Self Fund Your Own Film! 12/18/2009
 So how would you like to get your own film funded? No worries. There is a brand new web site called "Pirate My Film!" You register your film idea, state how much money you want raised and push the YES button. The site was founded by independent researcher and Journalist Max Keiser and is also the CEO and Co-Founder of the HSC Holdings and the inventor of "virtual market specialist!"Pirate Myfilm - The Film Futures Market for PiratesSome film makers want to have copies of their films pirated by millions. Some want to sell copies. In either case, producers can raise money for their projects on Pirate Myfilm by selling future copies today. When enough future copies have been reserved to fund a project a group-debit occurs and the funds are made available to the producer. Producers also have the option of offering members who reserve future copies a piece of ad or retail sales. In addition to getting a copy of the film you might also get some money back. For example, if a producer has opted to share ad revenues of future pirated copies or a percentage of future retailed copies of the next "Saw" or "The Blair Witch Project" the producer and future copy buyers like yourself could make a bewitching pot of gold. Keep in mind, nobody is debited until 100% of the future copies needed to fund the project have been reserved and you can cancel at any time. And keep checking your Pirate Myfilm account because producers can change any aspect of their projects - including the percentage of future revenue splits on ads and retailed copies - up until the group-debit. Real N' Raw, almost there!! 10/08/2009
 Matthew Wilson (The Director of Real N' Raw)! Well it finally happened. After reviewing over 400 hours of video, fourteen months and three countries (New Zealand, America and Costa Rica), Real N' Raw is in the final stages. Matthew Wilson, has been an amazing artist to work with over the past year. Here is a write up that Tim Lynch, a world class radio broadcaster wrote about Matthew Wilson........ Matty was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis at age 5 after being ill for two years. At age 12 he was told if he did not have his bowel removed and replaced with a colostomy bag he would have cancer by age 19 and not live to see 30. Today he is 35 and is a picture of health. This is his story. By eating raw foods which includes grass and virtually every thing like weeds that we find growing in our back lawn, such as clover, kikuyu, puha, plantains, dock, dandelion etc he was able to cure his disability. What Matt also found is that the wider the spectrum of leafy greens we eat, the greater the protection from being burnt by the sun. And that humanity maybe being affected by sunburn, because of excessive intake of mass produced, heated, powdered, packaged and tinned foods etc when nature outside gives us phyto-foods to sustain us and enable us to remain protected from the suns ultra violet light among 'many other things.' Matt who is also a top NZ animation artist, working with Warner Brothers and trained by one of Disney's top animators is a co-founder of Animator Inc, his own animation company, and has recently completed and directed an independent film called " Real N Raw" about reclaiming your health using simple and easy to access solutions. Listen to how other peoples globally have actively lived to very old ages, by eating raw foods, close to the land, on their own doorstep. So you want to know a secret? If you go over to the realnraw web site and sign up to be able to watch the film for free. You'll love it! Indie Filmmakers: China’s New Guerillas 09/26/2009
 Zhao Dayong By KIRK SEMPLE BEIJING OVER the course of six years Zhao Dayong, an independent filmmaker from Guangzhou, China, spent many months living among the residents of Zhiziluo, an impoverished and forgotten village in the rugged mountains near the Myanmar border, and filming their lives. Using his own money and simple digital filmmaking equipment he made “Ghost Town,” a quiet, hypnotizing, three-hour documentary that provides an extraordinary and intimate portrait of Chinese life. Like independent filmmakers everywhere, Mr. Zhao worked with no guarantee of an audience, or even a place to show his work. By his estimates only a few thousand people have seen “Ghost Town” in China since he finished it last year. Several hundred more are scheduled to see it Sunday afternoon when the film has its international premiere at the New York Film Festival. But what makes Mr. Zhao’s commitment particularly noteworthy is that his project was apparently illegal. The Chinese government has decreed that all films must be approved by government censors before being distributed and screened, including in overseas film festivals. Mr. Zhao, 39, said getting the approval of the censors was never a consideration. “It’s like asking to be raped,” he said this month in an interview here. “The government certainly has its own agenda. They want us to stop. But at the same time we know we’re doing something meaningful.” This mixture of defiance and principle defines China’s nascent yet highly dynamic crop of independent filmmakers who pursue their art in apparent violation of the law. For decades the Chinese government had nearly full control over all aspects of the film industry, from celluloid filmmaking technology to financing to distribution and screening. An underground filmmaking subculture emerged in China in the late 1980s, but it began to flourish only about a decade ago with the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and postproduction computer programs that helped put filmmaking further out of reach of the government authorities. Many of this latest generation of Chinese filmmakers have no formal film training and shoot on minimal budgets, often with small crews, or alone. Ying Liang, whose films have won numerous prizes on the international circuit, shot his widely celebrated debut film, “Taking Father Home,” using a borrowed camera. Relatives and friends were his cast and crew. “Unlike in previous generations, the stars of this generation are not only Beijing Film Academy graduates,” said Karin Chien, a film producer in New York and president of dGenerate Films, a company she founded last year to distribute this new crop of independent Chinese films outside China. “They’re journalists, they work at television stations, they’re painters, they’re people who just picked up a camera and made a film for $1,000.” Output is still small. Several leading filmmakers put the annual production of unsanctioned, independent films at fewer than 200. But this work has provided unusual ground-level views of China that possess an unvarnished authenticity often missing from mainstream, government-sanctioned films. “There’s been an extraordinary explosion of young filmmakers — quite a few of them are quite talented — who are dedicated to record and tell the real story of what’s going on in China,” said Richard Peña, program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which produces the New York Film Festival. “That story is really more fascinating than the story that the regime wanted to be told.” These achievements have come at a price. About 20 filmmakers have been banned from making films for two to five years, according to Zhang Xianmin, an independent film producer and a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. Others have received intimidating phone calls, had tapes confiscated or been detained and interrogated. But according to several filmmakers and film scholars both here and abroad, the government recently appears to have adopted a somewhat hands-off, though highly watchful, posture toward this film vanguard, leaving it to operate in an undefined gray area. It seems that as long as certain incendiary topics are not broached — among them the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, the outlawed religious group Falun Gong — then independent filmmakers are allowed to work. Yet no one is absolutely sure where the boundaries are, or whether the government will start to clamp down more fiercely. “You don’t know where that limit is,” said Zhang Yaxuan, a critic and documentary filmmaker who is organizing an independent film archive for the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. “You have to try to touch it. In the process of trying, you know.” Huang Wenhai, a documentary filmmaker in Beijing, said that the process of filmmaking here “is the process of conquering your fear.” Despite this pressure and uncertainty, there are now at least four major independent film festivals around the country and at least two theaters, both small, dedicated to showing Chinese independent films. Meanwhile Chinese audiences largely remain out of reach. With cinemas and television off limits to their unsanctioned films, independent moviemakers are mostly restricted to screenings in front of small audiences in art galleries, bars, universities and homes. As a result the most accomplished filmmakers have found their largest audiences overseas, especially at international film festivals. “I feel very frustrated,” Mr. Zhao said. “I’m a Chinese filmmaker, and of course my audience should be the Chinese people, especially since my films are about ordinary working Chinese people.” He added, “That would be more valuable than winning an international film festival.” Mr. Zhao began his career in the fine arts. He studied oil painting at an art academy before dropping out and working as a professional artist and advertising director in Beijing and Guangzhou. He eventually founded his own advertising firm as well as a journal for contemporary arts, and he opened a gallery in Shanghai. His first documentary was “Street Life,” a portrait of recyclers on the streets of Shanghai, which had its premiere at the Viennale in Austria in 2006. “Ghost Town,” his second film, is a series of vignettes and scenes that explore the economic struggles, religious beliefs and relationships of the residents of Zhiziluo, which had once been a local county seat for the Communist Party but was largely abandoned by the government. Mr. Peña said he had heard about the film for some time but finally viewed it in the 11th hour of the festival’s film-selection process. “It’s one of those films that, when we saw it, there was little question in our minds that it should be included,” he said. “Ghost Town” is the first documentary from China’s new generation of digital independent filmmakers to be included in the New York festival. Mr. Zhao, who continues to support himself by shooting television advertisements, said he had no illusions that his films would ever make him much money. “For me, making films is a way of life, not the means to it,” he said. “And I really enjoy this life.” Zhang Jing contributed research. Spike Lee - still doing the right thing! 09/18/2009
 Spike Lee 2009 As the BFI celebrates 20 years since the release of Spike Lee's seminal film with The Independent Interview and a season of movies on the Southbank, the director talks to Kaleem Aftab about race and retrospectives Spike Lee arrives at the BFI Southbank on Monday as part of a celebration of Do The Right Thing, his third film, which premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1989. In the two decades since then, the film has been recognised by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest 100 American movies in film history and was highly listed in a Sight and Sound Poll of the best films of the past 25 years. It was also, as Barack Obama coyly admitted last year, the movie that the President of the United States of America took Michelle to see on their first date. All in all, a far cry from the divisions and debate that the race drama provoked on its release. It was the most controversial and discussed film of that summer. You couldn't pick up a magazine or newspaper without someone having an opinion on the Brooklyn tale or the director. Critics David Denby in New York Magazine and Richard Corliss in Time argued that Do The Right Thing was of no value except as agitprop to incite the black community to riot. In the opposite corner was Roger Ebert who wrote that "it comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time". It's not to belittle Lee's other films, including Malcolm X or Inside Man, or his two great documentaries 4 Little Girls about the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama and the Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke, to state that Do The Right Thing remains the key work in his oeuvre. The director would never admit that it's his best film. "My films are like my children", he says. "I don't have a favourite." Yet in all the literature that Lee approves, from the children's book he wrote with his lawyer-turned-writer wife Tonya, Please, Baby, Please to the blurbs on the back of DVDs, it's always Do The Right Thing that is given the status of first among equals.  By SARAH MCBRIDE, JESSICA E. VASCELLARO and SAM SCHECHNER Google Inc.'s YouTube is in discussions with major movie studios about streaming movies on a rental basis, a test of whether the online video giant can persuade its millions of users to pay for premium content. For Hollywood, the move could represent a bold attempt to offset its dwindling DVD sales with online revenue. YouTube is talking to Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., Sony Corp., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. about charging for new titles on the existing YouTube site. In some cases, these titles might be available on the site on the same day that they come out on DVD. Some studios already make full-length movies available on YouTube free, though they tend to be older, lesser-known films. It is unclear to what extent older movies or television shows will be a part of the new agreements. While details vary from studio to studio, generally speaking the agreements would allow consumers to stream movies on a rental basis for a fee. However, in some cases, the movies could be available in way that they have been previously -- free, with advertising. Negotiations are continuing and there are no guarantees the deals will be struck. Many details remain in flux, including whether users will eventually be able to download movies. People familiar with the matter say that new movie rentals are likely to be around $3.99, the price Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store charges for new movie rentals. The companies hope to keep pricing on par with what consumers pay for video-on-demand for new titles, these people say. In a statement, a YouTube spokesman said the company is always working to expand on "its great relationships with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer our community." The talks are a sign of how YouTube is emerging as a competitor to a broad spectrum of entertainment outlets, including Blockbuster Inc. and Netflix Inc. as well as iTunes and Amazon.com Inc. The Hulu LLC joint venture and Sony's Crackle allow users to watch full-length movies free, but don't generally include new releases. Hulu is a joint venture of General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, News Corp. and Walt Disney Co. YouTube began as a place for scrappy, home-grown videos, but it has become increasingly aggressive in striking deals to host television shows, movies and other professional content as a way to draw in advertisers and viewers. But movie studios and TV networks won't give up their most popular content for a share of advertising, which they complain isn't sufficient. The negotiations with the studios are part of an effort to open up new revenue streams by charging users themselves. Hollywood has also been eager to distribute more of its films online -- as long as it can collect a reasonable fee. Though many studios now sell and rent movies online through services such as iTunes and Amazon.com, that has yet to produce meaningful revenue. By cutting a deal with YouTube, which had nearly 428 million global visitors in June, according to comScore, it can potentially reach a much wider audience. Studios have been pursuing these kinds of deals with renewed urgency, as revenue from DVD sales has eroded more quickly than they had anticipated. Adams Media Research says studio revenue from DVD sales should fall by about $850 million this year to $12.9 billion. However, YouTube users aren't accustomed to opening their wallets to watch videos. And the full-length movies that already exist on the service -- ranging from classics such as the 1940 "His Girl Friday" to more recent movies like the 1999 horror flick "House on Haunted Hill" -- have drawn a modest number of views compared to content like comedy clips and music videos. Many consumers balk at watching full-length films on a computer screen. You Tube and the studios are still hashing out how to divide revenue from the new arrangement. For deals that involve advertising, YouTube is likely to give partners the majority of the revenue, as it has done with other partners in the past. Some deals may also guarantee the studio a minimum fee per title viewed, in some cases just under $3, according to people familiar with the matter. YouTube is pressing studios to allow the movies to be streamed on mobile devices, but some of the studios are resisting, even though that is currently allowed under other online rental services such as iTunes. Under current plans, 10,000 Google employees will test the service for a period of three months, people familiar with the matter said. The trial was supposed to start at the beginning of September, but was pushed back as studio negotiations dragged on. Hollywood Collapse Continues 08/21/2009
Written by Mitch Santell It was so exciting to learn of Stephen Spielberg's financing in India. Why? Because I took a risk and in July of 2007 traveled to New Zealand to launch my new soundtrack company. The past two years have been an amazing time here and my bet was that once the real estate market collapsed, it would affect commercial real estate and now the studio business. Then I realized I had to launch my own film company. Our first project at Transparent Pictures, Ltd. is an independent documentary that has been in the making since June of 2008 called Real N' Raw. We are now in post-production and the film is scheduled for completion by the first week in September A film studio is a real place. You need land, resources, team and capital. Congratulations on receiving 825 Million Dollars to launch another dream  Stacey Snider and Stephen Spielberg Steven Spielberg and business partner Stacey Snider told The Wall Street Journal that their new film company,DreamWorks Studios, now has $825 million in capital to fund up to 21 new films during the next four years. The financing news comes months later than expected because of DreamWorks Studios’ struggles to raise the financing. The money allows DreamWorks Studios to launch a new venture with Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group. Back in July, media reports surfaced that DreamWorks Studios probably would get the $825 million needed to begin making some of the films this year. The Journal stated that DreamWorks and financing partner J.P. Morgan Chase raised $325 million in debt financing. That figure has been matched with equity from Reliance. Burbank-based Walt Disney Co. is contributing another $175 million. Disney also will distribute the films, the report states. Spielberg told the Journal that the past year has been difficult for the film industry -- which has operated in an environment of Wall Street funds that now have dried up. "The past year was like balancing ourselves on a sea of rolling logs," he told the Journal. This $325 million is only the first phase of DreamWorks Studios’ fund-raising. The film company wants to raise $550 million of total debt that Reliance will match with equity. Now that the economic crunch has come to Hollywood, international investments in many sectors -- including the film industry -- will be more commonplace Hollywood Machine Abandons Los Angeles 07/12/2009
 The Culver Studios By Richard Verrier  Howie Mandel Most of "Deal or No Deal's" 250 crew members lost their jobs in the move. "It's a crying shame," said Lindsay Hovel, an associate producer on the prime-time version of the game show hosted by comedian Howie Mandel. "There are so many talented people, and they're just not able to work in the [entertainment] capital." The relocation was doubly bruising for Cella because it was announced just after California approved its film-tax credit program, which Cella lobbied heavily for and helped craft. The credits, however, don't cover game shows. Still, Cella predicts that the tax deal will attract some TV shows back to California. "If we don't do something now, there's going to be nothing left," he said. Sorenson, of 24/7 Studio Equipment, also is pinning his hopes on the state tax credits to spur business. A major studio film can generate $75,000 in rental income for a company like Sorenson's. But this year, 24/7 has worked mostly on a few low-budget films such as Screen Gems' "The Roommate." His company's feature film business has plummeted 50% since 2007. Sorenson made up for the shortfall by renting out equipment to TV shows, but even that is no longer a sure bet. One of his customers, the HBO series "Hung," filmed three months in L.A. and two months in Michigan, which offers a 42% tax credit. Another customer, the TNT series "Leverage," has opted to film its second season in Portland, Ore., which offers a 20% cash rebate on qualified expenses. "It would be a lot different if we were smoking busy," he said. "But . . . every rental right now is like a precious jewel." Local prop houses also are struggling from the downturn. Some have recently closed and others have cut their payrolls.  Serving Los Angeles and Vancouver Modern Props laid off 17 workers last month. The company owns a 120,000-square-foot warehouse that contains 80,000 props. "I was in shock," said Luis Peniche, 21, a former sales assistant who lost his $25,000-a-year job after two years at Modern Props. "I really loved working there. It was like family." Unable to pay his rent, Peniche moved into his sister's apartment in Van Nuys. He also stopped taking classes at Santa Monica College because he couldn't afford the books and tuition. "I'd love to work in the entertainment industry, but it's just so bad out there." Zabrucky launched the company 32 years ago, specializing in leasing furniture, lights and electric control panels to sci-fi TV shows such as "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" and eventually to some of the biggest movies in Hollywood, including "Die Hard," "Ghostbusters" and "Men in Black." Modern Props became one of the largest prop houses in Hollywood, employing 50 people in its heyday in the late 1990s. But the business has eroded through much of the last decade, squeezed by the growing use of digital effects; the growth of reality television, which spends little on props; and especially the departure of shows to other locales. "We know how to do what we do very well," Zabrucky said, "but we can't fight the fact that everything is just being sold right from underneath us." Last summer, Modern Props lost one of its clients, the ABC series "Ugly Betty," to New York. "Their set decorator was in every week placing orders. That's $14,000 a month we lost," lamented Ken Sharp, vice president of sales and operations for Modern Props. To highlight the plight facing his business and others, Zabrucky recently designed skateboard decks that show a pictograph of the country, with California highlighted, and distributed them to hundreds of Hollywood executives as well as city and state politicians. The deck shows arrows pointing away from the state and the words "don't run away." Filmmakers' Exodus Leaving California Cold 07/02/2009
 Hollywood is fighting to stop an exodus of filmmakers who are being lured from Southern California by subsidies and tax breaks. The Big Picture! 07/02/2009
 Patrick Goldstein on the collision of entertainment, media and pop culture. | Mitch, Founder
Mitch Santell is a 3rd generation native Californian. He has been in the entertainment business since the age of 17. Mitch decided that there was too much Hollywood in Hollywood so he moved to New Zealand where he can focus on great projects. ArchivesAugust 2010 CategoriesAll |
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