[This Savage Art]

• Crack open the skull and look inside Bob Redford’s incubator: Behind the Scenes at the Sundance Lab [via The Houe Next Door.]
• David Milch talks shop on the blog The Idea of the Writer. [also THND]
• Godzilla, my childhood hero, turns 50.
• Dennis Farina is packing heat. Hey, it’s only a .22.

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Technology has upended everything from the music industry to shopping to how we get our news. Why should film festivals be any different? Scott Kirsner has a post announcing the first feature film, The Cult Of Sincerity, to debut on YouTube. That’s quite a feat and definitely raises some serious questions for any filmmaker creating content nowadays. New rules, more options, different workflows.

The film’s producers chose to just bypass the whole accept/reject process of the film festival and offer it up to whoever wants it for free. As compensation they will earn money if viewers sign up for a music service for a fee in order to watch the film online. It’s not the first film to set up this kind of structure but it’s obvious the distribution model is going in a different direction. One of the key questions that comes up is; will your film play better on the internet? Meaning, will it find its audience from online viewers versus a theatrical release? If you have a twenty-something post-college comedy [far from a new concept] like this one, your demographic is already sitting in the theater, their laptops. If you have an oddly sweeping, landscaped epic shot with anamorphic lenses on 35mm, maybe not.

Either way it seems that this new process of cutting out the festival middle man might have a serious trickle down effect. There are so many festivals right now, too many to even count [Okay, I'll look it up. Around 4,000 worldwide. Source: FilmFestivals.com.] Will online festivals and distribution put a crimp in real world film festival attendance? It seems that if festivals aren’t programming important, relevant films that need that exposure to push them into the stratosphere you might have an answer sooner than later.

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One of my concerns when I was planning on having a child was time. Am I ever going to finish a book? Am I ever going to see a film again? Will my tradition of attending the Tribeca Film Festival for the last five years fall to the waste side? Hell no.

I just snagged a pair of tickets for my baby’s mama and I to see The Caller. Since I didn’t have a lot of time to really go through the guide and do my usual research I cut my search short and found this cool looking neo-noir crime drama by return filmmaker Richard Ledes. Even though festival screenings are hit or miss I usually walk away with something whether it be a daring performance, stellar photography, the name of a producer to add to the personal database (note: film festival websites are a good source to find contact info) or just inspiration. Either way it’s a chance to keep the tradition going and in the time between now and next year I’ll have a year under my belt as a parent and maybe the festival can get a grip on its own identity crisis, again.

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Here’s a collection of a few interesting stories to keep you busy while I tend to the boy. I wouldn’t want you to forget about me. Here ya go:

• If you are old enough to have had Mad Magazine part of your upbringing [I weep for you if you didn't] you will really love this.
• Yeah, you’re not alone. Today’s music does suck.
• 16:9, television and that whole “letterbox” thing.
• Artie Lange goes apeshit.

[Hat tip: Making The Movie]

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Some events in life are too surreal to put into words. This is one of them. On April 3rd, 2008 at 1:15 p.m., my son, Nico Giordano Speruzzi entered the world. He came in at a fighting weight of 8 pounds 11 ounces. Yeah, he is a big boy.

They say stimulation is important for newborns so in time I’ll be breaking out the Cassavetes DVD box set. He’ll be weaned on the greats. Kubrick, Peckinpah (What? Too violent?), Huston. The Neo-Realists. Noir. Scorsese. I’ll even throw in some Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder, that is) and Caddyshack for good measure. Too many to mention here. Oh yeah, this boy will appreciate finer cinema, high culture and low, if I have anything to do with it.

Until then I have to change some diapers so you’ll have to excuse me.

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2001: A Space Odyssey entered the cinematic landscape 40 years ago today.

Tomorrow….a new being enters the world.

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Jules Dassin, the American director of Naked City, Rififi, Night and the City and Never On Sunday died in an Athens hospital after a short illness on Monday aged 96.

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I just upgraded to the new version and things might be running a little out of wack for a while especially with some of the plugins not upgraded for 2.5. Not all of them are 2.5 compliant like the Print This Post plugin for example.

I’m pretty impressed with this upgrade and I know a lot of work went into it to make it load faster with a lot of other built in enhancements. Thanks to the WordPress team and all the developers for creating an excellent publishing platform.

Feel free to contact me if something isn’t working correctly.

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“A villain is a guy with a frailty.”

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Does anyone out there have PDF versions of Into The Wild and The Darjeeling Limited? It seems that the studios who so generously posted scripts for download on their sites have made them all unavailable.

Please contact me if you do.

Update: Got The Darjeeling Limited PDF from Paul and Into The Wild from Gil. Thanks again guys.

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A case of the chicken or the egg. I was watching Being John Malkovich the other night and one thing always perplexed me about the film’s concept. The Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze strange creation seemed like a film that was virtually impossible to green light but somehow slipped through the cracks. Aside from the fact that I am in awe every time I see it I always wondered how this actor dependent screenplay was approached in the writing stage. Did Kaufman originally think of Malkovich when writing it? Was the deal struck before a page was written? What if he backed out? After all, it’s his heeeeeead! Could this concept have worked with say Al Pacino? Tom Cruise? Or what I think could have been another, just as wacky alteration on this theme; Being Christopher Walken!

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