Category: Industry

by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Essays, Film Festivals, Industry

SIFF 2011: Smilin’ through – Is anybody really trying?

Written by Kathleen Murphy June 8, 2011

“You know, the director will be in town on Friday. Would you like to interview him?”

That’s how I was welcomed today by an eager young publicist to SIFF’s 10 a.m. screening for press and passholders of Hong-jin Na’s The Yellow Sea. “Let me check out the movie first,” I replied. But that was not to be, thanks to yet another technical screwup on the part of our hometown festival.

When The Yellow Sea hit the screen, a prologue in English explained the very particular players and setting of this “great and gory” South Korean film (as described by The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, at the Cannes Film Festival). Then the main action began, there was dialogue—in Korean—and the audience sat tight, in dead silence, as the film continued … sans subtitles. Finally, someone—all right, it was me—shouted, “Stop the movie!” Nothing happened. The Yellow Sea rolled on.

Surely this can’t be happening again, I thought. Once might be excusable, but twice, on consecutive days, is just plain incompetence. You see, exactly 24 hours earlier, in the same venue (Pacific Place Cinemas), the 10 a.m. audience for the much-anticipated Norwegian Wood by Tranh Anh Hung watched bewildered as the Japanese-language film unreeled, for several minutes, sans subtitles. Eventually someone from SIFF was heard to mumble from the sidelines that “the projectionist isn’t going to start the film over again.” Mass exodus ensued.

What, exactly, had happened? Pressed to say something, one SIFF staffer speculated whether an unsubtitled version had been mistakenly sent from Japan. Even he didn’t seem to believe that was likely (we’re talking about a U.S. Premiere engagement). And what, exactly, did that curious phrase mean—”the projectionist isn’t going to start the film over again”? The projectionist refuses to? Won’t be asked to? If the projectionist had tried again, might he have hit the right button and activated subtitles that were there after all? If so, why not give it a shot? Or were we past a point of no return, and it wasn’t feasible to set the day’s screening schedule back, jeopardizing regular theater showings?

Were we talking technical error, or incompetence coupled with indifference? Who knows? SIFF never explains. Doesn’t have to.

Continue reading at Straight Shooting

by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Industry, Technology

Ghosts of the MGM Limited Edition Collection

Written by Sean Axmaker May 9, 2011

A batch of discs from the MGM Limited Edition Collection, a MOD (manufacture-on-demand) line of releases sold exclusively via the web, was manufactured with errors in the image. In particular scenes with dark objects or hard lines set against a bright or neutral backgrounds, a halo effect, or ghosting, can be seen in the radiating out from the image (see frame captures below for an example). The problem, which has since corrected by Allied Vaughn (the company partnering with Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment in the enterprise), was the result of a faulty transcoder used in the replication process, according to a spokesperson from Fox.

The problems appear to be limited to discs replicated during a particular window of time—the discs where I noticed the issue all arrived in early April—and a particular machine. And they are most apparent on black-and-white films, though the Africa scenes of How I Won The War, with soldiers set against the desert or the clear sky, are also quite noticeable, especially on high definition widescreen monitors.

Note the ghosting of the antenna against the blue sky at the top of frame

The issue curiously went unreported and most DVD reviewers did not notice or comment upon it. I first noticed the issue on The Captive City, a black-and-white film noir with some stark, simple compositions—the haloing jumped out at me in every close shot of John Forsythe against a blank wall or an empty sky—and after confirming the issue on multiple players and monitors, I contacted a few colleagues and searched the web to see if anyone else had found the same issues. At the time, only one post on Home Theater Forum found the same ghosting on their discs and provided screen caps for illustration (thanks to the every vigilant DVD Savant Glenn Erickson for alerting me to that post). A few reviewers have since made similar observations.

Continue reading at MSN Videodrone

by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Noir, Film Reviews, Industry

It’s Twilight Time: The Kremlin Letter and Violent Saturday debut on DVD in limited editions

Written by Sean Axmaker May 5, 2011

The DVD debut of John Huston’s sprawling, globetrotting 1970 espionage thriller The Kremlin Letter is also the debut release of Twilight Time, a new boutique DVD label (that’s actual pressed DVDs, not DVD-R or MOD) featuring limited run releases of select titles from the 20^th Century Fox library. The creation of Warner Bros. veteran Brian Jamieson and filmmaker/music restoration specialist Nick Redman, the label is initially slated to release one disc a month (and later perhaps more), all from the 20^th Century Fox catalogue, all from Fox digital masters, all in limited edition runs of 3,000 units.

“All our releases will be properly manufactured DVD’s and Blu-Rays – we were not interested in the DVD-R’s, as we feel they do an injustice to the titles in the long run,” explains Brian Jamieson. “While I’m sure collectors will find they fill a void in their collections, but we wanted to deliver a quality product, something that meets our own expectations and something we could be proud of. We love the old Fox film classics, especially from the 50’s.”

John Huston has been accused of cynicism in his films but The Kremlin Letter, a complicated plot of Cold War spy games is the most cold-blooded portrait of an mercenary world he’s ever presented. Charisma-challenged Patrick O’Neal is the ostensible leading man here, playing a career Navy officer coerced into joining a covert private team and go behind the Iron Curtain to retrieve a diplomatically dangerous letter, but in the scheme of things he’s just another player in a big, messy, tangled ensemble piece. Richard Boone is the standout as a hearty bear of an intelligence veteran who mentors O’Neal in the insidious games played in the name of counter-intelligence, and George Sanders (first seen in drag playing piano in a gay lounge), Nigel Green (a pimp in Mexico), Dean Jagger (hiding out a country vicar) and Max Von Sydow (as a deadly Soviet assassin who, haunted by his past, may be the most human figure in the bunch) fill out the deadly rogues gallery.

The colorful figures and their elaborate schemes (involving extortion, seduction, prostitution and the drug trade) is like Mission: Impossible in the unforgiving culture of international espionage of John Le Carre’s double agents and plots-within-plots. This is not a world where trust gets you anywhere and even the so-called good guys resort to subterfuge and manipulation in dealing with their own people. The personal endgames drive the international agenda and the players are expendable pieces in the elaborate international chess match.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Essays, Industry

Dinosaurs in the Age of the Cinemobile

Written by Richard T. Jameson December 9, 2010

John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn in Henry Hathaway's 'True Grit'

WHEN BILLY WILDER’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes opened at Christmastime 1970, no one would give it the time of day – literally. In my city, though a cozy relationship with United Artists forced the local theater circuit to book the film into one of the few remaining downtown movie palaces, they had no expectation that it would attract an audience. If you called the theater, asked “When’s the next show?”, and acted accordingly, you would arrive to find yourself in midfilm. Telephone lines had been juggled so that the staff could handle incoming calls for the sister theater across the street, where Love Story was doing land-office business. It never occurred to them that anyone might be interested in “the show” on their own screen, so they automatically gave out the Love Story schedule.

This was an extraordinary case – even if we set aside the outré management practice (I have never heard of a comparable instance of procedural hara-kiri) and the eventual recognition of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as at the very least an enchanting entertainment, and at best one of the summum masterworks of the cinema. (On that first weekend, the only one the film would have, I watched the evening show with seven other people in the auditorium.) Yet the film’s complete failure in 1970 was, in several respects, definitive of that moment in film history.

For one thing, Holmes was just the sort of sumptuously appointed, nostalgically couched superproduction that once would have seemed tailor-made to rule the holiday season. Only two Christmases before, Carol Reed’s Oliver! had scored a substantial hit, and gone on to win Academy Awards for itself and its director (a “fallen idol” two decades past his prime). Yet in 1969-70, the mid-Sixties vogue for three- and four-hour roadshows – reserved-seat special attractions with souvenir programmes and intermissions – abruptly bottomed out. Indeed, after witnessing such box-office debacles (and lousy movies) as Star and Paint Your Wagon, United Artists demanded that Wilder shorten his film by nearly an hour before they would release it at all.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Industry

Memories of a moviehouse

Written by Richard T. Jameson December 3, 2010

The Uptown Cinemas in Lower Queen Anne lie dark. The site’s 84-year history as a movie showcase came to an end Sunday evening, Nov. 28.

AMC, the national chain that had operated the theater in recent years, announced a few weeks back that its “Uptown 3 has been identified as a theatre that no longer competes effectively in the marketplace.” Who am I to argue? In this millennium I’ve gone to the Uptown mostly to attend advance screenings. Those were jampacked. On other, rare visits to catch a movie already in release, I pretty much had the place to myself.

That’s not how I remember it from my first days in Seattle. When I arrived in autumn 1965, the Uptown still had one screen. So did all the other theaters in the area, but the Uptown wasn’t just another moviehouse. It seemed uptown in the Manhattan sense (like the Beekman or 68th Street), classy and smart. What was on that single screen was usually distinctive, and audiences turned out for it.

At that time there were a handful of Seattle movie theaters with some claim to being called arthouses – theaters where foreign, independent or otherwise “niche” films were shown. Only the Ridgemont up on Greenwood was committed full time to this specialized market, especially subtitled foreign-language films, but the Uptown was among the hemi-semi-demi arthouses – to appropriate a nuance from “What’s New, Pussycat?,” a Woody Allen-scripted comedy of that era. So were the U District’s Varsity and Wallingford’s Guild 45th. More often than not, these places were showing something other than mainstream Hollywood releases.

For my grad-student money, the Uptown outpointed the others. It was then part of the vast Sterling Recreation Organization empire, the one where SRO would book the first runs of such English-language esoterica as The Knack … and How to Get It. The Knack was the brilliant, multiple-envelope-pushing farce Richard Lester had managed to knock off in between his Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!; it took the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, featuring Rod Steiger’s powerhouse performance (and some transgressive nudity), opened there and, if memory serves, was subsequently hailed by The Seattle Times’ John Hartl as best film of the year.

I believe The Collector made its local bow at the Uptown, and Roman Polanski’s English-language debut Repulsion. If What’s New, Pussycat? did or didn’t open there (that would have been just before my time), Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? certainly did. Nineteen sixty-eight brought Petulia, Lester’s sad, appalled satire on the contemporary American scene. That’s the last title I associate with the Uptown’s golden age, though don’t take that to the bank.

I’ve tried to Google up more history of the theater’s evolution, to nail down just when SRO sold the place, and when it was infected with the multiplex virus. (So far, the Uptown, unlike the Ridgemont, isn’t historic enough for Wikipedia.) For an interim of indefinite length, it appears that the once-singular theater did serve as just another among many movie emporia. True, in recent years there were signs of the old arthouse identity being reconstituted; but even when one or more of the three latterday screens were occupied by a foreign or otherwise arty, offbeat picture, it was rarely an exclusive booking. The Uptown’s days as a destination moviehouse were long past.

One thing you can find via Google is the cyber footsteps of a “New Uptown Cinema” movement. Some people are missing their neighborhood theater already, and dream of reviving and transforming it. We may yet see it light up again on the northwest corner of Queen Anne Ave and West Republican.

A final note, irrelevant and yet I can’t let it go. We rarely telephone movie theaters anymore because it’s easier to whistle up showtimes via the Internet and avoid those minutes-long multiplex recorded announcements. Back in Seattle’s single-screen era I used to phone all the time to check the schedule. I memorized the Uptown’s number early on and somehow have never forgot it. Then again, if I did, I had only to look in the phonebook: in 40some years it never changed. 285-1022. Goodbye, and thanks.

Books, by Richard T. Jameson, Commentary, Contributors, Industry

Tear sheets

Written by Richard T. Jameson November 22, 2010

In the age of Netflix, when just about any film made anywhere can be summoned painlessly to your mailbox [or streamed to your flatscreen], we do well to remember that once upon a time there were only a handful of independently operated movie theaters in the United States dedicated to showing foreign-language cinema. Prints were few, sane distributors fewer, and even as the beleaguered exhibitors struggled to build an audience for “movies you had to read,” often as not they had to fight off local censor boards, right-wing xenophobes, and self-appointed arbiters of morality and decency. Jim Selvidge was one of these cultural heroes (if you can feature a hero in horn-rimmed glasses heavy enough to tilt the Titanic). Singlehandedly at times, he championed Bergman, Godard, Buñuel, Kurosawa, et al., put the Seattle Censor Board out of business, founded the Seattle Film Society, and enticed his community to take the first decisive steps toward acquiring a reputation as one of the savviest movie towns in the country. It’s an important story.

I wrote that blurb for Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa: The Foreign Film in America, James N. Selvidge’s memoir of a couple decades as a Seattle film exhibitor. Chances are the name doesn’t ring a bell – unless, perhaps, you’re into horseracing. That’s the field Selvidge went into bigtime in the 1970s, after U.S. interest in the foreign-film scene shrank drastically, and he rode those horses a long way. In fact, his website is named horsestalk (though I’m not sure whether that’s “horses talk” or “horse stalk” … never mind).

Non-horse people knew the name when I arrived in Seattle in autumn 1965. Selvidge had made major contributions to the local scene, not just culturally but also politically. His activist stance in the previous decade had been key to delivering a potentially world-class city from the provincial constraints of a film censor board, and his profile was high enough that right-wingers circulated the rumor (and probably believed it) that you could get into Selvidge’s Ridgemont Theatre for free if you whispered the letters “ACLU” through the box-office window. Good times.

Breaking News on Net Neutrality from Lloyd Kaufman

Written by Editor August 5, 2010

The following press release was sent by Lloyd Kaufman, President of Troma Entertainment and Chairperson of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, in response to the report in The New York Times about a possible deal that would allow Google and Verizon greater access to the Internet, which they would then sell to customers at a premium. To quote the article, which was published on August 4: “Such an agreement could overthrow a once-sacred tenet of Internet policy known as net neutrality, in which no form of content is favored over another. In its place, consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service.”

We reprint the letter in its entirety. Please feel free to copy, paste and run on your site and blogs or E-mail around. (See also our interview with Lloyd Kaufman on Parallax View, where he discusses, among other things, his efforts to fight for net neutrality in the face of corporate pressure.)

Dear Colleagues:

As many of you may know, there is disastrous news on the front page of The New York Times today. Verizon and other mega-conglomerates have conspired to kill the last democratic medium: the Internet. It is imperative that we all take action immediately to fight for the only true agent of free information and diversity left in this country. Please spread my anti-mega-conglomerate PSA to all your contacts and post it on your blogs. Call the FCC and your elected representatives and urge them to defend net neutrality. Go to Save the Internet and contribute your thoughts. We must use the Internet to speak out on this matter while we still can.

by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Industry, Interviews

“I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my movies very seriously” – Lloyd Kaufman Interviewed

Written by Sean Axmaker April 15, 2010

The world knows Lloyd Kaufman (or rather, the part of the world that has heard of Lloyd Kaufman knows him) as the face of Troma Films and the director of the notoriously outrageous zero-budget cult-classic The Toxic Avenger and sequels. Fewer people know that he’s directed dozens of films (including the 2006 return to form Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, now also on–yes, it’s true–Blu-ray), produced scores more and made appearances in over a hundred genuinely independently-produced movies (partly out of solidarity with directors working outside the system, partly to promote the Troma brand). And some may even know that he’s the author of numerous books, most recently the guerrilla how-to guide Direct Your Own Damn Movie!, and a producer of documentaries and box sets devoted to practical tips on low-budget filmmaking.

What is less well known is his commitment to independent filmmaking. Not the kind of multi-million dollar films with major stars and studio backing that Hollywood brands as “Independent,” but independently financed and produced films made and seen outside the studio system. He’s the president of The Independent Film and Television Alliance, the trade association for the independent movie industry, and has been actively engaged in the fight to preserve net neutrality. And he created the TromaDance Film Festival, unique in the spectrum of American film festivals in that it does not charge filmmakers a fee to submit their films nor does it charge admission to the shows.

I interviewed Lloyd Kaufman in June 2009, when he was in Seattle for a horror convention. Troma’s tireless publicist arranged an opportunity for me to interview him between appearances and we spent over an hour in his hotel lobby talking about everything from the democratization filmmaking to corporate stranglehold on the distribution and exhibition of movies in the U.S. (from theaters to TV) to the origins of Troma.

As the 11^th Annual TromaDance Film Festival prepares to unspool on April 16, 2010, in its new home at Asbury Park, New Jersey, we present this lively interview with the outspoken and passionate Lloyd Kaufman. And be prepared: Kaufman is not shy about letting his passions through in very colorful language. Take it as you will, as warning or enticement.

You have a very interesting set of credits. You worked on Rocky and you were production manager on My Dinner With Andre.

Yes, I was indeed. Those movies, Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, those were my film school.

How did you move from working on those industry productions to creating the outsider studio Troma?

I was making my own movies constantly, I was always making my own damn movies and I was interested in long form, so at the one time we were trying to figure out… I did Sugar Cookies in 1970, I didn’t direct it, I made the mistake of just raising money and writing and producing, and then the distribution didn’t work out too well. And then we made a movie in Israel that’s probably the worst movie in history, called Big Gus, What’s the Fuss (1971), it’s the only movie I’m embarrassed to show and we got screwed on that one, and then Michael Herz and I decided that we had better learn distribution, and that’s when we started Troma in 1974 to both produce and distribute ourselves. Of course in those days there was just theatrical.

DVD, Industry, Technology

Warner Archive Collection – New Access to Old Movies

Written by Sean Axmaker March 28, 2009June 9, 2020

Warner’s launch of the Warner Archive Collection, its new DVD on Demand site, was well covered earlier this week (see The New York Times’ The Carpetbagger, Susan King at the LA Times and Lou Leminick at the New York Post) but there’s been little follow-up in the days since. Maybe that’s because we’re all waiting for that first disc to arrive before we pass judgment in the efficiency of the system and the quality of the discs. There was a pretty slow response time when I got on the site on Monday, March 23. It had been launched a week earlier but this was the date that the press releases went out and the home video sites and related blogs all spread the news. Everyone needed to check it out and a lot of folks made their first order.

The site launched with a curious collection of 150 films from the Warner Entertainment library of pre-1986 films from MGM, RKO Radio Pictures and Warner Bros., from westerns to romance, science fiction to melodrama, each one priced at $19.95 (or $14.95 for a digital download). They have little broad commercial appeal but have their fans, as evidenced by requests made over the years on sites like Turner Classic Movies and Amazon. Some of the more familiar titles include All Fall Down with Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint, Mr. Lucky with Cary Grant (it was ubiquitous on VHS but nowhere to be found on DVD), Abe Lincoln in Illinois with Raymond Massey and Possessed starring Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. There’s plenty of early Greta Garbo and second-tier Clark Gable and Joan Crawford and Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy titles, as well as auteur oddities like The Bamboo Blonde (Anthony Mann) Countdown (Robert Altman) and The Rain People (Francis Ford Coppola). I was most excited by the silent film selection and I ordered Rex Ingram’s 1923 Scaramouche. Just yesterday I just received confirmation that my order was sent (free shipping, UPS ground) and is expected to arrive on Tuesday, March 31. It a simple, no-frills disc, just the movie in a case with sleek artwork (and, if available, the original trailer), and George Feltenstein, senior vice president of theatrical catalog marketing for Warner Home Video, promises that they are all presented in their original aspect ratio. Given their source (most, if not all, have already been remastered and run on Turner Classic Movies), we should expect good quality transfers and mastering.

DVD, Essays, Industry

DVD for the Week – Remembering New Yorker Films 1965-2009

Written by Sean Axmaker February 23, 2009June 9, 2020

I got the news from Girish Shambu (via Facebook), who directed me to a report on IndieWire by Eugene Hernandez, who confirmed it: New Yorker Films is closing its doors. The devastating news is on the New Yorker homepage.

Anyone who was active in film culture in the days before the video business gave us access to many (though by no means all) of the classics of world cinema will remember New Yorker Films. When repertory theaters and college film programs were our only access to foreign films new and old, New Yorker distributed new films from great directors around the globe and built a small but essential library that kept in circulation the works of such auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard, Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, Werner Herzog, Louis Malle, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ousmane Sembene… the list goes on and on. The prints weren’t cheap, but they kept the works and the artists alive.

When home video changed the landscape of film distribution and pretty much ended the culture of repertory cinema, New Yorker’s print library found fewer venues for theatrical showings. The rights for home video distribution were not in those original contracts and foreign studios shopped many of those rights around to other video distributors and, later, DVD labels. I hadn’t heard the rumblings at New Yorker, but I saw the signs. DVDs were announced, then delayed, then delayed again. The number of titles on their schedule dwindled. And, to be honest, New Yorker was still looking to define itself on DVD. They were late to mastering widescreen films in anamorphic widescreen. The quality of DVD masters, while fine, often showed the telltale signs of PAL-to-NTSC conversion, rather than a fresh digital master for American DVD. Supplements were slim, if there were any. Criterion had established itself as the gold standard for classics on DVD. New Yorker struggled to catch up, but you could see the efforts in recent releases.

But I imagine that the real culprit in New Yorker’s demise is the changing face of film distribution: foreign films are finding a harder time finding screens, local coverage of non-mainstream films is dwindling, and even the alternative weeklies in major cities can’t be counted upon to cover these films that live and die by local support.