Archive for the 'Sundance' Category

• e  33 One Too Many Mornings

  An indie at this year’s Sundance Film Festival will let you download the movie the day after it premieres.

• e  3 The labs, day four

  Two meetings, a good hike and a chocolate shake made for a good day at the Sundance lab, my last full day before flying home tomorrow afternoon.

• e  55 A hard time to be an indie

  As a counterpoint to the utopian bliss of the Sundance Filmmakers Lab, I’ll direct your attention a speech given by James D. Stern] last week on the present and future of indie film.

• e  5 Notes from Sundance

  The projects change, but the work is largely the same — helping writers (mostly writer/directors) get their scripts into their best shape before shooting.

• e  8 10 Sundance shorts on iTunes

  Ten of the 80 short films featured this week at the Sundance Film Festival are available free on iTunes until January 25th. It’s a great way to see some work you’d almost certainly never catch.

  Visit itunes.com/Sundance to check out trailers and download. (Link opens in iTunes store.)

  I’m happy to see shorts featured this way, and [...]

• e  13 Why no one is buying your indie film

  Anne Thompson’s Variety article on the challenging market at Sundance this year is worth a read for anyone considering the indie route.

  I’ve written several times about my festival experience with The Nines, and how the classic paradigm of how indie films get bought and distributed is almost a myth. Most Sundance movies don’t sell, [...]

• e  4 USC at Sundance/Slamdance

  Connect with your Trojan brethren.

• e  8 Indie film, cont’d

  How some are navigating distribution of indie fare.

• e  5 What do you do when the buzz fades?

  You made a movie. Get the most you can out of it, then get cracking on doing the next project.

• e  31 Self-distributing an indie feature

  Todd Sklar, who I know from his work up at the Sundance Labs, wrote in to agree with a lot of the points I raised in my post-mortem of The Nines. His experience with the indie film he made and self-released is alternately inspiring and exhausting, but worth careful attention for anyone considering making [...]

• e  28 I never told Robert Redford to suck it

  I want to expand, redirect and challenge some of the discussion on my earlier post about Sundance, The Nines, and the death of independent film.

  For starters, many in the P2P world were all too happy to declare victory over, well, logic. (The Nines Director: Forget Sundance, Use P2P Instead). That’s incorrect on a lot [...]

• e  81 Sundance, The Nines, and the death of independent film

  A long hard look at distributing independent films.

• e  21 A good time, despite the dead children

  I’m back from Utah, where I was working as an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. I had five projects in three days, which made for a lot of reading and meeting, picking-apart and putting-back-together.

  The scripts this year were as emotionally challenging as ever — of the projects I covered, three involved the rape [...]

• e  11 Mysteries of Pittsburgh

  The story behind former assistant Rawson Thurber’s second feature.

• e  69 The Nines on BitTorrent

  Since well before our Sundance debut last year, I’ve been curious-slash-paranoid about when The Nines would start showing up on the BitTorrent trackers, the online repository of pirated movies and a few legitimate wares.

  It was inevitable that the movie would get bootlegged at some point. The timing was the delicate issue. If it showed up [...]

• e  3 Sundance Advice

  The folks at Sundance asked what advice I’d offer people whose films are chosen for the 2008 festival. In case they don’t use my quote, I thought I’d share:

  Remember that the reason you’re in the festival is because you made a terrific movie. Once the lights come up after the first screening, there’s no [...]

• e  51 The Nines opens Friday

  I feel like I’ve done so much publicity on it that everyone probably sick of me talking about it, but here’s the direct appeal:

  My movie THE NINES opens this Friday, August 31st, in Los Angeles and New York.

  Please come see it. And if you can’t, keep reading to find out how to get it [...]

• e  11 Permitted filmmaking

  If it’s you and a buddy with a tiny camera, should you really have to register with a governmental agency? I say no.

• e  22 The Nines goes to Venice

  A reader alluded to it in the comments of an earlier post, but today we can officially announce that The Nines was chosen to play the Venice Film Festival as part of Critics’ Week.

  (At least, I assume we can announce it. We were sworn to double-super secrecy, which is presumably now over, since it [...]

• e  16 Summer Sundance, part two

  What exactly do you discuss at Sundance? They’re entering with completed scripts, which I assume are perfect to them at the beginning, so where to next? And if you participate in the Screenwriting Lab are you automatically given a Directors Lab spot, if that is what you so choose to do with your completed work?

  – [...]

• e  14 Summer Sundance

  I’m up at Sundance for the summer filmmakers’ lab, where I’ve worked as an advisor for the past seven years.

  For those unfamiliar with the labs, it’s a workshop in which newer filmmakers (generally writer-directors) meet with established screenwriters in one-on-one sessions to sort out issues in their scripts. There’s a winter lab, which occurs [...]

• e  33 The Nines gets all domestic

  Ever since Sundance, when I announced that GreeneStreet scooped up international rights to The Nines, I’ve been faced with many questions. I knew the answer to the big one but couldn’t say. The answer to all the others depended on the first. So I’ve been sitting patiently, feigning detached acceptance, when I [...]

• e  19 What is independent film?

  Should the independently financed Star Wars prequels count?

• e  20 MTV Overdrive on The Nines

  Josh Horowitz from MTV News wrote in to point out that The Flash business wasn’t the only thing they ran from our Sundance interview. In fact, the full version, now up on MTV Overdrive, succeeds in making both Ryan and me sound coherent, which is no small feat.

  Here’s what you can’t see in the [...]

• e  31 Sundance, expanded edition

  Throughout the week, I’ve been trying to convey the Sundance experience with the Twitter feed, but there’s only so much one can communicate in a sentence or two. So I thought I’d fatten out a few entries to give a better sense of how Sundance really went.

  Checking through the itineraries and packing lists. Do [...]

• e  1 About the live updates

  If you’re reading this site via the RSS feeds, you may not be aware that the “real” site features a continuously updated list of what I’m doing at Sundance. Call it microblogging. It’s powered by Twitter, and doesn’t show up in the main feed.

  However, you can subscribe to the just the Twitters at this link.

• e  2 Sundance panels

  In addition to the screenings, I’ll be a panelist at two different events at the festival.

  HD House

  Cinematographer Nancy Schreiber and I will talk about the HD of it all, with clips from the movie. Monday, Jan. 22nd, at 7 p.m. Yarrow Theater 2 More info here.

  BMI Composer Roundtable

  Composer Alex Wurman and I will be talking about the music [...]

• e  8 Sundance catalog is out

  The catalog for this year’s Sundance Film Festival came this week, which was my first chance to see what everyone else’s first impression of The Nines would be. The festival organizers write the descriptions for the films, so you’re sort of at their mercy. Fortunately, John Cooper wrote up a very nice blurb [...]

• e  14 Seeing The Nines at Sundance

  I’m not going to suggest that devoted readers fly thousands of miles to see The Nines at Sundance. But I’m not going to not suggest it.

  I’ve long been of the mindset that there’s no reason to go to Sundance unless you have a movie there. I haven’t been since Go debuted there in 1999. [...]

• e  20 I heart WriteRoom

  For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the production notes for The Nines. The document will end up being about 20 pages, detailing the backstory of how the movie got made, from inspiration through editing, along with everyone’s bios. It’s part of the press kit for the film, helping the journalists [...]

• e  6 The Nines screening schedule at Sundance

  The good folks at Sundance just sent out the screening times and locations for The Nines. Their website doesn’t show the schedule yet, but I presume it will be up soon.

  Sun. Jan 21, 9:30 pm Eccles, Park City

  Mon. Jan 22, 8:30 am Prospector, Park City

  Tue. Jan 23, 9:00 pm Sundance Village

  Sun. Jan 28, 3:30 pm Rose Wagner, Salt [...]

• e  4 Why isn’t The Nines in competition at Sundance?

  I was wondering if you could explain the difference/reason for competitive and non-competitive categories at Sundance and why you chose the latter?

  – Steve Lakeland, FL

  It’s the Festival’s call. They decide whether or not they want to show the movie, then which category they’re going to put it in. They don’t explain their logic, but [...]

• e  31 The Movie is premiering at Sundance

  After months of vague hints, I can finally reveal information about The Movie I wrote and directed this summer.

  It’s called The Nines.1 It stars Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy. It’s a drama. Funny in places, suspenseful in places, but basically a drama. It will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival.

  This last point was the [...]