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Truly Free Film

The San Francisco Film Community’s Continual Rise

The best things in life bring multiple rewards.  

If you can solve a problem by improving other things simultaneously, you know everyone is going to win.  Besides, we all have way too much to get done, that it only makes sense to kill two birds with one stone whenever humanly possible.  I think the San Francisco Film Society and I may have just accomplished this remarkable feat.  Let’s see

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These Are Those Things

Happy Birthday Fog City Mavericks!

It was on this day, 43 years ago, that Francis Ford Coppola and friends, established Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco.  Indie owes it heart to them.

 

Fog City Mavericks – Part 1 of 5 from Gary Leva on Vimeo.

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Truly Free Film

Indie Owes It’s Heart To San Francisco

@LaFamiliaFilm tipped me to this truly inspirational documentary on the CinephileArchive blog. Where would be without Zoetrope?

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Truly Free Film

Is Our Film Culture Designed To Create Corporate Hucksters?

Sometimes it serves us to let our dark paranoia run rampant.  I have always had a love affair with conspiracy theories, but it is one of longing more than indulgence.  If only governments and people in general cared enough about other people to actually strategize to the extent needed to control things to the level most conspiracy theories fantasize.  But maybe instead of politics and community being the focus, the conspiracies exist in the pursuit of profit.  Sometimes looking at the result of business structures as their intent instead of their coincidental effect sheds further light on a complicated situation.

We all know that there is a substantial flaw to our film infrastructure: artists and their supporters are not rewarded for the work they generate.  I speak of this as a problem.  If the industry actually tried to make sure that the people who made the work benefited from the work, we’d have more money in the system, and it would probably be smarter money (that knew enough to let the filmmakers have creative control — or at least more of it) at that.  But all evidence points to the fact that the film industry wants to prevent creators from financially benefiting from their work.  We can change that (and I am going to try), but that’s for another post about why I have chosen to work for a not-for-profit.

Let’s let our dark side work for us for a moment:  if the model is not broken, but actually works, what is it trying to do?  Why would the film business not want creators to benefit?  Is it to give more people the opportunity to become filmmakers and investors since the current system virtually drives out all the experienced filmmakers and investors?  Ah, alas, much evidence exists to show that access and opportunity is not of interest to film business leaders (like the disproportional representation of white males — such as myself).  So what could it be?

What happens to those that survive in the film business?  If filmmakers can’t survive by making feature films, how do they survive?  There’s been one business strand that long has been there with a helping hand  to the creative class and it seems like even our greats have long had to indulge in their offerings.  Is the whole of film culture designed to create cinematic masters who then must be slaves to Madison Avenue and their international equivalents?

Fellini:

Evidently these bank commercials were the last films Fellini ever made, and they aired after he died.

I don’t think commercials kill directors, but I do think

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Truly Free Film

What Is The Great Hope For The Future Of Cinema?

Or for that matter, what do you think can really change and move things forward in both the near and distant future? If we could ask five key people what they saw on our various horizons, what would they show us? Who should we ask?  One of the great things about being pointed in a direction, is that it is almost a path. Could we have walked down that road when Francis Ford Coppola predicted YouTube in 1991:

It is not easy to just boil down to one specific all the various change that is swarming over us at this point.  I see major shifts coming in so many different aspects of cinema: discovery, consideration, value/return, participation, collaboration, transitioning, immersion, and many others.

Categories
Let's Make Better Films

Francis Ford Coppola Is Here To Teach Us All

FilmSchoolRejects tipped me to this great interview The99percent did with Francis Ford Coppola.  As we started out with Good Machine, only two established players ever reached out to us, David Picker and Francis.  His generosity of spirit and love of cinema is evident in this piece.  The entire interview is a treat and a wealth of knowledge and good advice.  Among it:

When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.

The reason it’s important to have this is because

Categories
Issues and Actions

AMERICA’S LEADING FILMMAKERS CALL FOR RELEASE OF IMPRISONED IRANIAN DIRECTOR JAFAR PANAHI

I am so heartened by this action. These filmmakers are all real leaders. I love that they have spoken up for artists’ right of freedom of expression on a worldwide basis. We enjoy tremendous freedom here in the USA, but until that is shared by everyone, none of us can truly be free. We must be united in preserving this right for all.

Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford, Francis Ford Coppola, Terrence Malick, Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Bros., Jim Jarmusch, Michael Moore, Ang Lee, Robert De Niro, and Oliver Stone, among other leading film industry figures, have condemned the detention of Jafar Panahi, the acclaimed director of “The White Balloon” and “Offside,” and are urging the Iranian government to release him