If one were to judge the Occupy Wall Street movement based on my friends' facebook feeds, it would be clear that the revolution was over and that we had won. Creative people would forever be free to be creative and the tyranny and corruption of "efficency" would be banished from the land. As such I might have an irrationally exuberant...
I stayed up late last night looking at footage from the occupy wall street protest. For the most part it’s pretty mild stuff. There are very few truncheons swinging. Yet the tone of dismissal and power is overwhelming. There’s a palpable anger among the officers even as the protesters remain non-violent. What’s even more disturbing is that the white shirts...
I haven’t been down to Wall Street yet. I almost went today with my 5 year old after we biked to Chinatown, but it felt wrong. I am in full support of raising questions and I am appalled by both the press and the police brutality. Part of the reason I haven’t gone is that I have a very hard time...
Pain. We all have our relationships with, and definitions of, pain. There are certain kinds of pain that I don't mind, that I even like a little. The soreness in my muscles from a long run the day before is a reminder of something accomplished. A little bit of emotional pain can lead to cathartic art. However, right now I'm dealing...
In the age of the internet, to a disturbing degree, snark is much more important than fact. “Reputable” news gathering organizations seem to be devoid of fact checkers and editors are loathe to issue corrections even when the stated facts are clearly wrong. Snark is employed to tell the story the “reporter” sets out to tell, rather than having to...
At Rumur we tend to make films that focus on people who go against the grain of the system. As we have matured, our characters have matured, but they are still outsiders who have difficulty going with the flow when the flow is going in a different direction than they think it should. Our very first film, "Half-Cocked" (1993), isn't a...
We locked picture (at least on the first reel) and the sound mixer, Alex at Resoundpost, is hard at work on the sound mix. In a couple of days filmmaker Greg King (Our House) will start doing finish work on the picture. This morning we have been working with our indispensable composer David Reid, who along with Derek Bermel, has been...
Last week a good friend, and academy nominated doc director, gave us some great notes on our rough cut. He had seen a somewhat earlier version of the film so it was great to hear his notes because we had already addressed about 80% of them. At the same time, he asked a series of sharp questions about what we were...
About a year and a half ago - when we launched our first kickstarter campaign to help fund Battle for Brooklyn (a doc we have been working on for 7.5 years), I did a great deal of planning. I took the game theory aspect very seriously. We knew that we had networks of people that we could tap into, and...