season 2 of Netflix’s Untold sports scandal documentary series, The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist, unspools the story of Manti Te’o, an extremely talented Notre Dame football...

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How ‘Huella’ Director Gabriela Ortega Found a Fairy Godmother in Film...

“It was really special,” filmmaker Gabriela Ortega says of the first time she met film producer and UnbeliEVAble Entertainment executive Sandra Condito. It was in September 2020 at a virtual event...

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The Artist, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Lead 2012 BAFTA Award Nominations

Though Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has been notably absent from much of the awards season hoopla—it’s done well in various critics groups’ awards but has received no SAG, PGA, DGA, WGA...

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Exploring the Mystery of Creativity with Old School New School

My documentary Old School New School explores the nature of creativity, all within the context of storytelling through various crafts, including acting, cinematography, music, theater, dance and...

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PGA Win Helps The Artist Break (Further) from the Pack

The Artist continued its intermittent awards season domination on Saturday, winning the Producers Guild of America (PGA) Award for Best Feature Film and shoring up its (already considerably good)...

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Say Hello to Your 2012 Oscar Nominees

This morning saw the announcement of the 2012 Academy Award nominations, and while many of the films to have their names called out by nominee presenters Jennifer Lawrence and Academy of Motion Picture...

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Annie ♥s Rango

It’s not time for the Oscars yet, but the Annies have already rolled into town. Last Saturday saw the Annie Awards, which honors the year’s highest achievements in (you guessed it) animation, take...

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The Artist Dominates at the 2012 BAFTA Awards

As expected, The Artist was the big winner at last night’s Orange British Academy Film Awards—or, as they’re better known, the BAFTAs—winning seven of the 12 categories in which it was nominated,...

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Hooray for The Artist!

Awards season is over for another year. Last night’s Oscars saw the big award go to—surprise, surprise—The Artist, which picked up a total of five wins (Best Film, Actor, Costume Design, Original Score...

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Bringing Suspicion to the Big Screen

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2007, I didn’t know I wanted to be a director. I thought I just wanted to produce. Like everyone else who moves to L.A. to pursue their dream, I figured that said dream...

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Become a Professional Producer with the ProShow Competition

It doesn’t matter whether your film dream job is directing, writing or producing—if your goal is to break into the industry, it’s nice to have some help along the way. Luckily, the Producers Guild of...

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From Penguins to Pirates: The Best of Aardman

After taking a detour into the world of CGI for last year’s Arthur Christmas, Aardman Animations—the studio behind the Wallace and Gromit films, Chicken Run, “Shaun the Sheep” and more—has returned to...

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What The Dictator Learned from Borat

From Cannes to Hollywood, Sacha Baron Cohen is back in the news this week as his latest mash-up of humor and political commentary makes it way into theaters, courtesy of The Dictator. If the moviemaker...

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James Franco vs. the Fact Checkers Unit

Director Dan Beers’ moviemaking success story began with his short film FCU: Fact Checkers Unit, which premiered at Sundance in 2008. The film, about two magazine fact checkers tasked with confirming...

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Jennifer Fox Turns to Crowdfunding for My Reincarnation

When moviemaker Jennifer Fox (“Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman”) completed her latest project—the documentary My Reincarnation, about a Tibetan Buddhism Master and his Western-born son—a...

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Lights, Camera, Social Action: The Disposable Film Festival

With our world’s amazing technology making spectacular cameras small, cheap and ubiquitous, new types of moviemaking (and, by extension, moviemakers) are proliferating. From the highest-powered film...

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Resurrecting Sixto Rodriguez: Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching For Sugarman

In the 1970s, the music of a mysterious singer-songwriter named Rodriguez became the anthem for a generation of Afrikaners increasingly isolated from the outside world by the international response to...

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AFI is a wrap, but Maja Milos’ CLIP is still haunting me

My girlfriend and I managed to attend eight films at AFI this year over the course of the seven-day festival: Amour; Rust and Bone; Clip; Caesar Must Die; Starlet; Beyond the Hills; Leviathan; and...

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We Make Movies: How I Started an Indie Film Collective

My name is Sam Mestman, and I run a film collective in Los Angeles and Toronto called We Make Movies. Moviemaker asked us to write a weekly DIY filmmaking blog about tips and issues facing...

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We Make Movies (Better): Please Don’t Have the Following Conversation About...

When I talk to filmmakers, way  too often I have a version of the following conversation: Sam Mestman (MM): What’s your movie about? Filmmaker (FM): Well, it’s a love story. Sort of a When Harry Met...

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Fictionalizing Truth: Lee Daniel’s The Butler & More

We’ve all seen those stately biopics (usually with Oscar aspirations), in which renowned actors portray real-life historical figures (Patton, Queen Elizabeth, Gandhi, etc). They are often interesting...

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How to Create a Franchise, Indie-Style

Transmedia is a buzzword that has been used quite a lot in the last couple of years to define all sorts of things, from the independent movie that has a companion Website and a Facebook fan page to the...

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We Make Movies (Better): Making Your Movie with Zero Money

Prologue This is the article you’ve been waiting for. You have a movie that you’re aching to make but you can’t, because you have no money. This is nonsense. I’m here to tell you that actually, you...

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Accepting Applications: Dogfish, the world’s first film production accelerator

Back in 2005, Paul Graham and Trevor Blackwell, two tech pioneers who’d made fortunes in Silicon Valley, founded a company called Y Combinator. The business model was based on publicly funded business...

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