THE BIZ: THE BASIC BUSINESS, LEGAL AND FINANCIAL ASPECTS OF THE FILM INDUSTRY by Schuyler M. Moore Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2000. ISBN: I -879-505-53-3 364 pp. $26.9-5 (paper), 7"x9" As a media professor, I am always on the lookout for books and writings that effectively convey useful information about entering and surviving the "real world" media industry maze. My top-most criteria for determining the "effectiveness" of such works are accessibility of language, depth of explanation and, above all, refusal to play into the self-promoting rhetoric and hype of industry-speak. It has been
Latest Posts
Dear IDA Members: IDA depends on volunteers to accomplish our goals and carry out our programs throughout the year. During any given year, we call on members and non-members alike to participate as seminar panelists, awards jury members, screening Q&A moderators, contributing writers to the magazine and the like. We have volunteer committees that serve in an advisory capacity and work with staff to implement our programs. A member of the board of directors chairs each committee. Committee members offer flesh voices, experience and varied perspectives to help guide our programs and services
After some 35 years of filming exotic wildlife in remote corners of planet Earth, Wolfgang Bayer has turned the camera on himself. He is producing Wolf 's World, a feature length assessment of what the future holds for the bears, butterflies, manta rays, bats and the other living things he has recorded for posterity. He says that the mass killings of animals that was commonplace 20 to 30 years ago has lessened because the public has become much more conscious of the issue. At the same time, their habitats are being destroyed, leaving them no place to roam. The 35 mm film features Bayer, his
Home of the largest and busiest port in the world, the bustling Dutch city of Rotterdam seems the perfect host for a film festival. A town almost completely rebuilt after World War II bombing, Rotterdam's brutalist post war architecture suggests straight-ahead post-war efficiency, with little to offer in the way of "old world charm." Its vibrant immigrant communities, however, lend a far more modern atmosphere to the otherwise-staid air, and hint of a new, more exciting future for both the city and Europe—a future further unveiled and celebrated in the film festival's programming and, most
The Sundance Film Festival produced another hit this year with the inauguration of "House of Docs." For years, festival organizers have attempted to put the documentary competition on an equal footing with fiction features. For the cognoscenti, it has become a cliché, albeit a true one, that the docs are the films to see in Park City. But trying to get to conflicting, far-flung screenings and connect with other documentary enthusiasts was sometimes difficult. The much-discussed Hollywoodization and overcrowding of the festival also tended to marginalize documentarians. "House Of Docs" has
One measure of Frederick Wiseman's renown is the size of the large, enthusiastic crowds that braved harsh winter weather to attend "Frederick Wiseman: American Filmmaker." The retrospective, held at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater from Jan. 28 through Feb.24, included all 30 of Wiseman's feature-length documentaries, from the long-suppressed Titicut Follies (1961) through his most recent, Belfast, Maine (1999). The event was organized in association with the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which, as part of the series, presented Wiseman with the 2000 Irene Diamond
Eight documentaries screened at this year's Slamdance 2000. The festival shared some traits with the Sundance Festival, most notably the difficulty with which docs could be located in the catalogue. Documentaries were mixed among the competition and special screening films in the Slamdance catalogue, a spiral-bound faux school notebook that was other wise a triumph of from and function. Realizing that audiences were demanding docs, and in keeping with the ad hoc nature of the festival, press relations chief Margot Gerber put together a hand-written list of the docs and taped it to the press
The country is Portugal, as it enters the 21 st century with its relatively newfound democracy. At the invitation of the 10th Encontros Internacionais de Cinema Documental (International Encounters in Documentary Cinema) in Lisbon, I showed up at the festival and the preceding documentary conference in November 1999, not quite knowing what to expect since it was my first visit. The warmth, energy and passion at both events was infectious, and although my hosts kept me busy from 9 A.M. to 2 A.M. for six days, I felt refreshed and rejuvenated by the people I met and the films I saw. The three
Dear IDA Members: As this issue of ID goes to bed, the first virtual film festival—Yahoo's On Line Film Festival—is streaming on the World Wide Web! (www.onlinefilmfestival.com) During the last century, film festivals became an integral part of every documentary filmmaker's release strategy. We are all familiar with stories about the most recent documentary "discovery" from Sundance, Berlin, New York, Yamagata or Amsterdam. The fortunate few that received press attention at festivals often then secured limited theatrical distribution, faithful art house audiences, critical acclaim and
The Sundance Film Festival has always provided a home for documentary-makers, veterans and rookies alike, to share their work and war stories with a receptive community. Documentaries get equal billing with dramatic features, and over the past few years, docs have caught that sacred Sundance buzz like nothing else. Sundance 2000 upped the ante this year, not only introducing digital projection for several of the documentaries, but also opening the House of Docs. I arrived in Park City just in time for the World Premiere of Julien Temple's The Filth and the Fury, which chronicles the rise and