Netflix and other streaming services are implementing something that Hollywood isn't good at: the kind of affirmative-action quotas that hamstring European film and TV content....
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Sorting through the Easter eggs scattered across HBO Max's 'Raised by Wolves', Ridley Scott's superlative new show. ...
A photograph of Cookie Mueller by Nan Goldin on HBO's "The Deuce" brings back to the roaring downtown scene of the mid-80s and the AIDS epidemic....
It seems essential for many fictional detectives to have insurmountable personal issues and challenges. But why?...
I’m mentoring a young friend through the process of writing and directing his first feature, which he’ll shoot in a year; he’s still in development tweaking the script before it goes out to cast. His executive producer, the former president of a major studio, said to him the other day, “Your cinematographer is the most important person on set after you.” I couldn’t agree more.
There’s nothing like working with a great DP, it makes all the difference in the world to the outcome of your film on many levels. The most important level for me is the personal, the experience of making a film. I don’t get to direct often, so when I do I want to enjoy it, to be carried away by, yes, the quasi-spiritual experience of creating something worthy in harmony with my crew, as cheesy as that might sound.
A couple of weeks ago I was in a preliminary meeting for a TV series I am being commissioned to write. One of the associated producers, who has hitherto exclusively made reality-TV fare, suggested the characters break the fourth wall and talk to the camera, in mockumentary style, which works to great effect in both TV and feature-film comedies — note the word “mock” — but not in drama.
As a purist, I was taken aback by the suggestion of deploying this unnecessary device. I reigned in my kneejerk contempt for it by nodding and muttering, “Hmm, interesting idea.” It just didn’t suit my vision for this particular piece at all, but I’m also coming in later in this project’s process. I’m changing it from a comedy to at most a dramedy, although by the time I’m through it’ll likely be an outright drama with comedic hints now and then; one of the main characters has a personality disorder that is too often the butt of jokes, which isn’t so bad as it is tiresome and inauthentic to how both people with the disorder and their caretakers deal with it in real life.
Scarlett Rouge reports from a barge in the middle of the Venice Biennale....
Dear James —
I’ve recently parked my meandering caravan in Torino, Italia, and transformed it, with a quick wiggle of my exceptional nose, into a glass-enclosed nest surrounded by woods and autumn leaves. Between the chirps and trees, I’m finally at home, or close to it. Who would have thought it was in Pino Torinese, or Turinese Pine, that I would find my comfort zone? But perhaps the reasoning is not so obscure: A childhood fantasy was being a tree fairy, living among mossy evergreens, luminous enchantments crackling from my fingertips. It’s a fantasy that lingers yet.