Driving down Beverly, you head opposite Hollywood, away from Studio City, toward the nondescript, single-level, brown-bricked building that’s the literal Blumhouse — the offices of horror movie maestro Jason Blum. Since founding the company, Blum has produced dozens of films that have made varying degrees of impact on the zeitgeist: the found-footage scares of the Paranormal Activity films, the reinvented haunted house of the Insidious pictures, the social violence of The Purge series. And then, of course, there’s megahit Get Out, Jordan Peele’s ferociously intelligent satire on racism that, despite its share of lobotomies and knifings and violently applied white privilege, was nominated for Best Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes and is now a Best Picture Oscar nominee. Added to the above are more components of a burgeoning empire, from a television division (Hellevator, Cold Case Files, Sharp Objects) to live events to nongenre titles like Whiplash.What … [Read more...] about Working Through Fear: An Interview with Blumhouse’s Jason Blum
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The Mary Sue Presents: “Not Smart, Not Clever”
The Mary Sue is pleased to present strange, beautiful new fiction from Apex Magazine each month. This month’s story, from Apex Magazine’s current issue, is “Not Smart, Not Clever” by E. Saxey. Take a look… The lecture theatre I’m trying to enter holds three hundred, but the security doors only admit two people at a time. Smart. I wait with the gang — Isha, Barb and Zach — in the underground atrium.“Lin,” Isha asks me, “you totally don’t have to tell me, but are you on brain–rec?”“No. I mean, not yet, anyway.”“I am,” Isha admits.The gang gasp. Isha is normally squeaky–clean.“I didn’t cheat! I was on face–rec,” Isha explains, “but then I was writing my Decadence essay and the face–rec didn’t know who I was, because I was wearing a hat. So the department put me on brain–rec, too.” She frowns. … [Read more...] about The Mary Sue Presents: “Not Smart, Not Clever”
IFP Screen Forward: Five Questions for Producer Mike S. Ryan
Ahead of his conversation at tomorrow’s Screen Forward conference, Mike S. Ryan fielded five questions about his career and recent Filmmaker piece “TV is Not the New Film.” A producer on such films as Meek’s Cutoff, The Comedy and Palindromes, Ryan explains how transmedia represents an loss of faith in the filmic medium, why True Detective is an exception to the rule of the TV writer as auteur, and what he looks for in a script.Filmmaker: In your “TV is Not the New Film” piece, you mention that the move to transmedia shows a “[loss] of faith in the medium,” while many others seem to argue that transmedia is a new, more immersive form of connecting with one’s audience. In an age where filmmakers are taught to know who they are selling to well before they make work, do you feel that relating to a particular viewer should be a byproduct of filmmaking and not a driving force?Mike … [Read more...] about IFP Screen Forward: Five Questions for Producer Mike S. Ryan
Family Plot: David Lowery Interviews
One of the most impressive debuts of this year, Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha — the story of a recovering alcoholic thoroughly derailed by the pressure-cooker of her sister’s Thanksgiving Day dinner — is a work of astonishing performances, formal control, filmmaking ambition and, finally, deep emotional wisdom. It’s a movie that has all the dramatic pyrotechnics one expects from the “home for the holidays” sub-genre, but, loosely based on a true story about one of Shults’s actual relatives, is suffused with a real understanding about issues of addiction and recovery, regret, and the difficulties of being and feeling accepted.Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival, this intimate family drama, shot in nine days on a micro budget, unspools with the full-throated brio of some lost European horror film. The camera movement becomes wildly subjective, the sound design is disorienting, the aspect ratio … [Read more...] about Family Plot: David Lowery Interviews
Seeking Arrangements: Lodge Kerrigan, Amy Seimetz and Steven Soderbergh on
Shot in New York City during the 2008 financial crisis, Steven Soderbergh’s feature The Girlfriend Experience was a cool movie about a hot topic. Ostensibly about a “new” kind of prostitution, where escorts would simulate the casual intimacy of a real relationship, it starred real-life porn star Sasha Grey even as it contained virtually no sex. But what began as a look at how the Internet enabled a new kind of solo entrepreneur sex worker — “As we were making the film, I didn’t consider [prostitution] as a metaphor for anything,“ Soderbergh said then — wound up a trenchantly austere portrait of economic anxiety for New York’s moneyed class. Grey’s various assignations were set against the white noise of plummeting stock prices and TARP program bailouts, as background became foreground. “I’m pushing harder and harder to try and get some of these projects into this area where they are almost like designed … [Read more...] about Seeking Arrangements: Lodge Kerrigan, Amy Seimetz and Steven Soderbergh on