Filmmakers

Ed Burns Guests On New Sundance Channel Series

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Ed Burns Guests On New Sundance Channel Series

Last weekend I posted a blog about actor/writer/director Ed Burns premiering his new self-financed indie Newlyweds (a cousin effort in naked filmmaking). This morning I received an e-mail from an east coast promotions agency asking me to share with the readers of this site about a new series that’s been running on the Sundance Channel in which Ed Burns is one of the special guests. This Monday at 8PM the Sundance Channel is featuring Ed Burns in new episode of their series The Mortified Sessions where celebrities share their most embarrassing stories from before they were famous, from awkward childhood photos to...

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Ed Burns makes “Newlyweds” for $9,000 with a Canon 5D

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Ed Burns makes “Newlyweds” for $9,000 with a Canon 5D

How long have I been saying to aspiring & first-time independent filmmakers that theatrical distribution is not only dead, it is nonexistent? Filmmaker Ed Burns became one of the Sundance stars and indie filmmaker poster childred with his $20,000 16mm feature The Brothers McMullen — a great film with some of the best performances I’ve scene in films. The DVD has one of the...

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Jimmy Ennett – Australian Naked Filmmaker

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Jimmy Ennett – Australian Naked Filmmaker

A few months ago I was reviewing my Youtube account and saw a mile of comments left on my videos. A few of them were from a young filmmaker in Australia named Jimmy Ennett who said that he was a one-man filmmaker, too, and that he’d even bought my book Naked Filmmaking. This was very personally uplifting for me to learn that not only was Naked Filmmaking reaching beyond U.S. borders, but that it was also spreading out into new hemispheres. I quickly sent this young compatriot a thank you e-mail and we began corresponding. I wanted to know...

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Matthew Modine – “You don’t need all that stuff” – Part 3 of 3

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Matthew Modine – “You don’t need all that stuff” – Part 3 of 3

Here is a portion of my interview with Matthew Modine on 12-9-2011 where he discusses shooting his new short film Jesus Was A Commie on the streets of New York City with just a Canon 5D DSLR and a few friends. As well as the influence that the legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick had on him about how you don’t need a lot of gear to make a movie, just a good idea. I spoke about Full Metal Jacket Diary. Matthew Modine’s book of photographs he took on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, as well as the...

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Matthew Modine – KCRA Common Ground Profile – Part 2 of 3

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Matthew Modine – KCRA Common Ground Profile – Part 2 of 3

Every now and then in the business of TV news you get a chance to meet and do a story on someone who’s work you admire and who had been a part of something historic. Matthew Modine is an actor and filmmaker who has been working in films for almost the same length of time that I’ve been working in TV news. His most well-known work is quite possibly in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. It was a film an an experience that left a lasting impression on Modine. Kubrick’s independent style in filmmaking went much deeper than in...

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Matthew Modine – From Joker to Jesus – Part 1 0f 3

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Matthew Modine – From Joker to Jesus – Part 1 0f 3

Several weeks ago I received an e-mail from a friend and former co-worker at KCRA asking if I could help out a filmmaker friend of hers. Her friend had a short film and wanted to know more about some of the northern California film festivals. Of course, I was glad to share my knowledge and experiences. Then I was told that her filmmaker friend was Matthew Modine. Cutting to the chase, I am a total Stanley Kubrick fan. And to learn that I was being asked to share some film festival knowledge with a lead actor who spent two...

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The Book That Changed My Life

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The Book That Changed My Life

I was born in 1955. I loved movies as a kid and by around 1967 or so I was already thinking about wanting to make my own. I’d even started writing my own scripts. But cinema studies and film production was still very new. In Los Angeles, one of the colleges, U.C.L.A., had started a film school, but even then it was pretty ramshackle. There were only a few published books on the subject back then. Most were on film theory, written my English professors turned film analysts. I didn’t understand what they were talking about then and I...

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John Cassavetes Making “Husbands” – A Rare Insight

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John Cassavetes Making “Husbands” – A Rare Insight

Years ago PBS’ American Masters broadcast a 90-minute profile on John Cassavetes. To be honest, I’d grown up reading about the importance of Cassavetes and how critics raved about his films. My first Cassavetes movie was Husbands, which CBS ran in their early days of late-night programming. I hated it. This was not filmmaking to me at that time. This was just turning on the camera and rolling. There was no story and no drama. It was just filling time. Keep in mind, I was still a teenager at the time. A few years later A Woman Under The...

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Richard Brooks – The “Secret” Writer-Producer-Director

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Richard Brooks – The “Secret” Writer-Producer-Director

Richard Brooks is one of my filmmaker heroes and role models. Whenever I’m writing a film script I always imagine to myself, “How would Richard Brooks approach this.” Brooks was a writer-producer-director, one of the “hyphenate” filmmakers who I admire. But first and foremost, Richard Brooks was a writer. He was an MGM contract writer-director in the 1950s, sometimes churning out as many as three movies a year, which he both wrote the screenplay for and directed. He was also one of the first studio directors who insisted on sitting in on the editing. At that time, most directors...

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Steven Spielberg – Director-Cameraman

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Steven Spielberg – Director-Cameraman

In my on-going series showing clips of major directors who also operate their own camera, as opposed to the stereotype of standing behind a bank of monitors with a cup of Starbucks in their hand. This clip shows Steven Spielberg on the set of Jurassic Park directing actors, blocking the scene, and operating his own Panavision camera and skillfully working the geared head wheels, one of the hardest feats to master. Notice how quickly and efficiently he works. Early in his career he was known for doing ten to twenty takes on everything. Here you see him grabbing shots...

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