Posts Tagged ‘ writer-directors ’

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 – 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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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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