Film Futurist

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I just got back from LA (which is where I both attended film school and spent the majority of my professional life until about a year ago) and something struck me this time that had never occurred to me before: there is no model for innovation in Hollywood. Most of the younger folks in the [...]

The facts of the shooting of US Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people in a Tuscon, Arizona grocery store are simply horrifying by any account: A man enters a store armed with a gun, targets the Representative, shoots her in the head and begins a seemingly random mass killing spree that results in [...]

The rumblings are out there: 2011 is the year of TV Everywhere. We’re cutting the cord, watching movies on Netflix, rejecting pre-packaged entertainment deals – therefore, the future, at least for us web content advocates, is here. Yet every time I hear the “TV Everywhere” chorus, I wonder who made this “the moment”. Because it [...]

The New York Times just ran a piece called “Who Will Be Oprah’s Last Star?” on what has been called the “Oprah Effect”, complete with slideshow of the beneficiaries of the talk show hosts immense influence over the last 25-odd years. Oprah’s book club did wonders for authors and she became a fairy godmother to [...]

In the world of visual media, entertainment is ubiquitous and philosophy a tad less so. As someone interested as much (if not more) in ideas than solely in form, I was delighted to discover this cleverly illustrated  video of a talk about 21st century Enlightenment. Before I saw the video below, I had never heard [...]

DIY filmmakers have always inherently understood the idea of microfunding, because in some sense or another, raising a few hundred or thousand from friends and family IS essentially the same idea. And now, with social media providing the kind of community reach that would have been impossible even ten years ago, this model has become [...]

I recognize how controversial the very idea may seem to book purists. And honestly, I myself dread the thought of reading Don Quixote on my iPhone with a link to a dramatization of the titular literary legend. Whose vision of the oft and uniquely conjured hero do we engage? My first thought as a dedicated [...]

I hate rules. I’ve never been able to follow them. And I find the tyranny of web lists obnoxious. BUT, somehow one cannot deny that in an era of such chaos as we are experiencing in the media arts especially, this kind of list may…possibly… have some value. There, I said it! This is my [...]

This is an amateur movie made by a member of the The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society in 1947. Strange, you may think, as it seemed to me when I first watched this one of several films created by members of this Society as a way to analyze their dreams. Initially, The Lion Dream struck me [...]