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Showing posts from September, 2005

Roger Corman

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Okay it's no secret that I'm a huge admirer of Roger Corman. I believe he has kind of sort of retired now, but at 80 he is still the man to beat when it comes to his track record of movie production. Corman directed early on his career, and his films include "The House of Usher" "Little Shop of Horrors", and "The Raven". These are just three films that he directed & produced. In the late 60's and early 70's Corman created his own studio that feed the drive-in circuits, and eventually the video market, which was to come later. Corman brags that he never lost a dime on any of his pictures and the reason he didn't is that he is a good businessman. Yes folks after all it is called show "business". He's done many interviews and has been honored at a number of festivals, and it is only now that I truly understand what Corman did. He has said in recent interviews that the number of films available to distributors has increase

Cronenberg Returns

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Okay so he may have never left, but tomorrow his film opens "History of Violence", and the word is that it's really good. Hype or truth you'll just have to see it to find out, but Cronenberg has been a big influence in my development as a filmmaker. His films are visceral, and yet they have a point to them. In my teenage years I saw his films such as "Rabid", "The Brood", and "Scanners" and ate it all up. To put it mildly Cronenberg was not for the timid. I remember when a magazine called "Cinefantastic" came out and he was on the cover. I ate up the article and read and re-read the article inside promoting his film Scanners. It was there that I saw a picture of a young Cronenberg filming something with an actor in a bath tub. "From the Drain" was one of Cronenberg's earliest films when he was a student, but I became fascinated with the idea of going to school for filmmaking. I eventually did, and Cronenberg was on

Shut up or put up!

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So I've been scrambling to get my film distributed and seen.  I've decided to distribute it myself through FilmBaby .  I recently had the film put onto DVD by Discmakers .  I have no other recourse and I'm so done with the film festival route.  Now this may sound like a sour grapes, but the festival route is loaded with favoritism, and is just plain corrupt.  I could go on about this but even if your a local filmmaker it's hard to getyour film into a film festival that just happens to be happening in your own backyard.  It's all about the glitter, and glamour of moviemaking.  (Yeah right!)  It's about what stars can I impress or conjoul to appear at my festival.  Such things as giving awards out does the trick, or maybe just plain bribery.  I mean when a star has a film coming out, and their willing to come to a festival to sneak peak it to the public why the fuck not.  Even if the film is a piece of crap I still have the star coming.   Kiss, kiss! Okay I'm

Where's the film in filmmaking?

I've just read an article in this months photography that explains about video disks, and the filming on small portable hard disks. A lot of productions do this already as a time saver since most production house edit on non-linear editing decks. The tape is used usually as a back-up in case there is a problem with the hard disk. With the coming of blu-tooth technology more and more video can now be transposed onto a hard disk, or several disks. In the article the author re-examines the various different disk technologies around the world. For instance I had no idea that China is a big market for video CD technology. It seems that 75 million players were sold in China alone, and so there is a significant market out there that plays it's movies on this technology. Most of the world has converted to the DVD standard, but there still remains a lot of different technologies out there that consumers posses. Several weeks ago I heard Kodak was laying off over 900 workers from