I often think of that Talking Heads song that goes, "You may ask yourself, where did I get this beautiful car, where did I get this beautiful wife, how did I get here?" The older I get the more prophetic it is. Simple decisions, such as what neighborhood to live in have such profound impacts on our lives, who we...
Last Night I went to a screening of a friends film. This friend is a one-man band and after three years of working on the film he’s done- finished- kaput. However, I still have some notes for him….. It is a great film, but it could be better, and I believe, reach a much wider audience with a few tweaks. After...
This has been a very intense, but positive, week on a number of fronts. For the past couple of years we have been struggling with our direction as filmmakers. We've spent a lot of energy developing TV projects, not out of a love for TV, but instead because it is nearly impossible to raise funds for the kind of films that...
The revolving door between government and industry doesn't just exist in the armed services and financial fields. A lot of the issues at play in our film, "Battle for Brooklyn" (click on link to see discussion of title) have to do with the revolving door between developers and the government and the government/developers and journalism. It's difficult to find a way...
There's a pretty amazing Gil Scott-Heron article in this weeks New Yorker. It's a rare piece of writing that reads like a well edited documentary film. So much of the time, even in good articles, the writing is almost as much about the writer as it is about the subject. It's kind of understandable that this would be the case, because...
As we get closer to having a finished film, we've started to focus increasingly on our plans for it. While strategizing about distribution, we are also thinking about presentation. The most important aspect of presentation is the name. For at least a year we have been working with the title "Battle of Brooklyn." However, we have become increasingly dissatisfied with...
DSLR video has had a tremendous impact on us over here at Rumur. The image quality is so much better than standard HD cameras that it has inspired a whole new wave of ideas. Before we made our first feature film, "Half-Cocked," Suki said to me, "If we can make it look anything like your photos, we'll be all right." At...
We were down by the river, the family and I, walking around in our river shoes like the summer people that we are. A shy looking boy with a fishing pole approached just as the wife and older girl were heading off to find a bathroom. The little girl and I stuck around to watch the fishing. The shy boy turned...
Yesterday would have been my father's 76th birthday. Four and half years ago he tried to cross a highway at night wearing all black. He didn't make it. I'm so much like him that it's hard for me not to be aware of him in some ways almost all the time. At dinner last night I was reminiscing about him and...
Last night, we were lucky enough to get a babysitter so that we could go see Richard Brody discuss his book, "Everything is Cinema" about Jean-luc Godard. We actually missed the majority of the discussion while grabbing dinner, but the dessert was getting to see "A Married Woman". It was inspiring in its simple complexity. In working on our current project,...
On the DSR list serve a person, recently referred to "donors," lurking on the edges of the discussion. Several donors wrote in response that they didn't appreciate the reference. Several other posters, including the list's admin, were quick to defend the use of the term. While I understood that the OP meant no harm it pointed to a bit of...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/health/13mind.html?8dpc This NY Times article touches on something I was discussing with my intern today as he set to work organizing materials for donor 67. Nature is a lot more powerful than people wanted to believe in the last couple of decades. The ascendant idea was that with good nurturing/parenting almost all obstacles could be overcome....