KGB Productions

Over the week-end I got to see the film "The Notorious Bettie Page" directed by Mary Harron . After the show Ms Harron & her cinematographer Mott Hupfel were introduced to the audience and we were allowed to field questions to both. If the name Mary Harron is unfamiliar to you she also directed the films " I Shot Andy Warhol " & " American Psycho ". The Notorious Bettie Page is about the pin-up model from the fifties who eventually graced the pages of Playboy in 1955. Grechen Moll stars as the title character Bettie Page, and from the first frame of the film you actually believe that Ms Moll is Bettie Page. Ms Moll does a fine performance of the 50's icon, and is convincing in every aspect. Two other performance should also be singled out here to and they are Lili Taylor's & Chris Bauer's performance of Paula & Irving Klaw. Both performers do an excellent job at fleshing out the parts of the exploitive team that introduced Betti...

I just read an interview by Jeremiah Kipp over at the blog The House Next Store , and I kind of get what Godfrey Cheshire is saying about today's world of film & filmmaking. Cheshire wrote a compelling two-part essay called the "The Death of Film: The Decay of Cinema" way back in 1999. The article was written in response to digital video's emergence. It's a good essay, and one you should check out, but the recent interview with Cheshire has me excited. You see having been taught the old way of doing things and coming from a film background I was a bit skeptical about digital video, and it's look. I thought it was an inferior technology, and one that would breed bad films that would look cheap and just plain look bad up on the screen. After all isn't it video? But we've come a long way baby, and the DV technology is fueling the DVD revolution, and what we are seeing is an increase in production of all sorts of films. From documentaries to features ...

Long ago I joined AIVF while I was still in school. Their magazine "The Independent" covered things that were not usually covered in other type of magazines, but that was then, and this is now. Since then there have been several magazines that have come out that do a better job at reporting about film and filmmaking. I tend to agree with people that an organization is needed to advocate for independent media makers especially in such times when government funding is but a memory. It seems more and more funding goes to corporations rather then individual media makers or local media organizations. When I first joined AIVF I used their resources and found contacts, and resources I could use, but as time went by AIVF's resources seemed to dry up. I seemed to get the feeling that I was in a vacuum, and nolonger connected to other media makers. I think this is the problem now. I've always tried to reach out to other filmmakers and media makers, yet I've done this on my ...

I recently got sucked into seeing the movie " Flashdance ", and was taken aback by how quick that movie moves. Over at Cinecultist Karen talks about how quick the movie goes by. I mean in the first 15 minutes you know everything about this movie, and it's characters. But not only does the movie go by fast, but what drew me in originally was it's cinematography by Donald Peterman . I was still in film school when it came out, and I was astounded by it's crisp cinematography. Kodak came out with several new high speed stocks, and along with some fast lenses it seemed one could shoot mid-night in a coal mine with no problem. So began a long experimental period in my life with the camera. The scene where Jennifer Beals is working out was done with predominately sunlight through a sky light. The images are burned into my brain, and not just because Ms Beals looked SO good (okay, okay, Ms Beals had a lot to do with it), but because the cinematography was ground-break...

So haven't I written about Corman already? Yes I have, but today is Mr. Corman's 80th birthday, and on one of my favorite blogs the author has challenged his readers to post a blog entry about Corman, so here it is. Roger Corman remains one of my favorite filmmakers of all time. Maybe some of his films were purely just drive-in fodder, but they were in a class all to them selves. If you want to learn about Corman I suggest you pick up two books that are ALL about him. One book is called:" Roger Corman: How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime" written with Jim Jerome , and another interesting book is: Roger Corman: An unauthorized biography of the Godfather of Indie filmmaking" written by Beverly Gray . Both books offer a good idea on how Corman produced and directed his movies, and to what extent he would go to to get them up on the screen. How I stumbled onto Corman was by watching his movies on television. In New York there would always b...