New Project News – Three Trembling Cities

3TC_Poster_3rdAttempt

We’re working on a new project, a web-series called Three Trembling Cities. The webseries delves into the lives of NYC immigrants juggling work, friends, romance, dreams and family expectations. Innovatively combining the stories of six fictional immigrants with docu-style interviews, Three Trembling Cities presents a deeper, richer story about the immigrant experience.

We just launched our Seed & Spark campaign for the project! Our goal is to raise $10K for the budget in the next 30 days. You can be a part of the team that makes it possible – head over to seedandspark.com/studio/three-trembling-cities to find out more, watch our pitch video, and contribute what you can. Thank you!

Little Earthquakes: The Best Movies I Saw in ’15

madya_apu My half-assed mashup of two of my favorite movie-going experiences, Apur Sansar and Mad Max: Fury Road.

By any account, I consumed a crapton of tv. Jessica Jones, Red Road, Daredevil, The Walking Dead, Orphan Black, Game of Thrones (oh and Helix and Defiance)… days of my life I’m not getting back were spent staring at the screen. But this wasn’t a passive experience – those were moments where I felt intimately connected with the lives of fictional people. Debarati and I talked about them as though we knew them. It’s that cliched tv-as-modern-campfire experience, and it definitely reached some kind of peak for me this year. It could be because I’m studying these shows with an eye towards breaking into the medium, or it could be that the creators are counting on the binge-watching experience when they’re crafting the stories.

On the other hand, it’s been a surprisingly lackluster year on the film front. I saw a handful of truly great features, most of them at least 25 years old (or older). But Avengers (especially), Spectre, Terminator: Whatever, and others… they were technically brilliant, good looking commercials, but had little lasting emotional value. And an even larger percentage of films – Ex Machina and The Martian come to mind – were gripping while I was watching them but really didn’t leave much of an impression later.

Surprisingly (or not), my most memorable film experiences of the year came from a handful of indie films and older, ostensibly more quiet films. So here’s the list of films I saw in 2015 that I will remember for years to come.

THE APU TRILOGY, Pather Panjali, Aparajito, and Apur Sansar – three incredible films, made by Satyajit Ray, from 1955 to 1959. The trilogy follows the fictional Apu, from his impoverished childhood in rural West Bengal in the early 20th century, to his later childhood in Benares, to his adulthood in Kolkata. After many years of hearing how awesome these films were, I finally got the chance to see them projected, thanks to a new restoration that screened at Film Forum. Ray does more with a single shot of two children running through the field to see a train go by, than Joss Whedon did with $200+ million and all the CGI toys and top-drawer Hollywood talent that you can buy with that. The careful composition of each shot, the amazing performances, the fact that you feel like you’re a part of someplace you’ve never been – it’s epic filmmaking, but done in a very understated (and therefore underappreciated) way.

HEAVEN’S GATE, released in 1980, is famous for being the film that bankrupted United Artists, and ushered in the beginning of the end of auteur-driven Hollywood filmmaking. On the surface it seems obvious: it’s a slow-moving, not very action-oriented Western about a lawyer from Harvard who ends up on the side of small homesteaders, immigrants and cattle rustlers in a remote part of Wyoming, as they’re targeted by big-time cattle ranchers. An epic of American greed, as immigrants who are fleeing Europe try to scratch out a decent living, and are targeted by ruthless, bigoted businessmen… sound familiar?

Time has been kind to this film, as many critics slowly unpacked what was really going on with the film. There are many repeating visual and sound motifs – concentric circles, mazelike interiors that contrast with the wide-open exteriors, locomotion of various kinds (horses, carriages, railroads, roller skates). The visual density, the telling of the story through movement and sound, the moral ambiguity of many of the characters – those alone are worth seeing the film for. Again, I felt like I was living in Wyoming over a century ago. I wasn’t in the theater any more.

NIGHTMARE CODE: This is a sneaky indie sci-fi/thriller. At first, you might think it’s just a ‘found footage’ project, playing on themes that have been worn to death – the dangers of surveillance, virtual reality, and so on. But it’s much more interesting than that. A troubled hacker trying to get out a big legal mess takes on a job at a startup. He’s tasked with finishing up their sophisticated behavior recognition software prototype, right after their lead programmer went postal and shot half the staff and himself. But the code proves to be far more than just predictive – it seems to be changing the behavior of its programmers, and not for the better. This film tells its story using split-screen security cameras, webcams, body cameras, and computer screen, in a way that’s really effective. The acting is really great – you feel as though you’re in a real startup shop, with folks trying to cope with real development problems. The realism makes the spooky goings-on that much more effective.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is amazing. It had no reason to be anything than a stupid action film with lots of over-the-top effects and no depth. It was a license to print cash. Instead it had a heart, a real point of view, incredibly well-done characterizations (especially considering the sparse dialog), and yes, awesome action (achieved through a magnificent combination of practical effects, CGI, and let’s not forget the sound design)!

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD, the director’s cut. When I saw the original version – 2.5 hours – back in 1990, I was both bored and intrigued. After seeing Wings of Desire, I was in love with Wim Wenders and thought he could do no wrong. But the film was so muddled and gave me no real anchor to guide me with. I could tell there were some great ideas floating in there, and had heard rumors that there was a longer cut out there.

The completely restored version, presented this year at MOMA, was amazing. It clocks in at nearly 5 hours, but you’re not bored at all. Instead, you’re incredibly grounded in what’s going on. The ostensible plot is about a woman who’s drifting through life in 1999, and gets seduced by, and then chases, a mysterious man who’s carrying around a camera that can record reality for playback to the blind, while the whole world is waiting for a potential nuclear disaster (a satellite carrying a nuclear payload may be crashing to earth). The plot takes the viewer from Europe through America to Japan to the aboriginal homelands in Australia. The themes of the film carry you through the wonder, fears and joys of modern life and tech, issues of community vs. individuality, the struggle to distinguish between the real and the virtual (and the real environment of dreams versus the virtual reality of our concept of nature). It’s a deep, dense movie, well worth the evening.

JESSICA JONES – yes I know it’s not a film, it’s a TV show, but hear me out. This is the project that will forever change the way we look at the superhero genre in film and tv. The craft on display is amazing – the performances, fight choreography, direction, lighting, sound design, music… but it’s the multilayered story that makes it work. By opting not to do another “the world ends if we don’t stop the bad guy,” the show instead delves into the internal world of the characters. It seems like it’s about a hard-drinking PI who is trying to take down a clever psychopath with a special talent for manipulation. But it’s also about the nature of abuse and manipulation, and the damage that abusive relationships can cause to one’s psyche. It’s about the difficulty and high cost of doing the right thing, when society as a whole rewards ‘following the program’ (even when that program turns you into a killer, a la Nuke, or a victim, like Patsy).

IMAGINE I’M BEAUTIFUL – this is a really tense, slow-build psychological thriller, written, starring and produced by Naomi McDougall Graham, and directed by Meredith Edwards. Without giving too much away, it’s about a young woman, Lana who comes to the city and answers a roommate ad. She moves in with the very troubled Lana, and the two slowly form a deep bond. But their friendship turns and twists in unexpected ways, and you’re kept wondering where the hell is their relationship going? It’s a great handshake of style and substance, made more amazing by the fact that it was made on such a low budget.

At first glance these films seem completely unrelated. Pather Panjali, Imagine I’m Beautiful and Nightmare Code were low-budget first features. Mad Max is part of a franchise, with top stars and made by George Miller, who’s pushing 70. Until the End… and Heaven’s Gate were both regarded as mid-career commercial and artistic failures at the time of their release. Jessica Jones was a thoroughly collaborative effort, produced by the Marvel machine (which has had better years, frankly).

But what unites all these films is their focus on what Tori Amos called, in her fantastic album and title song, Little Earthquakes. “Oh, these little earthquakes / Here we go again / Oh, these little earthquakes / Doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces.” When you listen to that song (or just about any of them on the album), you’re shown that someone’s sanity and life and dreams can matter as much as the whole world’s, and can depend on the simplest of things. Stolen fruit, the one tree that’s still standing in a marsh, the lucky find of a typewriter in a commune… these films, like little earthquakes, obliterate boundaries. I’ve never been to Apu’s remote West Bengal village, nor did I grow up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But while I was watching them and for some time afterward, I wasn’t here in NYC in 2015 anymore; I was standing next to Apu while he was walking down the tracks by his apartment, or hanging on to Furiosa’s rig for dear life. These films accomplished the miracle that the medium has always promised and seldom delivers – to connect you to someone else, somewhere else, and change you in the process.

At some point I’ll write about the great TV I saw in 2015, so stay tuned! Happy new year!

Daredevil Could Dare For More

Daredevil.  Excerpted for fair use purposes only.

Daredevil. Excerpted for fair use purposes only.

I don’t usually do this, but I figured it was time to write about something that was bugging me a bit.

I just finished the first season of Daredevil. Loved it. HOWEVER, there’s some odd stereotypical notes in the season, that I think the writers could work harder to move past. Some quick examples: Nobu the scowling inscrutable Japanese businessman/ninja, Mrs. Gao the inscrutable ‘dragon lady’ Chinese woman (though her character gets more interesting as we go along), pretty much all of the the Chinese opium workers, the “crazy” Russian mob brothers (though they’re a little more well developed), Mrs. Cardenas the suffering noble abuelita, Melvin the (autistic? mentally retarded? Not sure?) savant. And of course most of the nonwhite characters disappear from the show by the end of the season, for various reasons (I being deliberately vague here to avoid spoilers). So the all-white heroes square off against the all-white villains, for the soul of a supposedly diverse city. White man’s burden much?

When I point up these things to my more comic-literate friends (I read superhero comics growing up but but haven’t in a while), they usually retreat into “well it’s true to the comics” or “well if you knew this character from the comics…” Folks, this is NOT a valid response. The storyline they’re talking about is from the ’80s by Frank Miller (not the most progressive guy in the comics world), and regardless, (a) the series is being watched by a lot of people who’ve never read the comic, (b) it’s supposed to stand on its own as a work of art. We need to move past that line of thought to more objectively evaluate comic adaptations (that goes for “GOT” as well). Also, I’m not saying that any of this is “conscious” but that it’s indicative of largely unconscious attitudes.

Anyway, I still like the show and am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. And the writing is very, very good, so I know the writers can do better. It’s one of the first superhero works I’ve seen that actually spends as much time with its heroes as its villains. And when it spends time with its supporting characters – Vanessa the art dealer, Marci the “cutthroat” lawyer, Urich the reporter – it really shines.

When Is the Director Done?

Made In NY Bus Poster!

Found In Time has just been released on Amazon, and user reviews are starting to come in. They confirm something that all of us suspected from the beginning – that this was a film that would divide audiences. Those who were expecting something more straightforward would be frustrated; those who could deal with more ambiguity would be happy. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about either attitude, by the way. Ambiguity can be a terrible thing (see Prometheus).

We’re still waiting on some festivals to get back to us, and our foreign sales rep, Summer Hill Films, is taking it to Cannes next month. We’re also still exploring other domestic distribution options – DVD, BluRay, and a soundtrack album.

But most of that is the work of the producer, at least in theory. At what point is the director done with a film? Is it when it’s wrapped? When post is finished? When it’s out at festivals? When it’s available online or in stores? The producer is on for the whole ride (unless the producer is only working for hire). What is the director’s role in this brave new world of the artist/entrepreneur?

J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the tv series Babylon 5, somehow managed to write most of the 100+ episodes, EP the show, supervise the sound mix, run the online forums on AOL (hey, it was back in the day), and then went on to write follow-up movies, supervise comic and novel adaptations, and answer fan mail. At what point did he say ‘I’m done?’ The show went off the air sometime in the late 1990s but still has a loyal following. Until Firefly and Battlestar Galactica came along it was the gateway drug by which I introduced my non-geek friends to sci-fi. Does he still feel as connected to the show as he did all those years ago?

I’m wrestling with this issue now because I’m in the process of getting back into the director’s chair again for Bitter Child, but I don’t want to abandon Found In Time just at the moment when people are starting to see it. It’s been part of my life so long that I’m not even sure how I would go about leaving it… and yet whenever I work on Bitter Child part of me feels guilty. It’s an odd conundrum, and very different from what I’ve faced before.

By the time my first film, Caleb’s Door, was finished, I was really ready to be done with it and get on with the next project. That was a hundred internet years ago, when social media was just gaining traction and distributors were starting the now-familiar pattern of picking up films for a song and then putting them out into the marketplace with little if any promotion. The idea of the filmmaker taking up the promotion baton was seen as counterproductive (except for documentaries). Festivals were the main avenue for promoting a film.

I moved on to another project (which fell apart), then onto Found In Time. And the funny thing is, that while there are a lot of books out there on how to make your film, there are fewer on how to finish them, even fewer on how to distribute them, and none that I know of about how to do whatever happens after distribution. So I never really went through this before.

I can tell you that it’s a difficult process emotionally to untangle oneself from a project once its “finished,” and make plans for its entry into the world. Whenever I read the negative reviews, I wonder if I’ve made the film too inaccessible or too vague. Or I think that the marketing is off. Or I wonder if there’s a more ‘targeted’ distribution avenue out there.

Working on Bitter Child (and my television project, The Spectral City) is great, but it adds to the tension somewhat. It’s hard to work on more than one project at a time and give each one the proper attention and energy. And with The Spectral City, some more early-stage projects, and the need to make a living all jostling for attention. keeping sustained focus on any one thing can be difficult.

I still wake up every day happy to be in a position to make films and write and express myself, so don’t get the impression that it’s all doom and gloom. My grandparents and parents never had a chance to really pursue their artistic passions as fully as they would have liked. So I’m very lucky. This feeling of uncertainty about what my role is in regards to Found In Time – beyond being a sort of internet-age carnival barker (or wheatpaste band poster brigadier) – is something that’s akin to being a parent, I guess. We’ve raised the kid, and now it’s time to let it go and take on a supporting role in its life.

2014: Overrated and Underappreciated

aobff_group One of the highlights of the year for us: screening at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, where we won Best Feature Film!

Now that the Oscars are over, and March is nearly upon us, I figured it was time (finally) to talk about the overrated and underappreciated movies I saw in 2014. It was a great year for films, of all kinds and genres.

Keep in mind that this list represents neither the best nor worst films I saw. I just felt that the overrated ones (while sometimes great) got more praise than they deserved, while the underappreciated ones (while sometimes not great) didn’t get the recognition for what they did right.

The Overrated

Birdman and Interstellar: WHAT? Are you nuts? Well, look, I loved Birdman, but at the same time felt that Fellini covered this all with 8 1/2, and Kubrick set the bar with 2001. In other words, what looks brand new and fresh at first glance is really an extremely well-done version of what came before. Also, while I felt completely plugged into Birdman while I was watching it, I wasn’t sure it had the deeper resonance it was searching for. I think films about filmmaking (yes, I know it was a play, but the film was a tribute to Andre Bazin’s film theory) may be an exhausted trope. I would have to see it again, though.

Likewise, Interstellar was a great experience, but I was very put off by Hans Zimmer’s saccharine and overblown score (sometimes obscuring the dialog), the weird American heartland nostalgia trip, and the constant let’s-say-the-subtext-’cause-otherwise-people-might-not-get-the-point-of-the-scene. I felt the same way about Dark Knight Rises – Nolan’s forgotten the economy of show-vs-tell.

Gone Girl: Also well-crafted, interesting to watch, but forgettable. Fincher can do work that’s very engaging, but I wasn’t really at all interested in anyone in this film. Which is not a crime, but if you’re making a thriller you should be hoping things turn out well for someone.

Divergent: This was an interesting film, with good performances, and clear direction, but I felt it dragged a bit, and I’m not sure we need another dystopian YA film. But I’m willing to give the sequel a chance.

Noah: This could have been a truly horrid movie. The fact that it scored big with everyone (critics and fans, for the most part) should make me happy. But there was a part of me that would have loved to have seen the whole movie made in the tone of the second half of the film – as a somewhat naturalistic family drama, about the limits of blind religious faith and duty, humanism vs. theism, family vs. society, etc. But at the same time, I can see that perhaps the triumph of the second half wouldn’t have been possible without the ‘bombasticity’ of the first half.

Special mention goes to Words and Pictures: such great talent, and such potential for something interesting about art, language, love, learning… but I felt like the script had been sifted through the ‘development’ gears too many times until everything ran far too smoothly. It’s a further shame because the director (Fred Schepisi) has given us some really good films in the past (Last Orders is terrific, and Empire Falls isn’t bad) that have something to say.

Underappreciated

Enemy: What a fantastic, criminally under-seen film. Written and directed by the writer of Prisoners, this is a mind-twisty thriller/drama/political/sci-fi/wtf story that seems, at first, terribly artificial and maybe even bad. Until you think about it for a few days, and then you get whacked by its awesomeness. How many movies can you say that about?

The One I Love: This did get some real love from the critics, but it should have gotten a bigger release. A great mash-up of sci-fi, fantasy, dysfunctional couplehood, romance… it’s all there.

Noah: Yes, it’s on here twice. What many people didn’t appreciate about the film were the deeper themes lurking underneath the effects. There were some great performances here as well. And as much as I liked the second, “quieter” half of the film more, I also appreciate the audacity of the first half. So I guess I feel that Noah is both underappreciated AND overrated.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier got snubbed at the Oscars. A complex movie about the NSA, the role of the U.S. in world security, the influence of patriotism and the haunting of the present by the past; not to mention kick-ass fight scenes, great effects, terrific performances… and it took time to develop its characters, which was refreshing.

Edge of Tomorrow: Also screwed at the Oscars. Great performances, story, editing… the marketing folks just didn’t get this film.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: This film took a deeper look at the cost of civil war, the problematic nature of revolutionary movements, the creation of heroes, and stayed away from the action of the first two. The lack of big action set pieces was its strength, rather than a weakness.

Happy 2015

VIDEOLOGY SCREENING

Miami Sci-Fi 2015
As a fitting start to 2015, we’re returning to Brooklyn for a free screening at Videology! Join us on Monday, January 5th, @ 10pm at this unique bar/video store/screening room in the heart of Williamsburg (308 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, 11211). For details and RSVPs hit up the Facebook event page.

MIAMI SCI-FI

After that you can catch the film at the Miami Sci-Fi Film Festival! It will be screening Friday evening, January 23rd, at the beautiful beach-side Regency Hyatt. For details and tickets, visit Miscifi.com!

2014 IN REVIEW

As 2014 draws to a close, we salute all the wonderful people we’ve met along the Found In Time journey. Our family, friends, cast, crew, location owners, vendors, fans, festival programmers and staff, distributor staff… it takes a city, never mind a village.

This was a year of promoting and delivering the film, which has proved to be nearly as much work as making it was. We did a lot of research on promotion and publicity, and scored some great interviews and reviews – in “Starlog”, in Sci-Fi Saturday Night. We brought home four more awards, from Art of Brooklyn, Intendence, and Phoenix Comic-Con. We had some special screenings in non-festival venues – conventions, sci-fi meetup groups, and college campuses. We signed up with a foreign sales agent, TomCat Films. Our domestic distributor, Green Apple, worked tirelessly with us to get the film ready to go out on all the various platforms.

It was also a year of new beginnings. Every producer, at some point during a project, begins to yearn for something new. I certainly did. This year we launched two new projects – a supernatural war mini-series, “The Spectral City,” and a low-budget supernatural thriller, “Bitter Child.” While “Bitter Child” may get made first, we’re going to try a different approach – keeping two projects in the air at once.

We also – at Chaotic Sequence – expanded our efforts at film education. We’re still pushing my book on preproduction, Preparing For Takeoff, and pairing it up with one-day seminars on film prep. We’ll be doing more one day seminars in 2015 – on preproduction, visual storytelling, and more.

WHAT WE LEARNED

Probably the hardest part of 2014 was keeping so many irons in the fire – two projects in development, a book and workshops to push, a film to deliver and promote, and the everyday grind of making a living at budgeting, writing, teaching, and consulting. I’m at a point where I need to make some decisions as to how much effort to put into which projects, while having to acknowledge that I can’t do it all. So one of my goals for 2015 is to DIWO – Do It With Others. “Found In Time” was a wonderful collaborative experience. Now I need to replicate that on a larger scale.

Have a great new year!

Three Weeks From Release…

Some cool things are happening.

Awards!

We won the Best Sci-Fi Feature at Phoenix Comicon, and Best Sci-Fi and Best Audience Sci-Fi awards at Intendence Film Festival! Thank you to Intendence and Phoenix Comicon!

Made In NY Marketing Campaign Ad

We qualified for the Made In New York Marketing program, which means NYC will print and put up 250 subway and 20 bus shelter ads for our film – at no cost! Here’s a pic of our team looking over a rough copy of the subway poster:

Made In NY Marketing Poster Team

Screenings

We’re organizing some non-festival screenings in September, October and November, timed to the release of the film. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted.

I know we haven’t written a ‘how-to’ or diary entry in a while. Things are a little hectic right now. We’ll post more in-depth pieces in a short while.